One of those orange splotches was probably the animal that had just escaped them. Despite their bulk the face-tails could move fast. Thakur eyed the beasts, trying to pick one that was young enough to be vulnerable and old enough not to need the protection of its mother. It wasn’t easy. Yesterday he had chosen a young calf and ended up fleeing from the enraged mother. Today’s quarry had proved to be old enough to defend itself.
His cars pricked forward as a line of smaller shapes emerged from a copse of trees near the wallow. They were not face-tails, nor any other kind of herdbeast. Beside him he felt Khushi stiffen as the wind brought a stronger version of a familiar scent to their noses.
“Un-Named ones, Thakur!” Khushi hissed.
The herding teacher hesitated in his reply. Yes, the forms were the cat shapes that resembled those of his own kind, but never had he seen the Un-Named do what these newcomers were doing.
The line broke up as its members dispersed and melted into the high grass about the wallow. Thakur narrowed his eyes. At one end of the marshy area stood a face-tail whose patchy orange-and-black coat showed that it was older than the one the Named had tried to capture.
“They are hunting it,” Bira said. She had arrived so quietly that Thakur had hardly noticed.
Yes, they were. He caught a glimpse of a circle of hidden stalkers creeping toward the face-tail. There were more hunters than he had first thought, and they seemed to move with a deadly purpose. Unconsciously he cased himself down, peering through the high grass. Bira and Khushi followed his example.
The face-tail, unconcerned, was sloshing in the wallow, squirting water over itself with its trunk. The circle of hunters paused, as if making the final decision to attack. The scent wafting to Thakur’s nose carried more than a sense of hunger or the usual blind ferocity of the Un-Named. He sensed a certain unified purpose in their behavior that surprised him.
If these ones are truly Un-Named, they are different than any I know, he thought.
He did not see which individual triggered the attack. At one instant they were all crouched together in the grass; the next they were swarming onto the startled face-tail. Muddy water turned pink as the attackers clawed their way up the beast’s flanks and laid open its flesh with deep slashes.
The rest of the face-tails, alarmed, lumbered away with raised trunks, abandoning the victim.
The struggle did not last long. Despite the face-tail’s trumpeting and plunging, it soon toppled under the savagery of the assault. For a while it flailed in the shallow water as the hunters gathered atop it and began to feed. Then it grew still.
Beside him, Thakur felt Bira shivering. “I have never seen Un-Named ones like these before,” she hissed. “And I don’t like them!”
Khushi was struck silent. “They made it look … easy!” he blurted at last.
“Sh. We don’t want to attract their attention,” Thakur cautioned.
Bira began to creep slowly backward, deeper into the shade cast by the oak. Khushi followed. Thakur, torn between curiosity and fear, was the last to come away.
“Let’s go,” said Bira as Biaree huddled nervously on her shoulders.
Thakur agreed, but would only let his companions retreat as far as the small fire-den Bira had dug to store the coals of the Red Tongue.
He was thinking hard. The speed and efficiency of the unknown hunters told him that they were not a ragtag group of Un-Named ones such as those that had raided the clan’s herds in previous seasons. Even the organized attacks that had nearly decimated the Named had not been as complex or as smoothly carried out as this hunt. His sense of danger told him to leave these hunters far behind, but there was another sense that told him to stay.
Who were they? Where had they come from? How had they learned to hunt such formidable prey as the face-tails? The questions whirled through Thakur’s mind.
“You saw the hunt,” he argued, when his two companions protested against the idea of remaining. “Something like that takes more than strength and fierceness. They were working together.”
Bira gave him a questioning look. “The Un-Named can work together. They did when they attacked us several seasons ago.”
“Yes, but those attacks were not as well planned as the hunt we just saw. I was in those fights. I remember.” Thakur turned to Khushi. “This kill looked easy because everything was arranged in advance. Each hunter knew exactly what she or he was supposed to do and did it.” He continued, growing more excited. “Don’t you see? Not only must they be able to think and speak, they must be able to make detailed plans and describe them to each other. They must be like us!”
The other two stared at him, their jaws hanging open. As long as the Named had existed, they had thought their clan was the only one of its kind and that they alone had the gifts of awareness, forethought, and speech. A few individuals with such gifts existed among the Un-Named, but they had come from fringe matings with the clan.
Perhaps the Named were not unique after all.
Thakur and his two companions returned to the scene of the kill, hid, and watched patiently. The face-tail hunters were joined by others: elders, half-grown cubs, and nursing or pregnant females. The group all gorged themselves until late in the day. They then scattered to chew on bones they had taken from the carcass, or to lie in the sun.
Now was the best time to approach, Thakur decided. The Un-Named would be sated and sleepy. Carefully he and the others crept to a small stand of brush that was closer to the hunters and safely downwind.
“Are you sure this is a good idea, herding teacher?” Bira asked when he told her what he planned and asked her to stay behind with a small flame of the Red Tongue and pine branches to light for torches.
“They won’t attack. They’ve eaten too much. And if they chase us, they can’t run far with heavy stomachs.”
Bira was still doubtful. She also questioned Thakur’s conviction that he would be able to talk to the face-tail hunters. “We did not hear them speak to each other,” she argued quietly. “And they did not seem to be following a leader’s directions. That tells me that they are not like us. Perhaps we should wait and keep watching from a distance.”
Thakur answered that those objections had occurred to him, but that this chance was one worth taking. The hunters would only be sated and lazy for a short time. Afterward it would be too dangerous to approach.
Khushi, listening to them both, offered to go by himself. Thakur’s skills were too valuable to risk losing, he said. Who else would instruct the clan’s young if the herding teacher were killed?
“You and all the other herders I have trained,” Thakur answered. “Together you have enough knowledge. What you do not have is my experience in dealing with strangers outside the clan. I don’t plan to let myself be killed. You and I look enough like the hunters to fool them, at least from a distance.”
“What about our smell?”
“Rolling in face-tail dung should disguise it; the stuff is strong enough.”
Khushi only made a grimace.
Thakur gazed out over the open plain where the hunters sprawled in scattered groups. “Bira, watch us and keep a torch ready. I hope we will not need it….”
“But if you do, the Red Tongue will be there,” Bira said fiercely, taking up her post.
With Khushi pacing beside him, Thakur left the sheltering brush and walked out onto the open plain. The sun sat low behind him and the sky was starting to pale into the colors of dusk. After rolling thoroughly in a fresh pile of face-tail manure, he and Khushi took a wandering course toward the hunters. Sometimes the two lay down or even flopped over on their backs for a little while, imitating the bloated lassitude of the others.
The smell of the carcass was rich in Thakur’s nose. Next to him, Khushi swallowed, and the aroma of hunger tinged his smell. Thakur could not blame the young herder. His own mouth was watering. They had eaten yesterday, a few ground-birds caught by Bira, but it was not enough to fill their bellies.