Urt People The urt people are narrow-shouldered and narrow-chested, measuring only three and a half feet tall when upright, with a narrow, elongated face and rather large, ovoid eyes. They have long, thin arms and short, spindly legs along with a bent-over gait, often bringing the knuckles to the ground, and commonly travel inconspicuously among the large, migratory urt packs.
Urt people are known to be fond of pit fruit.
They can speak in a type of Gorean well enough to communicate with humans and communicate with each other by means of scent and various squeals, hisses and clicks. They are rational creatures and where thought to be in the past some form of human beings.
Goreans have been known to keep urt people as pets.
"Do not be afraid," I said. I took a slice of hard larma from my tray. This is a firm, single-seeded, applelike fruit. It is quite unlike the segmented, juicy larma. It is sometimes called, and perhaps more aptly, the pit fruit, because of its large single stone. I held it up so that he could see it. The urt people, I understood, were fond of pit fruit. Indeed, it was for having stolen such fruit from a state orchard mat he had been incarcerated. He had been netted, put in a sack and brought here. That had been more than six months ago. I had learned these things from the jailer when he had thrust the creature in with me. The creature approached, warily. Then it lifted its long arm and pointed a long index finger at the fruit. "Bet! Bet!" it said. "Pay! Pay!" Players of Gor – 267
It was one of the urt people. It had a narrow, elongated face and rather large, ovoid eyes. It was narrow-shouldered and narrow-chested. It had long, thin arms and short, spindly legs. It commonly walked, or hurried, bent over, its knuckles often on the ground, its heads moving from side to side. This low gait commonly kept it inconspicuous among the large, migratory urt packs with which it commonly moved. Sometimes such packs pass civilized areas and observers are not even aware of the urt people travelling with them. For some reason, not clear to me at that time, the urts seldom attack them. The urt packs provide them with cover and protection. For some reason, not as clear to me at that time urts seldom attack them. Sometimes it would rear up, slightly, unexpectedly, looking about itself, and then drop back to a smaller, more bent-over position. It was capable of incredible stillness and then sudden, surprising bursts of movement.
When it stood upright it was about three and a half feet tall." Players of Gor- 267
Come here," I said. "Up here." I indicated the surface of the table.
He leapt up to the surface of the table, squatting there.
I broke off another bit of the hard fruit and handed it to him. "What is your name?" I asked.
He uttered a kind of hissing squeal. I supposed that might be his name. The urt people, as I understood it, commonly communicate among themselves in the pack by means of such signals. How complicated or sophisticated those signals might be I did not know. They did tend to resemble the natural noises of urts. In this I supposed they tended to make their presence among the urts less obvious to outside observers and perhaps, too, less obvious, or obtrusive, to the urts themselves. Too, however, I knew the urt people could, and did upon occasion, as in their rare contacts with civilized folk, communicate in a type of Gorean, many of the words evidencing obvious linguistic corruptions for others, interestingly, apparently closely resembling archaic Gorean, a language not spoken popularly on Gor, except by members of the caste of Initiates, for hundreds of years. I had little difficulty, however, in understanding him. He seemed an intelligent creature, and his Gorean was doubtless quite different from the common trade Gorean of the urt people. It had doubtless been much refined and improved in the prison. The urt people learn quickly. They are rational. Some people keep them as pets. I think they are, or at one time were, a form of human being. Probably long ago, as some forms of urts became commensals with human beings, so, too, some humans may have become commensals, traveling companions, sharers at the same table, so to speak, with the migratory urt packs.
"What do they call you here?" I asked.
"Nim, Nim," it said. Players of Gor – 268
I looked back at the pack. The matter had to do with odor, I was sure. That would explain why a strange urt, though even of the pack’s own species, would be fallen upon and killed if it attempted to join the pack. That explained, too, why Nim Nim had no longer been accepted. In his time in prison, some six months or so, he would have lost the pack odor. The Priest-Kings, I recalled, had recognized who was "of the Nest," and who was not, by means of the Nest odor. This odor is acquired, of course, after time is spent in the nest. Similarly, I supposed, the pack odor would be acquired after some time in the pack. How, I wondered, did the first of the urt people gain admittance to their packs. I suspected it had occurred hundreds of years ago. Some very clever individual, or individuals, must have suspected the mechanisms involved. They might then have considered how they might be circumvented. This secret, in the successive generations, might have been lost to the urt people, or, perhaps, it had been deliberately allowed to vanish in time by the discoverers of the secret, that others could not reveal it, or take advantage of it, to their detriment. Now, I supposed, the urt people, their children and such, would simply grow up with the packs, thinking perhaps that this was just the way things had been, inexplicably, or naturally, from time immemorial. yet is it not likely, I pondered, there would once have been a reason or reasons. Surely it is not always to be assumed that it is a mere inexplicable fact, a simply brute given, something not to be inquired into, that things are as they now are. Might there not be a reason why grass is green, and the sky blue? Might there not be a reason for the movement of the winds and the rotation of the night sky, and a reason, say, why men are as they are, and women as they are?
