Josh sees eyes, low to the ground, moving just behind the treeline. Several pairs. And then an unearthly wailing cry. Viperwolves. Christ, what am I doing here?
IN THE SAMSON, the next day, they thunder over the treetops with a roar of turbofans. Below them the purple rainforest unrolls. The human pilot and the trooper escort sit in a sealed front cabin, while Josh/Avatar, Grace/Avatar and N'deh ride in the back compartment with the side doors open.
They land at Grace's direction, in a grassy meadow. They get out as the pilot shuts down the turbines. Their escort, CORPORAL LYLE WAINFLEET, steps out wearing mask, helmet, armor and rebreather. He is carrying an almighty big automatic rifle. Josh is wearing shorts and a T- shirt. Grace insists that he go barefoot, so his baby- blue feeties will toughen up with thick callouses like hers.
Josh stares at the wall of trees surrounding them. Up close, the trees are enormous, as big as sequoias at the base, and even taller because the gravity on Pandora is less than Earth. Lesser trees, the size of mature oaks, are like underbrush in between the colossi.
Lyle is like a birddog on point, hyperalert, scanning the gloom beyond the meadow. A flock of stingbats crosses far above them. He tracks them with the rifle, but they ignore the strangers.
GRACE: Lyle, stay with the ship.
LYLE: I'm supposed to escort you.
GRACE: Lyle, you're supposed to escort my: party. The ship is part of my: party. And we need it to get back,: so if you don't want to walk thirty: klicks through the bush...
LYLE: I'll stay with the ship.
Grace hates the troopers clomping through the woods with her. They disrupt the animals, and smash the plants, and make too much noise. And they tend to attract the larger predators, to whom they appear to be injured or defective animals.
They grab the cases of equipment and N'deh leads them into the trees. Josh stares all around like a tourist in hell... rubbernecking and fascinated, but scared shitless. Josh expects every dappled shadow to hide a razor-fanged predator, but their entry into the forest is uneventful.
Josh is jumpy and on guard. Swatting at insects. Soon he has gathered quite a cloud of buzzing attackers.
Grace uses a machete to hack open the bole of a low, cycad-like plant. She takes the viscous sap from the inside and starts briskly rubbing it all over her exposed skin. She recommends that he do the same, unless he wants his bones picked clean by every insect in the forest. He quickly complies.
The insects move off, like magic. Grace explains that the Na'vi use plant extracts for all sorts of things... to relieve pain, purify water, reduce fever, limit or improve fertility, promote wound healing, counteract stings and poisons, attract useful insects, kill external and internal parasites, prevent sunburn, and repel or attract larger animals. As a xenobotanist, her work has been vastly accelerated with their guidance as they help her see the greater relationship between things in the forest.
Josh gazes around him in wonder as they move deeper into the primeval gloom.
The bark of the giant trees is alien, like big hexagonal fishscales. Moss covers the lower parts of the trunks, and lainas and other vine-like structures lace around them, and hang between them like fallen power lines.
The roots of the greater trees are like mangroves, and they form clusters of pillars, each thick as a normal tree trunk, which join far above their heads into a single massive trunk. These root-trunks actually wind around each other, forming a kind of braided cylinder, which then rises a hundred feet above the ground before it forms branches.
They move on. Grace starts giving him survival pointers. How to avoid the things that bite and sting and suck.
Phalanxia, the deadly projectile plant, shows up bright as a neon sign in the ultraviolet-sensitive avatar vision. No problem. Give it a wide berth. She shows him the nests of Hellfire Wasps... the wasps don't like the sap they have rubbed on, but don't push your luck by coming near the nest.
She sees a SNAKETREE and brings him as close as she can. It is a hydra-like, ambulatory plant twice Josh's height. It moves into place, then freezes so that it resembles a gnarled, dead tree. When prey moves within range, it comes suddenly alive and strikes with one of six fanged heads. The animal is digested in a pitcher-like bole, and the half-stripped bones ejected to lure more prey.
Josh sees the bones lying around the base of the tree. Some of them are from animals at least as large as a man... or an avatar. Grace, the xenobotanist, is very excited to share the snake tree with him.
They move on. Josh has never been in a forest before, since they are mostly gone on Earth. He is scared, but dealing. It's kind of interesting.
She continues to give Josh pointers... touch this, don't touch that. They startle a small creature which crashes away into the underbrush.
Further up the trail, N'deh signals them to stop. Grace motions, and they crouch down, watching through the leaves as something moves through the woods parallel to them. It is a small six-legged herbivore called a HEXAPEDE, about the size of a tapir.
N'deh points at something else, and Grace whispers to Josh.
GRACE: Look. A slinger. It's stalking the: hexapede.
Josh doesn't see anything at first... then he spots it. A camouflaged shape moving through the sun-dappled shadows. The predator moving into the glade, is splashed by hard slashes of sunlight, which combine with its cammo pattern making it hard to see.
The SLINGER is smaller than a slinth, but just as deadly. It moves silently, like liquid, through the ferns. It pauses, rearing up, and like the slinth its muscular neck cocks back into a striking position...
GRACE: Watch this.
The slinger's neck snaps forward, and its long, pointed head detaches, flying through the woods as a self-guiding venomous glider... a smart-dart. The hexapede senses the dart and bolts, bounding in evasive zigzags. The dart tracks it unerringly through the trees and buries itself in its flank. The hexapede staggers. It stands, its muscles spasming, then falls over. The dart starts emitting a series of high-pitched squeals, which allow the body to home in on it blindly. The neck bends down, and is rejoined to the dart. Josh catches a glimpse of hair- like tendrils lacing together... some kind of neural interface. Then the slinger starts to rip the hexapede apart.
Grace explains that the slinth, with its striking head, is the evolutionary precursor of the slinger. The slinger's primary brain is in the dart, so if the body and the dart are ever permanently separated, they both die. The dart cannot feed itself.
The body and dart are actually mother and child... the dart is an immature form. When it grows too big to fly, it will mate, then drop off and metamorphose into a small complete slinger, with its offspring already in place, forming the new dart. Each new generation is the brain for the previous one. Sounds backward, but it works.
Josh watches the feeding slinger in awe. He has never seen anything like this... so raw and primal.
GRACE: Welcome to the food chain.
N'deh leads them past the feeding slinger, which is preoccupied with its kill. Josh's heart is pounding. He's still scared shitless, but this stuff is amazing. He feels more alive than he has ever felt.