We were gathered around my hunt. I had come a long way from that first meeting. I was probably the worst poet, but I was the best hunter. I made certain to hunt before I came each time, so that, when I killed something during the day, I could share it with my friends. I still got to eat the liver and kidneys, of course, that was only fair. But I distributed much of the rest of the carcass to the others.
“I saw some dirt Grubbers today,” Jehena said, “climbing the cliff just south of here. Way low down, of course.”
“Dirt Grubbers?” I asked.
Whehehnarr looked at me, “Haven’t you seen them? Strange creatures, barefaced, no real beak. Ground crawlers, but they speak.”
“They speak?” I said incredulous, “like Eagles?”
“Well, no, not like Eagles.” Whehehnarr said. “You can’t understand it or anything. It must be their own talk though, you can tell it means something.”
Jehena chuckled,“It sure does. I don’t know what they say when they are alone, but when we are there it means they are angry.”
“Why would they be angry?“ I asked.
Jehena looked sheepish, but Gheerraa said, “they don’t like being teased.”
“Teased?”
“Yeah. You know, you fly really close to them with your claws out.”
“We don’t hunt them?”
Everyone looked shocked, “You can’t hunt them!” Jehena said, “the King has forbidden it!”
“And I hear they taste awful,” Gheerraa added. At the others scandalized looks he added, “not that I have ever tried!”
Gheerraa said, “let’s go see if we can find any.” And took off. Whehehnarr and Jehena stayed behind, by the others and I followed him off the cliff, soaring down.
I have rarely been this low. My parents had never taken me down this low, and since out of the nest I had only done so a couple of times. Once I had done some great fishing in a beautiful lake down below the net
Gheerraa led us down and around the mountain. It was a glorious flight, arcing around corners one after another.
Suddenly he snapped away from the cliff face lifted up to a thermal hundreds of yards away. “This is a good spot to look for them,” he said once I had joined him in the thermal. “We are down on the level near where they live.”
I looked around, “How can you tell?”
“You don’t see their nests? Look over there, you see that the pile of stones and wood? Over there in the middle of that funny green patch?”
I looked, and my heart stopped.
“what’s wrong?” Gheerraa asked, following me down to where I slipped in my distress, but I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer myself. It was like all the nightmares I ever had suddenly coming rushing back.
“That... That is one of their nests?” I managed finally.
“Yes. They have lots of different kinds of nests, but this is the kind we see the most.”
“Look,” he said, “there’s one now, grubbing in the dirt.”
I focused my vision and sure enough that there was a strange creature grubbing in the dirt. “What is he doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They spend a lot of time doing that; scratching in the dirt with sticks.”
We watched for a while. A girl creature came out the nest followed by several nestlings, and they all started grubbing along with the male.
“Do we tease them now?” I asked.
“Oh, we never tease them when they are grubbing, it is far too dangerous.”
“They don’t look dangerous,” I said.
“It’s those sticks of theirs.” He replied. “They can swing them at you, or throw them. My father said that a friend is one of his died from one of those sticks. He saw a nestling, and was teasing it, when a male threw a stick at him. He made it back to his parent’s nest, but the wound got infected and he died several days later.”
“So when do we tease them, then?” I asked, watching the strange creatures, and feeling even stranger feelings washed over me. The sight of them made me angry, very angry, but I had no idea why.
“When they’re climbing. They have to use all four claws to climb and so they can’t use their sticks. You have to be careful though, that there isn’t another one around with a stick.”
As the thermal took us around I saw more and more of the nests. Each one was different, some larger, some smaller. They were each made with a slightly different kinds of rock. And the ground around each of them were slightly different as well.
And the plants looked odd too. They grew in straight lines and curves, all in a row. Suddenly I knew why. My mind showed me a picture of a dirt Grubber going a long and putting seeds in the ground, one seed after another in long rows.
The picture I had in my mind was of a taller Grubber, and he was working on the side of a mountain but far out on the plains, near a river.
“There’s one,” he said suddenly, and veered off. I followed him over. Sure enough, there were three Grubbers climbing up the cliff, holding onto a series of vines hanging bizarrely down the cliff face.
Gheenaa and Swoonaa were swooping down close to the face, where the Grubber boys were hanging. I decided to watch this time, and swung back into the thermal.
They shot along the cliff face, making nonsense noises. The boys on the cliff, on the other hand, were yelling at them using actual words. The two largest were expressing their anger. The one in the middle, the smallest, was scared.
Gheenaa and Swoonaa had made three passes and we’re coming back for more when I saw Grubber coming along a path at the base of the cliff, an adult male Grubber.
“Danger,” I yelled, and they veered off.
“Well, that was fun,” Gheenaa said, when he had joined me in the thermal and we were circling our way back up to the sky.“ Thanks for the warning.”
“No problem. Those Grubbers make me mad. I wonder why we aren’t allowed to hunt them.”
He didn’t say anything, and we rose together higher and higher together.
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Von