“If he hasn’t, tell him to hurry up and get one in.”

There wasn’t time to go into that further.  Kellogg’s jeep was rising from the camp across the run and approaching.

He decided to let the breakfast dishes go till after lunch.  Kurt Borch had stayed behind at the Kellogg camp, so he kept an eye on the Fuzzies and brought them back when they started to stray toward the footbridge.  Ben Rainsford hadn’t returned by lunchtime, but zebralope hunting took a little time, even from the air.  While he was eating, outside, one of the rented airjeeps returned from the northeast in a hurry, disgorging Ernst Mallin, Juan Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris.  Kurt Borch came hurrying out; they talked for a few minutes, and then they all went inside.  A little later, the second jeep came in, even faster, and landed; Kellogg and van Riebeek hastened into the living hut.  There wasn’t anything more to see.  He carried the dishes into the kitchen and washed them, and the Fuzzies went into the bedroom for their nap.

He was sitting at the table in the living room when Gerd van Riebeek knocked on the open door.

“Jack, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

“Sure.  Come in.”

Van Riebeek entered, unbuckling his gun belt.  He shifted a chair so that he could see the door from it, and laid the belt on the floor at his feet when he sat down.  Then he began to curse Leonard Kellogg in four or five languages.

“Well, I agree, in principle; why in particular, though?”

“You know what that son of a Khooghra’s doing?” Gerd asked.  “He and that—­” He used a couple of Sheshan words, viler than anything in Lingua Terra. “—­that quack headshrinker, Mallin, are preparing a report, accusing you and Ben Rainsford of perpetrating a deliberate scientific hoax.  You taught the Fuzzies some tricks; you and Rainsford, between you, made those artifacts yourselves and the two of you are conspiring to foist the Fuzzies off as sapient beings.  Jack, if it weren’t so goddamn stinking contemptible, it would be the biggest joke of the century!”

“I take it they wanted you to sign this report, too?”

“Yes, and I told Kellogg he could—­” What Kellogg could do, it seemed, was both appalling and physiologically impossible.  He cursed again, and then lit a cigarette and got hold of himself.  “Here’s what happened.  Kellogg and I went up that stream, about twenty miles down Cold Creek, the one you’ve been working on, and up onto the high flat to a spring and a stream that flows down in the opposite direction.  Know where I mean?  Well, we found where some Fuzzies had been camping, among a lot of fallen timber.  And we found a little grave, where the Fuzzies had buried one of their people.”

He should have expected something like that, and yet it startled him.  “You mean, they bury their dead?  What was the grave like?”

“A little stone cairn, about a foot and a half by three, a foot high.  Kellogg said it was just a big toilet pit, but I was sure of what it was.  I opened it.  Stones under the cairn, and then filled-in earth, and then a dead Fuzzy wrapped in grass.  A female; she’d been mangled by something, maybe a bush-goblin.  And get this Jack; they’d buried her prawn-stick with her.”