Yet, it had lifted and dropped that lid too briefly to have seen anything outside. Could it be listening for something? Carefully, he relinquished his control of the beast, fraction by fraction, to see what it would do.
It rose on tiptoe at once, and again lifted that earthen door.
It squinted at the profusion of green-yellow sunlight that stung its eyes. Then it rose on powerful hind limbs and clambered just high enough on that "ladder" to see over the grassy rim of the trapdoor-hole. Jerry then heard the soft shuffling sound that had re-alerted it, and saw the source.
Out on the matted brown jungle flooring, beneath the towering trees, another of the bear-things was moving forward from an open turf-door, emitting low, whimpering snorts as it inched along through the dappling yellow sunlight.
Obviously it was following that manic-destruction impulse that he just felt and managed to suppress. It must have been almost a hundred degrees out there. And the damned thing was shivering.
Here and there, Jerry noticed suddenly, other half-opened trapdoors were framing other bear-things' heads. The air was taut with electric tension, the tension of a slow trigger-squeeze that moves millimeter by millimeter toward the instant explosion....
The soft shuffling sounds of the animal's movement jogged Jerry's memory then, and he knew it for the sound he had heard when enhosted in the grasshopper-thing. Was a bear-thing what they'd been waiting in the trees so silently for? And what would be the culmination of that vigil?
Then the bear-thing he was in Contact with hitched itself up another root-rung. Jerry saw the thing toward which the quaking creature was headed, in a hunched crawl, its whimpers more anguished by the moment.
Pendant in the green gloaming, about four feet above the spongy brown jungle floor, hung a thick yellow-gray gourd at the tip of a long vine. Its sides glittered stickily with condensed moisture that mingled with the effluvium of the gourd itself. The odor was both noisome and compelling, powerful as a bushel of rotting roses. It sickened as it lured, teased the nostrils as it cloyed within the lungs.