Mamma Fuzzy came in while he was finishing the examination.  She seemed suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property had been taken or damaged.  Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with one hand and holding a slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was munching, with the other.  He crammed what was left of the fruit into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and sat down on his head again.  Have to do something to break him of that.  One of these days, he’d be getting too big for it.

In a few minutes, the rest of the family came in, chasing and pummeling each other and yeeking happily.  Mamma jumped off his lap and joined the free-for-all, and then Baby took off from his head and landed on Mamma’s back.  And he thought he’d lost his Little Fuzzy, and, gosh, here he had five Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy.  When they were tired romping, he made beds for them in the living room, and brought out Little Fuzzy’s bedding and his treasures.  One Little Fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine; five and a Baby Fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing.

They were swarming over the bed, Baby and all, to waken him the next morning.

* * * * *

The next morning he made a steel chopper-digger for each of them, and half a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies showed up.  He also made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a handsaw out of a piece of broken power-saw blade and half a dozen little knives forged in one piece from quarter-inch coil-spring material.  He had less trouble trading the Fuzzies’ own things away from them than he had expected.  They had a very keen property sense, but they knew a good deal when one was offered.  He put the wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the desk drawer.  Start of the Holloway Collection of Zarathustran Fuzzy Weapons and Implements.  Maybe he’d will it to the Federation Institute of Xeno-Sciences.

Of course, the family had to try out the new chopper-diggers on land-prawns, and he followed them around with the movie camera.  They killed a dozen and a half that morning, and there was very little interest in lunch, though they did sit around nibbling, just to be doing what he was doing.  As soon as they finished, they all went in for a nap on his bed.  He spent the afternoon pottering about camp doing odd jobs that he had been postponing for months.  The Fuzzies all emerged in the late afternoon for a romp in the grass outside.

He was in the kitchen, getting dinner, when they all came pelting in through the little door into the living room, making an excited outcry.  Little Fuzzy and one of the other males came into the kitchen.  Little Fuzzy squatted, put one hand on his lower jaw, with thumb and little finger extended, and the other on his forehead, first finger upright.  Then he thrust out his right arm stiffly and made a barking noise of a sort he had never made before.  He had to do it a second time before Jack got it.