Chap. 257 Big Cat Toes

Chap. 257 Big Cat Toes

He was so concentrating on putting his feet right, not to mention his hand beginning to swell, that K’ndar failed to see the transition from dense, entangling scrub to actual rain forest.

His first indication was the temperature dropping several degrees. The relief from the sun’s glare was immediate. His eyes took several moments to adjust to the shade.

All about him was forest floor, dappled with bits of sunlight making it through the thick canopy over head. Flowers spangled the vegetation. Flutters rose up ahead of them in flamboyantly colored clouds. He heard rustling noises in the dried leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

It was magnificent.

Rand stopped and turned.

“See? Look up, K’ndar.”

He obliged. All around him were pillars, trees that soared to impossible heights. He could hear the calls of the birds and wherries from their invisible perches far above his head.

Rand had a grin wrapped three times around his head.

“Well, mate? Is it something you’ve ever seen afore?”

K’ndar shook his head, unable to take it all in. “No. No. I’ve never seen such big trees in my life.”

“See this un?” Rand said, walking to a thick boled tree just off the path.

The tree before him had a base of wide, blunt buttress roots at least twice as tall and thick as a human. They formed the base of the tree. There was something familiar about their appearance, although he couldn’t make the link.

The roots on his level were thick and hefty, rising at a steep angle to join the trunk about five meters above his head. From that point, the trunk narrowed, upwards until the first lateral branches appeared. They were heavily leaved. Vines dangled from them before attaching themselves to the trunk, where they thickened to form a dense net. Streams of sunlight that managed to make their way through the leaves illuminated numberless insects, darting in and out of the sun beams. Their wings flashed in metallic tones.

“See how the undergrowth has thinned out? Can’t get as much light here, see, the canopy is closed. Just streams of sunlight, rather than full on head broiling. Can you feel it?”

“Oh, yes, by the egg, my head feels cooler right away,” K’ndar agreed. His sweat drenched shirt felt almost cold.

Movement caught his eye. He sensed more than saw what appeared to be a small crawler, racing up one of the thick vines.

Siskin launched to attack it.

The crawler vanished.

Siskin landed where he’d seen it last. His talons failed to gain traction on the narrow vine. His wings flapping to keep him stabilized, he searched for the crawler.

After several moments of searching, he lifted off from the tree to scan it from a better point.

The crawler re-appeared and skittered upwards. It had been right between Siskin’s paws!

Hissing, the fire lizard went right after the crawler. It vanished again.

“Look at that, it looks like a crawler? It went between! It disappeared!” K’ndar shouted.

Rand laughed. “Nay, mate, far as I know, only dragons and fire lizards can teleport. No, that crawler-he’s translucent. His skin has no color. He’s clear as water, K’ndar, he takes on the color o’ whatever he’s on. When he freezes like that, he disappears. Only his head has coloration, that’s to protect his brains from the sun, I think. When you get a closer look, you can actually see his heart beating!

“Oh, I MUST catch one,” K’ndar said, the biologist in him awakening now that he was no longer being baked alive in the jungle sun.

“Ah, they’re everywhere. I’ve got ‘em in my home. They are murder on insects, they stick to vertical surfaces, I don’t know how. They can run almost upside down! You have to be careful not to step on them. Once they’ve learned you’re harmless, they expect you to go around them. Pretty hard to do in the middle of the night, what? But they seem to know we’re blind in the dark, they’ll sing or chirp when you’s blundering about. They make a powerful lot of noise for something so little.”

Siskin circled the tree, looking for the crawler that he KNEW was there. Finally, snorting in disgust, he returned to K’ndar’s shoulder. His eyes roiled a disgruntled green.

“I didn’t want it anyways, that’s what he’s saying, aye, K’ndar?”

K’ndar laughed. “You’re reading him right, Rand.”

He touched the nearest buttress root. It felt slightly fuzzy where it wasn’t covered with moss or vines. He wasn’t sure if he was still sun struck, but he swore he felt a slow, ponderous beat. Trees don’t have hearts, he reminded himself. Maybe it was his own heart, still pounding from the strenuous hike.

“These..these are roots, yes?” The sense of having seen them before nagged him

“Aye. They’s roots. Big fat ‘uns, but still...roots.”

“Where have I seen them? What do you call this tree?”

Rand laughed. “I calls ‘em pussy toe trees.”

“YES!!” K’ndar shouted, seeing it immediately. The roots looked like the paws of a cat. Yes. It was as if he was standing in front of a giant cat’s foot. This was how prey must see a cat, just before…

He laughed in his head. Any cat this big would consider him just a snack.

“No claws, though”.

“Nay, but, look closely, K’ndar. If this tree had claws, there’s even a slot for ‘em, running right down the middle of the toe.”

