Drule had just started eating when she heard a sniffle in the gloom, a very large sniffle. She looked up. "What matter with Krog?"
"Want some, too," the monster explained.
The Lady Drule filled a tree-bark bowl and gave it to Krog. He sniffed it, opened his mouth, and popped it in, bowl and all. He swallowed. "Good," he said. "More?"
Hunch, the Grand Notioner, stared up at the big creature in disbelief. "Gonna need lots more rats an' greens," he said. "Bark, too, if Krog keep eatin' th' bowls."
"Rats?" Krog's eyes lit up. "Krog get rats with bashin' tool"
He stood, picked up his club, and vanished into the darkness. He was gone for a long time, and most of the gully dwarves were asleep when he returned.
Drule saw him approaching and held a finger to her lips. "Sh!" she said.
Quietly, Krog came to the waning fire, found a clear spot and dropped something on the ground, something very big. "Rats too quick for Krog," he whispered. "Can't catch 'em. This do?"
Drule gaped at the thing. She had seen cave bears before, but never a dead one, and never up close. It certainly would make a lot of stew, she decided.
The Highbulp Gorge III was not happy. First to be snatched up by armed Talls and herded cross-country with a rope around his neck, lashed with whips and insulted at every stumble, then to be thrown into a cage with the rest of his followers and dozens of Tall captives as well — Gorge was almost certain that his dignity had been offended, among other things.
"This intoler… outra… unforgiv… this stink!" he grumbled, pacing back and forth in the comer of the roofed pen where the gully dwarves were huddled. "Slave, Talls say. Not slave. I Highbulp!"
"Not slave either," several of his subjects agreed.
A voice growled, "You gully dwarves pipe down or you'll feel the lash."
"Hmph!" Gorge muttered, but lowered his voice. "Maybe dig out? Skitt? Where Skitt?"
"Here," a sleepy voice said. "What Highbulp want?"
"Skitt, you dig hole."
"Tried it," Skitt said in the gloom. "Rock underneath. Need tools, no tools. G'night."
"Might cut through bars," another suggested. "Bars are wood."
"Cut with what?" still another pointed out. "Same thing. Got no tools. If had anything for cut, could — "
"Shut up over there!" a human whispered from the other side of the pen. "You'll get us all in trouble!"
"Hmph!" Gorge said, feeling helpless and hopeless.
Armed guards patrolled around the pen. Nearby, the fires of the slavers' camp burned bright. They had been coming in all day, groups of four to eight at a time, most of them bringing captives, and now there were at least thirty in the camp, and dozens of slaves in the pen.
A guard passed near the wood-barred enclosure, and a human voice inside said, "If only I could get my hands on a sword, I'd…"
The guard laughed. "You'd what, slave? Fight? By the time we sell you, we'll have beaten all the fight out of you. Now shut up."
Another guard strolled past on the gully dwarves' side, and the Highbulp and his followers cringed away from the bars. They didn't like the way these Talls talked, at all.
At first dawn, the ladies packed as much bear meat as they could carry, while the Lady Drule went looking for tracks to follow. Krog tagged along, happy as a duckling following its mother.
Drule searched northward, then stopped and scratched her head. There had been tracks before, she was certain, but now there were none. "Where they all go?" she wondered.
Krog squatted beside her, scratching his head in imitation. "Who?" he asked.
"Highbulp an' th' rest," she reminded him. "Ones we been tryin' to find."
He scowled — a frightening and fierce expression, on his face. "Mama want find those ones?"
"Sure," the Lady Drule said. "Don't know where to look, though."
"No problem," Krog said, standing and pointing northward. "They over there."
"Where?"
"There. See smoke? That where other others go."
He seemed certain of it, so Drule said, "Fine. We go there, too. Highbulp prob'ly need 'tendin' to 'bout now."
She called to the rest, and they set off northward — a nine-foot creature guiding, a long line of three- to four-foot creatures tagging after. In the distance, far across a wide, sundered valley littered with the debris of nameless catastrophe, was a ridge. Beyond the ridge, Krog said, were their lost people. It would take all day to get there, Drule guessed, but they had nowhere else to go.
It was midday when Drule and Krog rounded a spire of rock that might once have been a mountaintop, and came face-to-face with a stranger, a human, carrying an axe.
As any good gully dwarf would do, faced with an armed Tall, the Lady Drule shrieked, turned and ran. Behind her, gully dwarves scattered in all directions.
Krog looked after Drule for a second, thoroughly puzzled, then looked again at the bug-eyed man standing there, gawking up at him in terror. Krog shrugged eloquently, then voiced a mighty shriek, flung up his hands just as Drule had done, and pounded away after her. His shriek drowned out the screams of the man, who was now bounding away in the other direction, shouting, "Ogre! Ogre!"
Some distance away, Krog found the Lady Drule hiding behind a clump of grass. Krog did the same, though his clump of grass covered no more than the lower part of his face and maybe one shoulder. He stayed there until Drule rose. Deciding the danger was gone, she went to regather her followers. Krog didn't know why they had been hiding, but whatever suited Mama was all right with him.
It was late evening. Hazy dusk lay in the long shadows of the Khalkists, and the smoke of campfires hung in the air when a gully dwarf named Bipp crept through the brush to the shadowed slave pen and looked inside. He squinted. "Highbulp?"
Several faces turned toward him. "Hey," someone said. "That Bipp."
"What you doin' out there, Bipp?" another asked.
Bipp put a finger to his lips. "Sh!"
"What?"
"Sh!"
"Oh. Okay."
"Where Highbulp?" Bipp whispered.
"Right here, somewhere. Highbulp? Highbulp, wake up. Bipp here." A pause, then, "Highbulp! Wake up! Highbulp sleepy oaf. Wake up, Highbulp! Bipp here."
"Who?"
"Bipp"
"Shut up over there!" a human voice shouted. "Can't you little dimwits ever be quiet?"
At the sound, an armed guard at the far comer of the pen looked around, and Bipp flattened himself in the shadows. "Shut up in there, or you'll wish you had," the guard ordered.
Then Gorge was there, peering through the lashed-post bars. "What Bipp want?"
"Lady Drule send me. She lookin' for you. Why ever'body here?"
"Can't get out," the Highbulp said, peevishly. "Talls got us incarcera… in custo… got us locked in for sell."
"Oh." Bipp studied the bars, shrugged, and turned away. "Okay," he said. "Have nice evenin'. I go tell Lady Drule."
In a moment he was gone, but behind him a babble of voices echoed, and a guard roared, "You slaves heard what I said!"
A torch flared. A guard with a patch on one eye drew a sword and thrust it viciously between the bars. A human screamed, and the scream became a whimper as the guard withdrew the sword, bloody.
The man put away his sword, grinned at another guard. "That ought to quiet them," he said. "Slaves don't need two ears, anyway."
Atop the ridge, the Lady Drule and the others listened wide-eyed as Bipp made his report. He told them what he had seen and what he had heard, and there was no doubt what it all meant. Most of the males of the Bulp clan were prisoners of heavily armed Talls, and would be sold into slavery.
Drule scratched her head, wondering what to do about that, then gave up and went to find Hunch. "You Grand Notioner," she reminded him. "Time for Grand Notion."