With no warning of its approach, a creature, semi-human in form, walked into view from behind the tree trunk. Tang stifled his instinctive urge to reach for his pistol and stood motionless. He had learned long ago, that when playing a strange game, to let the other fellow play first.
The native possessed two limbs upon which he stood, and two others, set where its shoulders should have been, but there his human likeness ceased. Yet there was something about him that more nearly approached the human standard of a man than did the stick-insect which he had observed earlier.
The man-creature's body and limbs were well filled out, and covered with slate-gray skin. There was no neck, his head was merely an extension of his trunk. Two eye clusters, set high on his head and wide apart, and a long, slit, mouth just below were his only facial features. Two flesh-feathered apertures, situated where the breast nipples would have been on a human, and evidently respiration openings, fluttered with each breath the creature took. He was entirely unclothed and in one grubby fist he gripped a long-bladed knife.
About the native's feet frisked a small four-legged animal with the proportions of a pudgy teddybear. It too was neckless, with the same dead-white skin as the native, and reminded Tang of a bouncy little ball of bread dough.
The native stared at him until the silence grew thin and Tang decided that he would have to make the first move.
"Hello," he said. He knew there was little chance the other could understand him. In fact, there were no organs of hearing, as far as he could discern, yet he hoped to convey, by the tone of his voice that he was not a hostile intruder. He knew by experience that almost invariably an animal, or a human, feared a stranger, and reacted to that fear with either flight or a challenge. Sometimes that fear could be allayed by an early demonstration of animity.
Abruptly the native seemed to lose interest in Tang. He turned and began cutting small branch shoots from one of the surrounding limbs. These he placed on a pile which he had started on the ground.
Tang drew a deep breath of relief. Still keeping a wary eye on the native he walked over to the tree trunk and stood leaning against it. The other ignored him and went on with his work.
When the pile of shoots reached a size that satisfied him, the native picked them up and entered one of the branch tunnels leading in the opposite direction from which Tang had come. Tang followed.
They came out of the woods onto the same type of sandy plain that Tang had found when he first landed. A half mile away he could see a small river, and collected along its banks were dozens of adobe-like dwellings. They stretched away along the river banks until lost to sight among the foothills.