The Felodon lurked thirty yards from the point where Lampert was standing, protected from his sight by the undergrowth and by one of the piles of dirt thrown up by the machine which had dug the pit. It seemed to be looking through the soil at the spot where the man was. The snarl was still on its face, but no muscle moved in its long body. It had been there for minutes without moving; it had frozen similarly when McLaughlin had passed it on his way out. Now it simply stood and waited.
On a cliffside kilometers away, Ndomi Sulewayo gave utterance to the first profanity Krendall had ever heard him use. They were on opposite sides of the block containing the fossil, so neither could see the other. Krendall, naturally, asked what was wrong.
"Don't tell me a bug got through one of these suits!"
"Worse, if possible. I told you this foreleg—" both had been carefully avoiding the use of such words as "arms"—"was sticking out sideways, so that I was afraid we might have cut off part of it in digging the tunnel."
Krendall nodded. "I remember. Did we?"
"I don't know."
"Eh? How come? I should think there'd be no doubt, one way or the other, if you have that much of the limb clear."
"Well, I haven't. I got as far as the bone goes—and right there I run out of tuff and into the limestone. If there's anything more, it's in an entirely different kind of rock, which is a trifle unlikely; but I'm going to have to check the blocks we cut from this part of the tunnel in order to make sure, and I don't look forward to the job at all." Krendall, properly sympathetic, came around to Sulewayo's side to look, and agreed that the search was necessary. The bone the younger man had been clearing ended in a joint of the type they had come to regard as typical of the creature's limbs; and this had occurred almost exactly at the surface they had left when first outlining the block with the saw.
Sulewayo, with a grunt of disgust, dropped his tools and went out into the rain, where the blocks cut from the cliff had been piled; Krendall, nobly sacrificing his personal inclinations, went along with him.