He hung around Mother Weedon's most of the time. As a result Lynne saw a lot of him throughout the days and evenings, a fact which both pleased and alarmed her unreasonably. It was during the third night of his stay that he invaded, or tried to invade, her nights as well.
Before drifting off to sleep she found herself dwelling on him with relaxed reverie. Ray and Janet had had some sort of quarrel and the atmosphere that evening had been far from pleasant. It was a relief to lie alone, to let her thoughts roam and quest as they would.
Rolf had talked of Mars during a stroll to the bazaar-mart during the afternoon. He had described a boar-hunt on Earth's sister-planet during a night when both Deimos and Phobos were describing their rapid orbits across the cloudless sky.
The pig, as man's most adaptable food-animal, had been the first livestock imported to Mars less than three decades earlier. Now, according to Rolf, the animals had in large measure reverted to their feral state and constituted a menace to man and his works alike.
"We used flashlights and small-arms paralyzers on that hunt," Rolf said. "We flushed a whole herd of them in an erosion-gully along the border of the Great Southern Canal—didn't get so much as a smell of the brutes until we were right on top of them.
"At that we managed to nab a baker's dozen for de-tusking and redomestication. Ferkab, it was touch and go for a bit! One big brute slipped under my ray and if I hadn't been lucky enough to jam my flashlight tube into his mouth he'd have taken my leg off."
"What does ferkab mean?" Lynne asked, a little annoyed at feeling an atavistic thrill from the account of the primitive hunt.
To her delight Rolf actually blushed beneath his tan. He began with, "I don't think you'd appreciate its meaning," then recalled her telepathic powers and shut up and blushed more deeply.
At which it had been Lynne's turn to feel her face grow hot. The meaning of ferkab, an approximate translation of certain graphically illustrated ancient Martian runes, was explicit to the point of bawdiness. Yet on Mars, apparently, it was used in mixed company.
So, lying half asleep, Lynne not surprisingly visualised the boar hunt as Rolf had described it. She could see his weatherproof aluminum clothing gleaming in the pale light of the swift tiny moons, shining in the occasional ray of a flashlight as he and his shadowy companions worked their way along the eroded bank of the canal.