Hartford demanded equal time with the fishline, and discovered to his gratification that the dough he pinched off the chapattis and molded to the hook took the fancy of Kansas fish as well as Takeko's offerings. With a sense of at last participating in the affairs of the universe, he de-capitated and decaudated the six fish they ended with, and gutted them with a rich delight in the juicy messiness of the task.
Hartford and Takeko scissored the fillets in split twigs and roasted them, like aquatic weenies, over a fire built from the pithy stalks of dead sunflowers. The firepit, a saucer of scooped-out dirt, had buried beneath it half a dozen of the swollen roots of sunflowers, each wrapped in the cordiform, sharkskin-surfaced leaf of the parent plant, to roast beneath the coals.
They seasoned their fish with daikon, a kind of horseradish; and their plates were the fresh-baked, flat, un-leavened chappattis Takeko had brought in her pack. The tubers, eaten from a fresh leaf-plate, needed only butter. Takeko had this, too, churned of camelopard-milk cream. Buds or flower-heads of the sunflower were eaten with sunflower oil, like artichokes. "Your people have a good friend in the sunflower;" Hartford remarked, wiping his lips.
"With the golden flower and the golden giraffu, with the take-grass and the good soil, we had a rich life here before you glass-headed men came," Takeko said. "Now we are treated in our own villages like rats to be driven out, in our fields as gnawing vermin. Why is your Brotherhood so angry with us, Lee-san, who live in only a few places on a wide world? Is there no law among the light-skinned people? We have lived here, on the world you call Kansas, for many generations. We were once of Earth, as were your grandfathers."
"All humans were once of Earth," Hartford said.
"If we are as much human as you," she said, "why does your Nef call us Hominids? Is that a name to give a brother?"
"It is better than Stinker," Hartford suggested.
"Hai! I tell you, Lee-san why you must re-name us. It is because men do not kill men until they give their brother-enemy a monstrous name. Why do you wish to kill us all?" she asked.
"I'm not a member of the Brotherhood," Hartford said. "I'm only a man who was born on Axenite. That means, until your beast and my jeep collided, tearing my safety-suit, I was an animal uncontaminated by microscopic life. These microscopic animals, Takeko, are deadly to an Axenite."