it was safe.

"The small ones--"

Dalgard needed no prompting. He picked off easily enough the two
half-grown ones. The infants were another problem. Far less sluggish
than their huge elders they sensed that they were in danger and fled.
One took refuge in the pouch of its now-dead parent, and the others
moved so fast that Dalgard found them difficult targets. He killed one
which had almost reached an archway and at length nicked the second in
the foot, knowing that, while the poison would be slower in acting, it
would be as sure.

Through all of this the third adult devil continued to lie motionless,
only its wicked eyes giving any indication that it was alive. Dalgard
watched it impatiently. Unless it would move, allow him a chance to
aim at the soft underparts, there was little chance of killing it.

What followed startled both hunters, versed as they were in the usual
mechanics of killing snake-devils. It had been an accepted premise,
through the years since the colonists had known of the monsters, that
the creatures were relatively brainless, mere machines which fought,
ate, and killed, incapable of any intelligent reasoning, and therefore
only dangerous when one was surprised by them or when the hunter was
forced to face them inadequately armed.

This snake-devil was different, as it became increasingly plain to the
two behind the grille. It had remained safe during the slaughter of
its companions because it had not moved, almost as if it had wit
enough _not_ to move. And now, when it did change position, its
maneuvers, simple as they were, underlined the fact that this one
creature appeared to have thought out a solution to its situation--as
rational a solution as Dalgard might have produced had it been his
problem.

Still keeping its soft underparts covered, it edged about in the sand
until its back, with the impenetrable armor plates, was facing the
grille behind which the hunters stood. Retracting its neck between its
shoulders and hunching its powerful back limbs under it, it rushed
from that point of danger straight for one of the archways.

Dalgard sent an arrow after it. Only to see the shaft scrape along the
heavy scales and bounce to the sand. Then the snake-devil was gone.

"Banded--" The word reached Dalgard. Sssuri had been cool enough to
note that while the human hunter had been only bewildered by the
untypical actions of his quarry.

"It must be intelligent." The scout's statement was mor