As Ed came up it struggled feebly to get up, but one of the heavy slugs
had evidently hit the spine, or whatever carried communications to the
hindquarters. It fell back, shuddering convulsively, and suddenly
regurgitated a small, furry animal.

Ed stepped back quickly to bring his rifle to bear, but the newest
arrival was obviously already dead.

He turned his attention back to the larger animal. It, too, was dead
now. There was an obvious family resemblance to the smaller one he had
shot in the leaves. Both were smooth-skinned, many-legged, and now that
he looked closely he could see this one had two mouths, a small one just
under the nostrils, purse-lipped and tiny in its huge face but quite
like that of the other creature. Neither looked even remotely like
anything he had ever seen before.

He laid down his rifle and took out his knife.

Ten minutes later, he knew quite a bit about the thing, but what he knew
did not make much sense. In the first place, its blood _was_ green, a
yellowish pussy green. In the second place, the larger mouth, complete
with jaws and impressive musculature, opened not into a digestive
system, but into a large closed pouch which comprised most of the
animal's torso. There was no proper digestive system at all, only a
rudimentary gut, heavily laced with blood vessels, terminating at one
end in the small second mouth, at the other in an even smaller anus.
Otherwise, the thing had no insides except a good pair of lungs and a
stout heart--none at all. Bone, muscle, lung, heart--plus the
ridiculously inadequate gut--that was it.

What about the small, furry, animal then; the one the other had been
carrying in its pouch? There was nothing much out-of-the-way about it--a
feline sort of carnivore, something like a marten. The fur looked
interesting, and he skinned it out, casing the hide. On the left ham,
the skin was punctured and there was a swollen, bluish area--about the
sort of wound that would be made by the fang of the first thing he had
shot. Ed squatted back on his heels, studying it and putting two and two
together. What two and two made was pretty hard to believe, but it
fitted the evidence.

He wiped his knife carefully on the grass, put it back in its sheath,
and got to his feet. Suddenly, the feeling that he was not alone
recurred. He looked quickly around.

Back where he had shot the first thing, a man in forest-green whipcord
trousers and jacket was leaning over, hands on k