"You didn't ask ... hardly know what ecology means ... didn't realize it was important ..." the old doctor stammered.
"Everything is important to an ecologist, especially what people won't tell him!" Cole stormed.
He tried to stamp out of the lab, and progressed in a ludicrous bouncing that enraged him even more. He shouted for Hawkins and went home early.
In his rooms he brooded on his wrongs for an hour, then went downstairs and thundered on the locked door into the main house, shouting Garth Bidgrass' name. The sounds beyond hushed. Then Garth Bidgrass opened the door, looking stern and angry.
"Come into the library, Mr. Cole," he said. "Try to control yourself."
In the library Cole poured out his story while Bidgrass, standing with right elbow resting atop a bookcase, listened gravely.
"You must understand," Cole finished, "to save the stompers we must cut down the piskies. Crudely put, the most common method is to find a disease or a parasite that affects them, and breed more potent strains of it. But that won't work on piskies, and I could have and should have known that to begin with."
"Then you must give up?"
"No! Something must prey on them or their eggs in their native habitat, a macrobiotic limit factor I can use. I must learn the adult pisky's diet; if its range is narrow enough that can be made a limit factor."