The terrible suck, splat, slurp sound of the many fearful things which—it would seem to a hunter—were squibs, had Bailey in a terror. A big cat, bear or wolf was one thing, but something like this, something so much more antihuman, placed an icy unseen hand to his chest.

The creatures had the grasping bald legs of legend, but not the cuddly limbs of a pet, but a hard fish-like length of pale flesh capped with barbed mushroom cups that gripped and tore the hard skin from trees and the crumble-down flesh from the earth. Each of these creatures had eight such vine arms that would skin a man alive in seconds. Their heads were like a brain sunk in a belly sack without a skull, bobbing around on top of where the legs met. From behind the apparently blind head wormed a thicker arm with a big nose on the end—like a bison nose, that sucked the air, seemingly to seek them out. The things were not propelled by their legs, only steadied, as they hopped, powered by a frog leg the size of a muscular bruiser’s arm. The base of the foot was a star-shaped mouth lined with inward curving fangs. But worst of all was that which was at the base of the small body just forward of where the frog leg merged with the 8 waving arms—a bird’s beak, a big, hungry, clacking, bird’s beak!

Bailey had three arrows between his knuckles and one drawn to his ear. They were surrounded now by more squibs than he could count, by more squibs than the entire clan could count if they took off their moccasins and used their toes!

He drew the arrow a little farther, to just behind the ear, knowing he would transfix the one bugger that was climbing up the big oak before them—an oak with bark scarred from many such scraping climbs. Then it came to him, Geldbred’s telling of the story of pack leader Marsha and fire-seer Hertz in the Oldie story of Snow Fall Finding. After killing all the Baddies with his many arrows, and bashing in the brains of the Big Baddie, Marsha was out of arrows and his club was broken when the slit-eyed Sky Oldies came down. The Sky Oldies were slit-eyed, Geldbred said, because they sat around stars rather than campfires and must squint less they get all blinkered up and blind-like. In the end it was the Sky Oldies that brought the snow and it’s killing of the butt-biter swarms.

Well, Bailey thought, if these aren’t some butt-biter Baddies what is?

Bailey lowered his bow and kneeled down and made the interlaced hut-hand, in imitation of his enemy Hat friend, who was beseeching something called an Angel, which Bailey figured must be a Hat Oldie who poked its head out of the sky on occasion to help a troubled Hat out.

This must be the answer—he felt it in his bones—to Hat survival, despite their fool habits and lack of survival ways. It must be that Hat’s have oldies that care.

The number of squibs that had climbed the oaks all around and had scraped and sucked and lurched to within a single hop of them was now far beyond the counting of even Hat-seers, and in his fool Hat-seer friend, Jo-whatever-you-say-it, Bailey put his faith, and closed his eyes, for he saw the Hat doing that as he said his big-stuff words into the sky.

He was now hip-to-hip with his stout ripped-up Hat friend, who put one thick arm around Bailey’s narrow shoulders and joined his hands to Bailey’s hands. For his part Bailey did his best to hum along in the tone in which Jo-whatever-you-say-it beseeched the departed members of his squealer-pen tribe.

And, as the scraping of numberless tiny claws gripped every tree trunk and limb within a good spit launch, and countless sucking slurps of dank dripping snouts drank in their scent, Bailey felt like a hero, for he neither peed or shat in his coyote hide loincloth as the countless hungry snouts of an alien world spilled out of its abyss to ascertain his palatability like a great, clacking, bald, bear sniffing a honeycomb hive.