I suddenly leapt to the beast who’s neck I had broken. I looked to the men on the hill. They had not yet released the sleen. I tore away a tusk, breaking it loose, from the side of the jaw of the dead animal. Then, feverishly, with a will, I thrust it through its pelt and, pulling and tearing, using my hands, and teeth, as well, I began to remove its skin. Perhaps they would think I had gone mad. Yet I did not think it would take Flaminius long to grasp my intent.
I looked back wildly back to the crest of the hill. Already the sleen, unleashed, were racing down the grassy slope.
I continued my work.
I tore loose part of the skin. I ran the side of my hand, like a knife, between it and organs and hot fat. I put my foot on the rib cage and, pressing down, then release the pressure, then pressing down, and releasing again, I turned the rib cage, drawing the pelt, rip by rip, away from it. I turned again to see the progress of the sleen. They could be upon me now in by Ihn. I could see their eagerness, their eyes. I tore the pelt mostly away from the animal. I had no time to remove the lolling, dangling head. With my foot, thrusting, I removed most of the remaining body and entrails from the hide, and clutching it, with both hands, wrapping it about my hips, I entered the pack.
Part of the hide was still warm on my skin. It was wet and sticky about me. MY legs and thighs were bloody from it. I wedged between urts. Their fur was warm and oily. I felt their ribs through it, the movement of muscles beneath it. Noses pushed toward me. I pushed on, fighting to make my way through the bodies. Almost at the same instant the sleen reached the pack and plunged toward me.
One climbed over the bodies of the closely packed urts, snapping and snarling. Its jaws came within a foot of me, and then it fell between the startled urts, it spinning about then, confused. I kept pushing through the urts, toward the other side of the pack, more than a hundred and fifty yards away. Behind me I suddenly heard again that hideous squeal of an urt, once ore the stranger-recognition signal.
The sleen is a tenacious tracker, I told myself. It is a tireless, determined, tenacious tracker. Such thoughts had run through my mind earlier, when I had first come to the edge of the pack. They had then seemed provocatively, somehow significantly, but with no full significance which I had then grasped, lurking, prowling, at the borders of my understanding. Now I realized the thought with which my mind must have then been toying, the marvelous, astounding possibility which at that time I had not fully grasped, that possibility which would have seemed then, had I been fully aware of it, so disappointingly remote, yet so intriguing. But had I not acted upon this understanding, immediately, almost instinctively, whose earlier significance only now came fully home to me? I had. What had once been only a hint, a puzzling, intriguing thought which I had scarcely understood, had, in the thicket of circumstances, in the crisis of an instant, become a coercive modality of action, that path upon which one must boldly and irrevocably embark. I had required only the mechanism of my passage.
Given that, everything, luminously, like the pieces of a puzzle, had fallen into place. Nothing could follow me through the urts. Nothing, not even sleen.
I pressed on. Behind me I heard the intensification and multiplication of the squeals. The sleen is a tenacious tracker. In its way it is an admirable animal. It does not give up; it will not retreat. I turned about to look back. I could see three swarming locations in the pack, almost as though gigantic tawny insects infested the area, clambering about atop each other. I saw a sleen rearing up on its hind legs, its shoulders and head emergent from the hill of swarming, clambering urts. An urt was clutched lifeless in its jaws. It shook it savagely. Then it fell back under the urts, and I could no longer see it. I pushed on. Then I could not move further. Too many urts, seemingly intent upon me, crowded about me. I was ringed. Then it seemed I stood in a clear place, an open place, an empty place, a central place, almost like a dry, lonely pool, separated out from, isolated in the midst of, those tawny bodies. I did not move. Necks craned towards me, noses twitching and sniffing. I did not move.
Through the bodies an urt came pressing towards me. It was a large urt, darkly furred. It had one tusk broken at the side of its jaw. it was about four feet high at the shoulder, extremely large for this type of animal. It had a silvered snout. I recognized it. it was the urt Nim Nim had earlier identified as the leader of the pack. It began to sniff me, its nose moving and twitching.
"Tal, ugly brute," I said, softly.
I turned, keeping it in sight as it circled me, sniffing. Then it had completed its circuit. Those small, myopic eyes peered up at me.
"You are a stinking, ugly brute," I whispered.
