Cadmann tore her hands loose from around his neck and without another word opened the box of tools and building supplies that he had skeetered up from the camp.
He was still limping.
A tireless machine, made of polished hickory and leather. That's what
Cadmann seemed to her. For all his injuries and his age, he worked on and on when she was exhausted, when the youngest, strongest men in the Colony would have collapsed and begged for rest.
He worked eight hours a day, digging, shoring, piling... building ridges of earth that would later become garden or upper patio. No effort was lost. He never hauled any dirt or stone uphill. He built on the hill and he planned carefully, and every wheelbarrow of earth and rock moved downhill to the growing garden structure.
In some ways the excavation was beginning to look like a smallish swimming pool, with the deep end—nine feet deep—at the lowest part, and the shallow higher. He cut deep "steps" into the hill above the excavation, so that the entire cavity measured five meters along the bottom edge and twelve meters along each side.
When he was through with the morning's work, Cadmann stretched and took off with Tweedledee to check the traps. (Mary Ann had found another difference between the twins. Tweedledee's right ear was a bit—or, more precisely, a bite—short, a souvenir of a kennel brawl that had become serious.)
And here she was able to accompany him, learning to set the wire spring traps that Cadmann set for the slow, almost friendly mammaloids that Cadmann called "Dopey Joes." He said it was a literary reference.
At first she was able to do little but help him haul dirt, and cook the meals and clean the camp. But it was too easy for her to remember a time when she had been one of the most competent women on the expedition, and there was no way that she could remain satisfied with this new role.
She learned to set snares. Nets in the stream that ran past the site of the house from the heights of Mucking Great Mountain, a tiny ice-melt stream Cadmann had named the Amazon. With a large-mouthed basket in one hand and Tweedledee's leash in the other, she explored the mountain, learning the paths and the patches of sliding rock. And it was among them that she found Missy.
The snares were set near any of the half dozen or so bushes and plants that showed the characteristic gnawed parallel toothmarks. One patch of plants interested her. They were green and broad-leaved, with thick yellow veins branching from a central stem. The flowers were delicate pink with tiny red berries clustered in the center. None of its flowers were chewed or gnawed, but the roots and leaves were the favorite food of some local creature. When she took a closer look at the flowers, she noted a dusting of dried insect segments, and more dead, delicately winged husks on the ground beneath the blossoms. The word "poison" flashed through her mind, and she was pleased with herself for making the connection.
Something was rustling behind the bush, and she carefully pulled the branches aside.
There, its neck caught in a chew-proof nylon spring loop, was eighteen inches of furred frustration. The Joe had huge orange eyes almost too large for its face. The eyes were imploring, terrified, confused. They reminded her of... what was it?
What... ?
She stomped her foot in frustration and forgot about it. The creature was in one of the snares, bleeding from the throat, twisting and spitting at her. Tweedledee barked, and the little Joe almost broke its own neck trying to escape.
She poked it into the basket and then cut it lose from the snare. It chattered at her. "Well, Missy," Mary Ann said. "Can't blame you for being upset."
Tarsier. That was the word she had searched for. An equatorial primate, the owner of the largest eyes of any mammal. Found in the forests of Malaysia and the Philippines.
She laughed in relief. It was still there. Some of the information was still in her mind, she just couldn't call it up on command as once she had. Maybe she could restructure the way she thought...
She shook the cage and held it up close to her face. "Are you a good-luck charm, Missy?"
Missy spat at her and tried to hide in a corner of the basket. She was more slender than a tarsier, almost like a thick, furred lizard. She lay on her back, claws out and scrabbling blindly.
On their way back down, Tweedledee suddenly strained at the leash, tugging so hard that Mary almost dropped the basket. Tweedledee yipped hysterically, struggling to climb up into the rocks. Missy went absolutely apeshit, squealing and clawing in the wire cage.
"'Dee Dee, get back here!" Mary Ann yelled, suddenly suspicious. Reluctantly, the shepherd came back down, tail folded contritely between her legs. Mary Ann wound the leash tightly around a rock, then climbed up and took a closer look, Missy chattering more loudly.
Her ears were rewarded before her eyes. She heard a thin, mewling sound that reminded her of nothing so much as the cry of kittens starving for milk. There were six of them, curled up around each other like a tangle of hairy rope. They were just babies, barely able to wiggle. One lay still; it seemed dead. The others looked up at her with curiosity untainted by fear.
Mary Ann glanced from the wire cage to the babies, and sudden inspiration struck.
Missy was climbing up the sides of the basket, and Mary Ann thumped her back down, throwing handfuls of avalonia grass and leaves into the cage until the bottom was completely matted.
Then she carried the basket up the defile to the rocks. Missy chattered even more frantically now. Down below her, Tweedledee leaped and danced, yipping enthusiastically.
Mary Ann braced herself between the rocks, thankful now for hours of jogging, because her calves were starting to burn from all the climbing. She reached down into the crevice and gently drew up one of the Joe kittens. It struggled and bit her hand—a scratch, hardly enough to break the skin. Mary Ann set the fur ball back down and pulled her jacket sleeve down over her hand in a makeshift glove. This time she couldn't feel the teeth at all when she transferred the second Joe into the basket.
Mary Ann had to knock Missy down from the side of the cage again, and then a third time when she tried to bite through the jacket. When the first baby was deposited in the cage. Missy scampered around and around in a furry flash before finally slowing down. She sniffed at her child, then licked, and finally wound herself around the kitten, enveloping it.
One at a time, Mary Ann transplanted the Joes to the cage. Then she trundled it back down to Tweedledee.
The mother chattered up at-her vilely, then continued to tie her children into a ball for maximum warmth and protection. Mary Ann looked at the last small, sad body down in the crevice, and shook her head.
"Time to head back to camp. Dee," she said, unleashing the dog. She stood with small fists on hips, looking around the area. What did these things eat? The adults, anyway? The Joes looked close enough to mammalian; there would be some sort of milk gland for the young.
There were several types of plants: a kind of lichen or moss seemed to be breaking down some of the rocks, and a viny thing that resembled a colony of long-legged spiders. It grew out of the rocks in symbiotic relationship with the moss. There were shrubs up here, and flowering plants, which she had noticed from the helicopter.
Which would the Joe family prefer? She took a chance: the broadleafed plant that had concealed the snare. She tore loose a cluster of red berries and dropped them into the cage.
Nothing. Momma Joe ignored them.
Still following the hunch, she tore loose a clutch of leaves, sorted through them for the tenderest, and dropped them in.
Missy sprang on them. After careful sniffing, she began to chew.
Well, that answered that.