milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Today was a good day for Ray. He slept late. That's always good. He got home about mid-day and made up for his away-time in New York City. This is also good. Granted, it's amazingly slimy, but hey, he knew that was part of the deal when he signed up, right? Right. The city is safe for another year. Week. Day. Whatever interval of time it takes for something ghastly with too many teeth to pop out of the sidewalk. You get the picture. He did his duty.

Still, the performance of one duty does not excuse one from the performance of another, which is why he's out behind the bar adjusting the settings on his training drone to 'Mr. Sangiovese would like a word with you about your gambling debts' before starting practice for the evening.

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"We call ourselves humans, but yeah, you're right."

He crouches down to scratch Scribble's head where 'behind the ears' would be on a dog or cat.

"I'm always glad to feed her. She's a good chick. She'll grow up to be strong and clever, if she gets the chance."

"Humans," she repeats, nodding. Red frowns slightly as she watches and listens, nodding again. "The other two didn't get the chance. Dactyls and deinonychs."

Ray winces; he's got a vivid imagination. "I hope this one and your other chicks do better, then," he says, as he's reasonably sure standard human responses to the losses of children aren't going to work here.

She nods again. "It's been a bad year. My sister's chick's chicks are doing well, at least. One almost got caught, but it got away in time."

Red snorts quietly to herself as she crouches down to get a better look at Scribble, who bounds over to her. "With how this one acts, I'm surprised nothing's gotten her yet. She's like my sister. Bold."

"That's always good. I haven't got chicks of my own yet, but my sister has two. They're growing up well."

He smiles, watching Scribble hop towards her mother. "Bold and quick are a good combination," he says. "Bold gets you into trouble, but clever gets you out of it. I think she has all three."

"Hopefully they won't get eaten. It happens to lots of chicks."

Scribble chirps at her mother, who offers her a hand to sniff. "I hope so. I'm glad she's growing fast; she won't be as defenseless that way."

Ray nods. "I'm going to teach them to fight when they're a little older. They're too small to protect themselves yet."

It's as close as he can come to saying that he wants to make them his apprentices, as far as a head-blind newly made Jedi can ever be said to have a chance at apprentices.

"She's got good teeth," Ray says. "They'll have to be stronger when she's older, though. I should play the tugging game with her, so she gets stronger while she's still small."

"Most chicks are." She pauses. "Unless they're astros, but even then you can kill them. It's just hard sometimes."

Red stands back up, looking to Ray. "She likes the tugging games, I think. She brings the things to the cave, so she can play with them."

She's blissfully unaware that in 65 million years or so, more than a few paeleontologists will have heart attacks thanks to those toys.

"I can imagine," says Ray, who's never actually tried to kill his own dinner unless it was flopping at the end of a line with a hook in its mouth.

Ray is also unaware of this. But it makes him smile anyway. "She does? I'm glad she likes them. We use things like that when we're teaching animals that we're going to hunt with. The more they play when they're little, the better a chance they have of doing well when they're big and hunting properly."

Red tilts her head to the side, considering this. "Food always seemed more important to me. The greediest ones are the ones that get to live, assuming something doesn't eat them."

"True," Ray says. "Greedy gets you more food. But if you're greedy and slow, or greedy and clumsy, and the chick next to you is greedy and faster than you, they'll get to the food first. A greedy chick who's clever will distract one of the others and then eat the food when they're not looking."

Ray was always the smallest kid in his class. He's big on clever.

Red looks pleased at that, nodding. "That's what I did. I was faster, and I distracted the rest sometimes. It was easier to do with my brothers than my sister."

Scribble, bored by the fuzzy tickbird chattering, hops back over to ray to paw at his pantleg. "Yeep?"

Ray hastily digs in his pocket and comes out with a high-bouncing ball- they're cheap, he buys them a lot just in case Scribble turns up. "See the ball, Scribble? Get the ball! Fetch!"

Boing, boing, boing.

"She'll learn to be fast. It'll be good for her."

"Yeeep!" With that, Scribble is off, yapping as loud as she can while she pursues the ball.

Red watches her go. "She needs to be, to survive. Slow raptors starve when food is hard to find."

That's hard to argue with, really.

"Life is hard for your kind, isn't it?" Ray asks quietly.

She shrugs. "It's how things are. The acros try to kill us, the deinonychs will go after us if they think they have a chance, and the yellow snout hunt our prey, too. Lots of things kill chicks. Prey tries to kill us, so it won't die." Red snorts, looking back to Ray. "Even dead prey can kill you."

Ray blinks at this. "By making you sick, or by bringing in other predators?" he wonders. "I mean, I can see either one hapening..."

"By just falling. They can fall and trap something, like a tail, and make you stuck, and then you can't get out, especially if it's in the muck. That's how my first mate died. He couldn't be dug out."

"Oh, yeah," Ray says. "Yeah, I- that makes sense."

He almost says, I'd forgotten, but that wouldn't help matters at all.

"We humans hardly ever hunt, these days. We keep prey animals in one place and feed them, and when we need to eat, we take one away and kill it. It makes you forget what hunting is like, I think."

"Hunting's dangerous," all she says before listening and then frowning. "They don't try to get away? How cna you do that with something so big? An iguandon or astro could kill you easily."

"Oh, we keep smaller creatures than that," Ray says. "Look, over there-"

He points towards the stables.

"There are animals in there called horses. We don't eat them- we use them for other things. But the horses are about the same size as some of the animals we do eat. They stay because we give them food and water and keep the predators away. It's easier for them than roaming everywhere looking for a safe place to spend the night."

Just in case, he repeats, "Eating horses is not a good idea. You shouldn't try."

"Why not? They smelled strange, but I thought you could eat tehm. I never tried, though. It looked too small to hunt easily in there."

Scribble, meanwhile, has finally found the ball and comes back, hopping through the snow and looking pleased with herself. She drops the ball at Ray's feet, then leans against him, looking for body heat.

"They're for riding. Humans sit on them and steer them so they can go faster than a human can run. Other animals are for eating."

He's going to wind up the world's screwiest anthropologist at this rate.

Scribble's ball-drop is met with another fistful of food- she did, after all, 'fetch'. Ray waits for her to deal with the meat before crouching down to present a larger profile. "It's cold out here. We should get you two inside, so you can stay somewhere warm tonight."

"So what animals can you eat?" She frowns. "I don't think I should try eating fuzzy tick...humans again," she says, catching herself before she completes the wrong word.

The meat is gobbled down, and Scribble yaps and continues to lean. Red watches, then nods and turns towards the bar. "Normally we stay by the fire." She squawks, and Scribble gets up, trotting after her.

"Cows are good," Ray says. "And fish, and chickens, and-"

He almost says and pigs but Snowball is about these days.

"It's probably good to assume that 'food that talks is not food'. Don't try to eat it if it can talk to you. Don't try to eat the horses, because they're useful. Other things, like fish and rabbits, are safe. Although the water's a little cold for fish these days."

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redsnout.livejournal.com - 2005-12-21 07:15 (UTC) - Expand

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