Voodoo Planet by Andre Norton (big ebook reader txt) 📕

that followed, thus keeping the path clear for its enemies. Jellico was making the journey, sure-footedly, with the Chief Ranger only one hillock behind. Tau sighed.

“Someday maybe this will be just another tall tale and we’ll all be thought liars when we spout it,” he observed. “That is if we survive to tell it. So now which way do we go? If I had my choice it would be up!”

When Dane pulled himself to his feet and surveyed their small refuge, he was ready to agree to that. For the space, packed with dead and dying vegetable matter until one sank calf deep, was a triangle with a narrow point running east into the swamp.

“They don’t give up easily, do they?” Jellico looked back to the shore and the cliff. Though the wounded graz bull still held the heights against its fellows, there were others breaking from the jungle on the lower level, wandering back and forth to paw the earth, rip up soil with their tusks, and otherwise threaten anyone who would try to return to the strip they patrolled.

“They will not,” Asaki answered bleakly. “Arouse a graz and it will trail you for days; kill any of the herd and you have little hope of escaping them on foot.”

It would seem now that the swamp was a deterrent to pursuit. The two beasts that had fallen in the mire moaned in a pitiful rising note. They had ceased to struggle and several of their kind clustered on the shore near them, calling entreatingly. Asaki took careful aim with the needler and put one animal after another out of its misery. But the flash of those shots angered those on shore to a higher pitch of rage.

“No going back,” he said. “At least not for several days.”

Tau slapped a black, four-winged insect which had settled on his arm, its jaws wide open for a sampling bite. “We can’t very well perch here until they forget all about us,” he pointed out. “Not without water we can trust, and with the local wild life ready to test us for tasty eating.”

Nymani had prowled along the swampward point of their island, and now he made his report.

“There is more high land to the east. Perhaps it will give us a bridge across.”

At that moment Dane doubted his ability to make any more leaps from island to island. And it would seem Tau shared his discouragement.

“I don’t suppose you could discourage our friends on shore there with a few more shots?”

Asaki shook his head. “We do not have clips enough to settle a whole herd. These might retreat from sight but they would be waiting for us in the bush, and that would mean certain death. We shall have to take the swamp road.”

If Dane had considered their earlier march misery, this was sheer torture. Since footing was never secure, falls were frequent, and within a quarter-hour they were all plastered with evil-smelling slime and mud which hardened to rock consistency when exposed to the air. Painful as this was, it did protect a portion of their bodies from the insects with which the swamp was well stocked.

And, in spite of their efforts to find a way out, the only possible paths led them deeper into the center of the unexplored morass. At last Asaki called a halt and a council to consider retreat. To locate an island from which they could at least watch the shore appealed very strongly indeed.

“We have to have water.” Tau’s voice was a harsh croak, issuing out of a mask of green mud festooned with trailing weeds.

“This ground is rising.” Asaki smacked the stock of his needler against the surface on which he crouched. “I think perhaps there may be clean land soon to come.”

Jellico hitched his way up a sapling, now bending under his weight. Through the vision lenses he studied the route ahead.

“You’re right about that,” he called to the Chief Ranger. “There’s a showing of the right sort of green to the left, about half a mile on. And,” he glanced about at the westering sun, “we have about an hour yet of good light in which to make it. I wouldn’t try such a run after dark.”

That promise of green bolstered their weary spirits for a last exhausting effort. Once again they were faced with a series of islet leaps, and now they carried with them brush culled from the bigger tussocks to aid in times of need.

When Dane scrambled up the last pull, staggered, and went down to his knees again, he knew he was done. He did not even move at an excited cry from Nymani, echoed a moment later by Asaki. It was not until the latter leaned over him, a canteen open in his hand, that Dane aroused a little.

“Drink!” the Khatkan urged. “We have found a water tree. This is fresh.”

The liquid might have been fresh, but it also had a peculiar taste, which Dane did not note until he had gulped down a generous swallow. At that moment he was past caring about anything but the fact that he did have a portion of drinkable stuff in hand.

Here the stunted, unnatural growth of the swamplands had given away to the more normal vegetation of the jungle-clad lowlands. Had they come clear across the swamp, Dane wondered dully, or was this only a large island in the midst of the stinking boglands?

He drank again and regained strength enough to crawl to where his shipmates lay. It was some time before he was interested in much besides the fact that he could drink when he wished. Then he watched Jellico waver to his feet, his head turned eastward. Tau, too, sat up as if alerted by the Queen’s alarm buzzer.

The Khatkans were gone, perhaps back to the water tree. But all three of the spacemen heard that sound, a far off throbbing rhythm which was a vibration as well. Jellico looked to Tau.

“Drums?”

“Could be.” The medic screwed