Twenty-four
‘‘Mother?’’ The grezzen cantered through the rain, sweeping back and forth in sixty-jump arcs as it searched for the humans in their moving shell. He cocked his great head when she did not respond.
The grezzen neither needed or understood communication tools nor, for that matter, tools of any sort. So he did not understand the concept of background noise. He simply and reflexively filtered out the low, ubiquitous buzz generated by the consciousness of uncountable trillions of dumb organisms, and by the distant clamor of billions of irrelevantly distant intelligent ones. The filtering behavior had served his species well for thirty million perfectly adapted years.
There. He felt his mother, but she ignored him. Asleep. That was normal enough. But during the daily rain? When prey that relied solely on what it saw and smelled and heard was disadvantaged?
He had no idiom for putting one plus one together, though he manipulated numeric concepts in a base-six system when he counted herds, estimated distance, or established new territory.
But he deduced that one vaguely troubling thing had happened, followed quickly by another. The human intrusion had been followed by his mother’s unresponsiveness. His mother had taught him that, in such cases, the first thing had often caused the second.
Within the vastness of eternal background noise, he sifted until he again felt the consciousness of the dominant human, the one that called itself Cutler. Then the grezzen brought that consciousness forward.
The grezzen froze, two legs up, four down, like a woog at the first scent of a striper. The grezzen felt what the human felt. More importantly, he saw what the human saw, and heard what the human said to its subservients.
Then the grezzen growled, a low rumble so powerful that tree leaves a body length away trembled. He shifted from a canter to great, six legged bounds. As he searched, he splintered trees with his forepaws. Not because they blocked his passage, but because he was angry.