For the moment the sammadar was happy to see the two halves of sammad Kerrick staying well apart from each other. They were too distant, too alien, separated by more than language. He had freed the mastodon from the travois and hobbled it under the trees where it grazed the young leaves happily. The creature was going to be a problem—since it was so large it was sure to be seen from the air. The answer was obvious; kill it and smoke the meat. They would have to do that, but not right now. There had been so much killing.

Armun had lit a small and smokeless fire under a spreading, wide-branched tree; the children played close by. Ortnar was sleeping, while Harl had gone off to hunt—carefully slipping into the forest far away from the other half of the encampment. There was peace for the moment, time to think. Time for him to talk to the males. Keeping to the shadows he walked over to their encampment close to the lake shore. He admired the thick, leafy covering overhead.

“You did this?” he asked. “Grew this cover so you could not be seen from the air?”

“Brute force is a female trait, intelligence male,” Nadaskè said smugly, leaning back on his tail.

“Endless labor cutting fresh boughs,” Imehei added. “They dried and changed colors most quickly. So we cut poles and trained the ivy along them.”

“Work of intelligence, admiration-unbounded.”

Kerrick reinforced it with strong modifiers. The two males had worked in this unknown environment, facing difficulties they had never imagined in the security of the hanalè. They had secure cover now, and certainly had been eating well. “The hunting is good?”

“We are expert,” Imehei said. “In the art of fishing also.” He waddled over to a pit in the ground filled with wet leaves, rooted through the leaves until he found what he wanted, returned with two large freshwater crustacea. “We catch these. Desire-to-eat?”

“Later. Hunger-dispersed-presently.”

“Better than meat,” Imehei said, putting one in his mouth and passing the second over to Nadaskè. He chewed happily, his sharp, conical teeth making quick work of the creature, bits of shell pushing out between his lips as he ground away.

Nadaskè finished his quickly as well, spitting the bits of shell into the bushes. “Without these the food would not be as good. We do not know the secret of meat preparation—do you?”

Kerrick signed negative. “I have seen them do it in the city. The fresh-killed meat is put into tubs with a liquid, that is what changes it. I have no idea of what the liquid is.”

“Joyful-jellied-flesh,” Imehei said; Nadaskè added qualifiers of agreement. “But perhaps that is all we miss of the city. Freedom of spirit and body makes all work worthwhile.”

“Have you seen other Yilanè—do you know anything of the city?” Kerrick asked.