ift swooping shapes winged out from the trees, prey-hungry
eyes gleaming green. And from the swamps came bellowings and stirrings
from monster mud-encrusted bodies, awakening to their nocturnal quest
for food. The night reechoed with the harsh cacophony of their cries.

With lumbering caution, its smooth knob head waving on a long
reptilian neck, its heavy armored tail dragging behind its body's
folds of flesh, a giant night-thing came stumping out of a copse of
jungle growth--a buru. Its eyes were watchful, but centered mainly on
the pool of water to one side of the peninsula of firm soil. Its
drinking water was there. With several pauses, it went right out on
the spit, and a flat-bottomed foot twice the size of an elephant's
missed one of the sleeping forms by inches. But the buru cared not for
them. It was not a flesh-eater. Its undulating neck stretched far out;
its head dipped; water was lapped up--until it caught sight of the
uprooted giant stump lying pitched in the pool. The beast drank but
little after that, and retreated as cautiously as it had come.

Five or six of its fellows of the swamps followed at intervals to the
water, grotesque hulking shapes, odorous and slimy with mud. All drank
from the same spot; all ignored, save for a tentative rooting snuffle,
the unconscious figures lying puny beneath them. But all noticed the
twisted roots of the stump, sticking out in a score of directions, and
avoided them.

And then there came smaller, more cautious animals who did not drink
from the favored spot, who surveyed it, sniffed, hesitated, and
finally retreated. There was a good reason for this caution.

For with the falling of night the stump had been at least thirty feet
out in the water; now it was not ten feet from the side of the spit,
and not twelve feet from the nearest sleeping figure. The suits that
clad the three figures were sealed, the face-plates closed, so there
was probably--after their trip through the void--no man smell to
attract the giants of swamp and trees. But those three figures had
moved. That was lure enough for one monster.

When the first ruddy arrows of Jupiter's light laced through the
jungle's highest foliage, the twisted, gnarled stump was settled on
the peninsula's rim, half out of the water. And when day burst, when
Jupiter's flaming arch pushed over into view, the long seeming-roots
eeled forward in sinuous reptilian life.

* * * * *

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