Between the intertwined, heavily leaved vines, K’ndar could see an indentation that ran from the ground to the top of the buttress. The indentation could easily accommodate a human. He resisted the urge to fit himself into it, wanting the feeling of being a little kid in the grip of such a big cat. He couldn’t help but feel minuscule. Such an enormous thing...and alive.

“Pussy toe tree. Wonderful, wonderful analogy!” K’ndar said. This was the way he thought, seeing resemblances to things that had no linkage.

Something squawked overhead, swooping in and out of the leaves over head. He pulled off his backpack to dig out his binocular.

The squawker had vanished, but the range finder in the binocular said something ridiculous. He pulled them from his eyes, resisting the urge to shake it.

“’Ello, what’s that?”

“It’s a binocular that can also focus to act as a microscope. With this I can see many kilometers...or many micrometers. But I can’t believe the reading, it says that, just to the lower side of the leaves, it’s 16 meters?”

“It’s probably right, K’ndar. And this ‘un is on the smallish side. She’s just a pup. Wait until you see her big siblings,” Rand said.

“No steppe tree had ever grown so tall,” he muttered.

“Can I...can I look through the bonocular?”

“Certainly. It’s binocular. Here. You look through this end, and point it at, for instance, the top of that tree over there.” He pointed as he handed the ‘noc to Rand.

The man imitated how K’ndar had used them. He took several tries before he got the nocs situated over his eyes.

“Huh. It’s just a glob, it’s fuzzy green. It looks like the world after a drunk.”

K’ndar laughed. “I wouldn’t know, I don’t drink. But here. Give me your finger, no, the dominant one, feel this button? Press on it until everything comes into focus, meaning, everything looks sharp, like your normal sight. No, put them right up against your face, yes. Just hold it steady, okay?”

“How will I know..”

“You’ll know. If you want, I can activate the focus til you get the hang of it.”

“I think I can do it, just, just give me a minute.”

Rand pushed the button. “It’s not doing anything, but..whoa, so fast, now it’s like Oh! Oh! This is incredible. I can see every bloody leaf, I can see the insects on it!!”

He started to walk towards the tree and K’ndar grabbed him just as he was about to stumble over a small root.

“No, stand still. Don’t move until you pull them away from your eyes.”

Rand, awestruck, returned the nocs to his eyes.

“This is incredible. Incredible,” he said, swinging the nocs back and forth.

“Oh. I’d better stop, this is making me seasick.” He handed the nocs back to K’ndar.

“And this is all from Aivas?”

“Well, yes and no. The Ancients had them. They were found (he didn’t say HE found them, that, he’d learned, only put himself at the mercy of greedy and unethical people) as an artifact and Landing found the plans on the computer. Now you can buy one of these.”

Rand looked at them. “Whew. I bet they’re not cheap. I still have to buy chickens and a bred sow, and a dog...and I could use a new set of knives.”

He sighed.

“Ah well. Let’s move on.”

Ahead there was a large break in the canopy. In the clearing lay a fallen tree.

“This tree, it just fell recently? The leaves are still green, if wilted.” K’ndar said. They skirted a long branch that arched over the trail. It was as thick as his thigh.

“Aye,” Rand said. “See the root wad, sticking up vertically? Ye see that, for the length of this tree, it’s not very big.”

“Why is that?” K’ndar wondered.

“These trees, K’ndar, they form a coalition, of sorts. They talks to each other, through some means I don’t know, but they work together. When one gets eaten up by insects, or crawlers, or whatever, the other trees start putting toxins in the leaves, to keep them from being eaten, too. Depending on the tree, that toxin can definitely kill an insect, so they leave the trees alone and migrate elsewhere. When the bugs get to be too annoying, I put a bunch of leaves down in my home and that kills a lot of ‘em off. Or at least runs them off.”

He pointed at the root wad. “See these roots? For such a big tree, they’s nothing. Shallow and wide, almost an excuse. It’s like putting a size 0 horseshoe on a draft horse’s size 7 hoof. Roots cost energy, and this forest-well, we get so much rain that the soil is very nutrient poor. It leaches out, you know? The big ones, I’ll tell you about them in a minute, don’t waste energy growing deep roots that won’t give them much feed anyway. But it comes at a cost, when a high wind, like a hurricane, comes through, they are more likely to fall over. So they they depend on these pussy toes, most of which grow on the edges of the forest, to take the brunt of the wind. The pussy toes are big and stout. There isn’t a hurricane that’s been able to knock these un’s over, those roots are big like a ship and they go deep.

The cost to the pussy toe is it doesn’t get as high as the big ones. So they don’t reach up the sun. But they don’t need the sunlight that the big ‘uns do, they leaf out early in the spring and are all done flowering just as the big ‘uns are ramping up to start leafing out.”

