Ko-Ko, who had climbed upon Rainsford’s lap, jumped suddenly to the ground, grabbed the chopper-digger he had left beside the chair and started across the grass. Everybody got to their feet, the visitors getting cameras out. The Fuzzies seemed perplexed by all the excitement. It was only another land-prawn, wasn’t it?
Ko-Ko got in front of it, poked it on the nose to stop it and then struck a dramatic pose, flourishing his weapon and bringing it down on the prawn’s neck. Then, after flopping it over, he looked at it almost in sorrow and hit it a couple of whacks with the flat. He began pulling it apart and eating it.
“I see why you call him Ko-Ko,” Ruth said, aiming her camera, “Don’t the others do it that way?”
“Well, Little Fuzzy runs along beside them and pivots and gives them a quick chop. Mike and Mitzi flop theirs over first and behead them on their backs. And Mamma takes a swipe at their legs first. But beheading and breaking the undershell, they all do that.”
“Uh-huh; that’s basic,” she said. “Instinctive. The technique is either self-learned or copied. When Baby begins killing his own prawns, see if he doesn’t do it the way Mamma does!”
“Hey, look!” Jimenez cried. “He’s making a lobster pick for himself!”
Through lunch, they talked exclusively about Fuzzies. The subjects of the discussion nibbled things that were given to them, and yeeked among themselves. Gerd van Riebeek suggested that they were discussing the odd habits of human-type people. Juan Jimenez looked at him, slightly disturbed, as though wondering just how seriously he meant it.
“You know, what impressed me most in the taped account was the incident of the damnthing,” said Ruth Ortheris. “Any animal associating with man will try to attract attention if something’s wrong, but I never heard of one, not even a Freyan kholph or a Terran chimpanzee, that would use descriptive pantomime. Little Fuzzy was actually making a symbolic representation, by abstracting the distinguishing characteristic of the damnthing.”
“Think that stiff-arm gesture and bark might have been intended to represent a rifle?” Gerd van Riebeek asked. “He’d seen you shooting before, hadn’t he?”
“I don’t think it was anything else. He was telling me, ‘Big nasty damnthing outside; shoot it like you did the harpy.’ And if he hadn’t run past me and pointed back, that damnthing would have killed me.”