West of Eden Read Free Page B

take the day and the night to butcher and smoke what we have here."
    "And to eat," Ogatyr said, smacking his lips loudly. "Eat our fill. The more we put into our stomachs the less we will have to carry on our backs!"
    Though it was cooler under the trees they were soon crawling with biting flies. They could only beat at them and plead with Amahast for the smoke to keep them at bay.
    "Skin the carcasses," he ordered, then kicked a fallen log with his toe: it fell to pieces. "Too damp. The wood here under the trees is too wet to burn. Ogatyr, bring the fire from the boat and feed it with dry grass until we return. I will take the boy and get some driftwood from the beach."
    He left his bow and arrows behind, but took up his spear and started off through the grove towards the ocean side of the island. Kerrick did the same and hurried after him.
    The beach was wide, the fine sand almost as white as snow. Offshore the waves broke into a rumble of bubbling froth that surged far up the beach towards them. At the water's edge were bits of wood and broken sponges, endless varicolored shells, violet snails, great green lengths of seaweed with tiny crabs clinging to them. The few small pieces of driftwood here were too tiny to bother with, so they walked on to the headland that pushed a rocky peninsula out into the sea. When they had climbed the easy slope they could look out between the trees to see that the headland curved out and around to make a sheltered bay.
    On the sand at the far side dark forms, they might be seals, basked in the sun.
    At the same moment they became aware that someone was standing under a nearby tree, also looking out over the bay. Another hunter perhaps. Amahast had opened his mouth to call out when the figure stepped forward into the sunlight. The words froze in his throat; every muscle in his body locked hard.
    No hunter, no man, not this. Man-shaped but repellently different in every way.
    West of Eden - Harry Harrison
    The creature was hairless and naked, with a colored crest that ran across the top of its head and down its spine. It was bright in the sunlight, obscenely marked with a skin that was scaled and multicolored.
    A marag. Smaller than the giants in the jungle, but a marag nevertheless. Like all of its kind it was motionless at rest, as though carved from stone. Then it turned its head to one side, a series of small jerking motions, until they could see its round and expressionless eye, the massive out-thrust jaw. They stood, as motionless as murgu themselves, gripping their spears tightly, unseen, for the creature had not turned far enough to notice their silent forms among the trees.
    Amahast waited until its gaze went back to the ocean before he moved. Gliding forward without a sound, raising his spear. He had reached the edge of the trees before the beast heard him or sensed his approach.
    It snapped its head about, stared directly into his face.
    The hunter plunged the stone head of his spear into one lidless eye, through the eye and deep into the brain behind. It shuddered once, a spasm that shook its entire body, then fell heavily. Dead before it hit the ground. Amahast had the spear pulled free even before that, had spun about and raked his gaze across the slope and the beach beyond. There were no more of the creatures nearby.
    Kerrick joined his father, standing beside him in silence as they looked down upon the corpse.
    It was a crude and disgusting parody of human form. Red blood was still seeping from the socket of the destroyed eye, while the other stared blankly up at them, its pupil a black, vertical slit. There was no nose; just flapped openings where a nose should have been. Its massive jaw had dropped open in the agony of sudden death to reveal white rows of sharp and pointed teeth.
    "What is it?" Kerrick asked, almost choking on the words.
    "I don't know. A marag of some kind. A small one, I have never seen its like before."
    "It stood, it walked, like it was human, Tanu. A