He turned to point out a live pussy toe. “That tree there? She won’t get much bigger because she’s so close to the edge of the forest. She’s caught every high wind what comes along. So she built herself strong, instead of tall. She’s like a mountain. In return, she gets more nutrients, because the scrub jungle we just came through adds a lot of nutrients. That stuff grows fast and dies fast, and decomposes leaving lots of nutrients for the pussy toes.

Remember the hurricane two years ago? It lashed the forest hard. The biggest, oldest trees, like this ‘un, are so shallow rooted that a lot of ‘em fell down. This one, though, just came down maybe a week ago, two weeks? Didn’t take no wind, she was just at the end of her life, I ‘spect. This species seedlings, if they hit the soil, are so slow to take root, that even these little plants by your knees out compete them. They depend on breaks in the canopy to begin to grow. And they do best with a mother to help them. But if they’re close to the edge of the forest, where that scrub is, that stuff grows so fast it kills off the seedlings.”

“A mother tree.” K’ndar said. He imagined a tall tree carefully spoon feeding a seedling. He laughed inside his head.

Yes. Just ahead of us you’ll see one. It’s a fallen one, it fell years ago, and it’s rotting away. But it also is providing a rich food source for the seedlings, not to mention insects, and fungi, all of which produce nutrients. The open canopy when the mother tree fell gives the seedlings enough sunlight to give them a good start. They grow along the top of the tree itself, sort of eating her. They take what nutrients she had to feed themselves. Eventually the dead tree is all eaten up but by then, its kids, its seedlings are all grown up into big trees all on their own.”

K’ndar looked at the dying foliage. “This isn’t a pussy toes tree.”

“Nay, K’ndar. I calls this type a bowl tree.”

“Bowl? Like a bowl you drink from?”

“Aye,” Rand said. He manhandled a dying leaf from a branch that stuck out over his head. The many branches had kept the upper part of the tree from hitting the ground directly. Instead, it had shattered. At one time in its life the tree had been hit by lightning, shortening it. But not by much.

“By the egg, it’s enormous.”

“Aye, she were a grand un. I’m suspecting she was over 200 years old, certainly no younger.”

K’ndar paced the length of the tree from the root wad that whose end roots were far over his head, to fair guesstimate to what had been the tree top.

“No, this can’t be right. 60 meters? Sixty?”

“You’re not far off, mate, I’ve not measured it, but this one was a grand matriarch of the jungle. I were asleep when she came down. Woke me up, it did, it shook the planet, I swear.”

Rand, still holding the leaf, gestured over his head.

“Look, K’ndar. See, there’s pussy toe trees everywhere, but this species towers over everything. Look at the still live ones, see how the canopy is completely closed? It’s almost all bowl trees. Your looking at the bottom of the bowls. Like this ‘un.”

K’ndar dragged his eyes from the soaring trees all around him.

The spear shaped leaf Rand was holding was more than a meter long, and almost as wide. It was deeply cupped.

“You could almost take a bath out of that,” K’ndar observed.

Rand laughed. “Aye. I make bowls out of them, sew a trio together and you have a bowl you can cook in. The stem, here, see? It attaches half way up the bowl. See how it’s concave? What happens, K’ndar, is that when it rains, which, judging by experience, it will be raining here in about forty five minutes, the bowl fills up with water. Very little of the rain actually makes it past a bowl tree, so if it’s raining, and you don’t want to get wet, stand under a bowl tree. But you also stand a chance of the tree getting hit by lightning, like this one was, so, choose your poison, eh?” Rand chortled.

“These leaves are water proof. I climbed some of these trees, long ago when I was much younger, and there are animals that live in these bowls, like fish in a lake. Birds bathe in them. Some beasts drink from them, never coming to the ground. They don’t need to. Anyway, once the water in the bowl reaches a certain level, the water drains down the stem, down the branches, which, as you can see, are also concave, they empty onto the trunk of the tree, and maybe, if there’s any water left from being soaked up by the bark or the moss or the vines, reaches the ground.

I think it’s how these trees evolved to survive thread. Not that we got much thread anyways, but when we did, the thread that hit the bowls died in the water. It might eat up dead branches, a very neat pruning of deadwood, I’m thinking, but it won’t hurt the tree itself, and everything on the ground is already sodden from the daily rain. Not to mention the grubs, they ate every bit of Thread that managed to survive to hit the ground.

“Amazing,” K’ndar said, “The more I get out, the more I find ways that nature fended off thread.” He patted the trunk of the tree. Even horizontal, it was far over his head.

“Now I know how a crawler feels next to a human,” he said, feeling tiny. “This forest. It’s magnificent.”

“Tol’ you so. There’s lots more to see, but for now, let’s see to that hand o’ yours.”