Little Fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that was a word he recognized. He took
them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast veldbeest and
yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while they were eating from a couple
of big pans, he went back to the living room to examine the things they
had brought with them. Two of the prawn-killers were wood, like the one
Little Fuzzy had discarded in the shed. A third was of horn, beautifully
polished, and the fourth looked as though it had been made from the
shoulder bone of something like a zebralope. Then there was a small _coup
de poing_ ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the
shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight edge.
For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a scraper. He
puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was serrated, and
decided that it was a saw. And there were three very good flake knives,
and some shells, evidently drinking vessels.
Mamma Fuzzy came in while he was finishing the examination. She seemed
suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property had been taken
or damaged. Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with one hand and holding a
slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was munching, with the other. He
crammed what was left of the fruit into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and
sat down on his head again. Have to do something to break him of that. One
of these days, he'd be getting too big for it.
In a few minutes, the rest of the family came in, chasing and pummeling
each other and yeeking happily. Mamma jumped off his lap and joined the
free-for-all, and then Baby took off from his head and landed on Mamma's
back. And he thought he'd lost his Little Fuzzy, and, gosh, here he had
five Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy. When they were tired romping, he made beds
for them in the living room, and brought out Little Fuzzy's bedding and
his treasures. One Little Fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine; five and a
Baby Fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing.
They were swarming over the bed, Baby and all, to waken him the next
morning.
* * * * *
The next morning he made a steel chopper-digger for each of them, and half
a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies showed up. He also
made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a handsaw out of a piece of
broken power-saw blade and half a dozen little knives forged in one piece
from quarter-inch coil-spring material. He had less trouble trading the
Fuzzies' own things away from them than he had expected. They had a very
keen property sense, but they knew a good deal when one was offered. He
put the wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the desk
drawer. Start of the Holloway Collection of Zarathustran Fuzzy Weapons and
Implements. Maybe he'd will it to the Federation Institute of
Xeno-Sciences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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