His followers looked at him with dawning hope. Without a word to them, Burl began to run. They followed hastily and quickened their pace when his voice came back in a shout of triumph. In a moment they had emerged from the tangle of fungus growths to stand upon the banks of a wide river—the same river whose gleam Burl had seen the day before, from the farther side of the red puffball plain.
Once before, Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. That journey had been involuntary. He had been carried far from his tribe and Saya, his heart filled with desolation. But now he viewed the swiftly–running current with delight.
He cast his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there it rose in a low bluff and thick shelf–fungi stretched out above the water. They were adaptations of the fungi that once had grown on trees and now fed upon the incredibly nourishing earth–banks formed of dead growing things. Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the relatively hard growths with his spear and striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen stared blankly, but at a snapped order they imitated him.
Soon two dozen masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore. Burl began to explain what they were for, but Dor remonstrated. They were afraid to part from him. If they might embark on the same fungus–raft, it would be a different matter. Old Tama scolded him shrilly at the thought of separation. Jon trembled at the mere idea.
Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was rapidly approaching. Soon the red puffballs would burst and shoot their dust–clouds into the air. This was no time to make stipulations. Then Saya spoke softly.
Burl made the suggested great sacrifice. He took the gorgeous velvet cloak of moth–wing from his shoulder and tore it into a dozen long, irregular pieces along the lines of the sinews reinforcing it. He planted his spear upright in the largest raft, fastening the other cranky craft to it with the improvised lines.
In a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream. One by one, Burl settled the folk upon them with stern commands about movement. Then he shoved them out from the bank. The collection of uneasy, floating things moved slowly out from shore to where the current caught them. Burl and Saya sat on the same section of fungus, the other trustful but frightened tribes–people clustered timorously about.
As they began to move between the mushroom–lined banks of the river, and as the mist of nighttime lifted from its surface, columns of red dust spurted sullenly upward on the plain. In the light of dawn the deadly red haze was forming once more over the puffball plain.
By that time, however, the unstable rafts were speeding down the river, bobbing and whirling in the stream, with wide–eyed people as their passengers gazing in wonderment at the shores.
Five miles downstream, the red growths became less numerous and other forms of fungus took their places. Moulds and rusts covered the ground as grass did on more favored planets. Toadstools showed their creamy, rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks and branches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Once the tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting–spider outlined on the river–bank.
All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect life that had been absent in the neighborhood of the death–plain became abundant again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps and dragonflies. Four–inch mosquitoes appeared, to be driven off with blows. Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies of every imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced above the steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply being alive.
All the thousand–and–one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swam and dived where the people of the rafts could see them. Water–beetles came lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface. The shell–covered boats of caddis–flies floated in the eddies and backwaters.
The day wore on and the shores flowed by. The tribesmen ate of their food and drank of the river. When afternoon came the banks fell away and the current slackened. The shores became indefinite. The river merged itself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering.
The water seemed to grow dark when black mud took the place of the clay that had formed its bed. Then there appeared floating green things which did not move with the flowing water. They were the leaves of the water–lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and a very few other plants in the midst of a fungus world. Twelve feet across, any one of the green leaves might have supported the whole of Burl's tribe.
They became so numerous that only a relatively narrow, uncovered stream flowed between tens of acres of the flat, floating leaves. Here and there colossal waxen blossoms could be seen. Three men could hide in those enormous flowers. They exhaled an almost overpowering fragrance into the air.
And presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew in volume to an intermittent deep–bass roar. It seemed to come from the banks on either side. It was the discordant croaking of frogs, eight feet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently the tribesfolk saw them: green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, only opening their huge mouths to croak.
Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that a normal tribal hunting–ground—in which tribesmen were not yet accustomed to hunt—would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of little midges, no more than three or four inches across their wings, danced above the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly enamoured of their reflections in the glassy water.
The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strange new things they saw. Where the river split and split and divided again, there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not grow here. Moulds, yes. But there were cattails, with stalks like trees, towering thirty feet above the waterways.
After a long, long time though, the streams began to rejoin each other. Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here. The river flowed toward and through them. And here a wall of high mountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed. They vanished in the mist even before the cloud–bank swallowed them.
The river flowed through a river–gate, a water–gap in the mountains. While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirling through a narrow pass with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing in the mist. Here there was even some white water. Above it, spanning a chasm five hundred feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. The rafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of its kind, its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless in the center of the snare as the humans swept beneath it.
Then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where, look as they might, there was no single tawny–red puffball from whose spreading range the tribesmen were refugees. The rafts grounded and they waded ashore while still the day held. And there was food here in plenty.
But darkness fell before they could explore. As a matter of precaution Burl and his folk found a hiding–place in a mushroom–thicket and hid until morning. The night–sounds were wholly familiar to them. The noise of katydids was louder than usual—the feminine sound of that name gives no hint of the sonorous, deep–toned notes the enlarged creatures uttered—and that implied more vegetation as compared with straight fungoid flora. A great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shrouding the hiding–place, indicating that the huge snails they fed on were plentiful. The snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmen also. But men were not yet established in their own minds as predators.
They were, though, definitely no longer the furtive vermin they had been. They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed ants for food and a pirate–wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degree they were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behind him—and he still had some way to go.