Almost to goal. Absent gods, the blighted thing was well out on that side branch. He extended himself, gripping the branch he was half-lying across under his right armpit, feet sliding along the wobbly bough below it, wishing for almost the first time in his life for more height and reach. Overbalance at this elevation, and he could swiftly prove himself stupider than Stupid Sunny. A little more, a little more, get his hook around that attachment…and a good yank.

Dag clung hard as the rough gray paper-wasp nest the size of a watermelon parted from the branch and began its thirty-five foot-drop. Most of the nest’s residents were home for the evening, his groundsense told him, settling down for the night. Wake up! You’re under attack! His feeble effort to stir up the wasps with his ground seemed redundant when the plummeting object hit the dirt and ruptured with a loud and satisfying thwack. Followed by a deep angry whine he could hear all the way up here.

The first screams were a deal more satisfying, though.

He cuddled back against the trunk of the tree, feet braced on some less flexible side branches, gasping for breath and applying himself to a few refinements. Persuading the furious wasps to advance up trouser legs and down collars proved not as difficult as he’d feared, although he could not simply bounce them like mosquitoes, and they were much less tractable than fireflies. A matter of practice, Dag decided. He set to it with a will.

“Ah! Ah! They’re in my hair, they’re in my hair, they’re stinging meee!” came a wail from below, voice too high-pitched to identify.

“Augh, my ears! Ow, my hands! Get them off, get them off!”

“Run for the river, Sunny!”

The shuffling sounds of retreat filtered up through the leaves; the pell-mell flight wouldn’t help them much, for Dag made sure they left under full guard. Even without groundsense, though, he could tell when his trouser-explorers made it all the way to target by the earsplitting shrieks that went up and up until breath was gone.

“Limp for the river, Sunny,” Dag muttered savagely, as the frantic cries trailed away to the east.

Then came the matter of getting down.

Dag took it slowly, at least till the last ten feet when his hook slipped free and scored a long slash down the trunk in the wake of the flying bark bits from under his knees. But he did manage to land on his feet and avoid banging his splint very much on anything on the way. He staggered upright, gasping. “It was easier…when I could just…gut them…”

No. Not really.