it between his knees. Unfortunately, he tried twisting it the
wrong way and only screwed the cap on tighter. He yeeked plaintively.

"No, go ahead. You can do it."

Little Fuzzy looked at the bottle again. Then he tried twisting the cap
the other way, and it loosened. He gave a yeek that couldn't possibly be
anything but "Eureka!" and promptly took it off, holding it up. After
being commended, he examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the
threads, and then screwed the cap back on again.

"You know, you're a smart Little Fuzzy." It took a few seconds to realize
just how smart. Little Fuzzy had wondered why you twisted the cap one way
to take it off and the other way to put it on, and he had found out. For
pure reasoning ability, that topped anything in the way of animal
intelligence he'd ever seen. "I'm going to tell Ben Rainsford about you."

Going to the communication screen, he punched out the wave-length
combination of the naturalist's camp, seventy miles down Snake River from
the mouth of Cold Creek. Rainsford's screen must have been on automatic;
it lit as soon as he was through punching. There was a card set up in
front of it, lettered: AWAY ON TRIP, BACK THE FIFTEENTH. RECORDER ON.

"Ben, Jack Holloway," he said. "I just ran into something interesting." He
explained briefly what it was. "I hope he stays around till you get back.
He's totally unlike anything I've ever seen on this planet."

Little Fuzzy was disappointed when Jack turned off the screen; that had
been interesting. He picked him up and carried him over to the armchair,
taking him on his lap.

"Now," he said, reaching for the control panel of the viewscreen. "Watch
this; we're going to see something nice."

When he put on the screen, at random, he got a view, from close up, of the
great fires that were raging where the Company people were burning off the
dead forests on what used to be Big Blackwater Swamp. Little Fuzzy cried
out in alarm, flung his arms around Pappy Jack's neck and buried his face
in the bosom of his shirt. Well, forest fires started from lightning
sometimes, and they'd be bad things for a Little Fuzzy. He worked the
selector and got another pickup, this time on the top of Company House in
Mallorysport, three time zones west, with the city spread out below and
the sunset blazing in the west. Little Fuzzy stared at it in wonder. It
was pretty impressive for a little fellow who'd spent all his life in the
big woods.

So