It sniffed me again, beginning at my feet and then lifting its head until it seemed, again, to look me in the eyes. When it had lowered its head I had lowered the pelt I grasped, holding it about me, that it might be near its nose. When it had lifted its head I had raised the pelt, too, keeping it muchly between us. It did not seem muchly concerned with the head of the urt which was still, by the skin, attached to the pelt. Its responses in this situation I assumed, I trusted, I hoped, would be activated almost exclusively by smell, and not by the smell of blood, or human, but by the smell of the pelt, by the pack odor.
I breathed a sigh of relief. It had turned away. The animals now returned to their business. Again was the pack tranquil, save where some animals, here and there, fed on sleen.
I then began, again, to press through the urts, wading through the pack. Once, a few yards before me and to my right, I saw a small, elongated head rise up suddenly, peering at me. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it disappeared. Again, then, I could see only the animals. This was the only concrete sign I had to suggest that there might be urt people traveling with the pack. Players of Gor 281-284
Nim Nim darted into the pack.
"No!" I cried. It seemed almost as though he was wading in beasts. Then the animals seemed to draw apart about him and he was left standing as though in a dry pool, an empty place, an isolated, lonely place surrounded by tawny waters, waters which seemed somehow, inexplicably, to have drawn back about him, waters with eyes and teeth, ringing him. I saw that he did not understand what was going on.
"Come out!" I called to him. "Come out, while you can!"
Eyes regarded him on all sides. I saw those narrow, elongated snouts lifted towards him, the nostrils twitching and flaring.
Nim Nim began to utter reassuring noises to the urts. he began to whistle and hiss at them. In this fashion I supposed the urt people might speak with one another. Perhaps, too, some of these were signals used by the urts themselves. Then animals, I could see, were becoming more and more excited. They were now quivering. There was an almost feverish intensity in their reactions.
"Come out!" I called to him.
There was suddenly from one of the urts an angry, intense, shrill, high-pitched, hideous squeal. In an instant, almost like an electric shock, a movement seemed to course through the animals in the circle. Indeed, this tremorlike reaction, like a shock, seemed to move through the entire pack. Its passage’s swift route was actually visible in the animals, like a wave spreading along, and registered in, their backs and fur, in their sudden stillness, then in the sudden alertness of them, then in the quivering agitation which seemed to transform the entire pack, hitherto seemingly so tranquil, suddenly into a restless, roiling lake of ugly energy.
"Come out!" I screamed at him.
Another animal in the circle ringing Nim Nim now took up that angry, hideous, ear-splitting squeal, then another, and another. They began to quiver uncontrollably; their eyes bulged in their sockets; their fur erected, with a crackle of static electricity; their ears laid back, flattened, against the sides of their heads. Every animal in that vast pack was now oriented toward that location, that sound. Several of the other animals began to press eagerly toward the sound, some even crawling and scrambling over the backs of others. Every animal in that circle about Nim Nim had now taken up that horrifying squeal. It, too, was now being taken up by the entire pack. It reverberated in the area, striking against the nearby cliffs, the stones and outcroppings, rebounding, resounding, again and again in that natural bowl, torturing the ear, tearing and shocking the air, seeming as though it must frighten and terrify even the clouds themselves, which seemed to flee before it, perhaps even the sky, and a world. I suspected it could be heard in distant Brundisium.
I cupped my hands to my mouth. "Come out!" I screamed.
"I cannot!" he screamed.
The animals then charged, swarming in upon him. He tried to run between them, to reach the edge of the pack. I saw him fall twice, and each time get up. By the time he came near the edge of the back he had lost a foot and a hand. He could not now fall, however, because of the animals pressing about him. Several had their teeth fastened in his body, tearing at him, eating. By the time he was within a few feet of me he had lost half of his face. His head rolled wildly on his shoulders. I was not even sure he was still alive then until I saw his eyes. In fury I sprang towards him, tearing urts back and ;away from him. I caught some by the scruff of the neck and others by the hind legs and hurled them back into the pack. Tearing at him they seemed oblivious of me. I was among them. I caught one and thrusting my arms under its forelegs and clasping my hands together behind its neck, broke its neck. I threw it behind me. Other urts pressed forward, many of them squealing and trying to clamber over their fellows, in order to reach what was now left of Nim Nim. I then, my legs brushing against urts, backed from the pack. I saw, between pressing tawny bodies, parts of Nim Nim being dragged backwards, back into the pack. I now stood, breathing heavily, at the edge of the pack. I trembled. I threw up into the grass.
Clearly, as I now understood, the recognition and acceptance disposition of the pack was connected with smell. There must be, in effect, a pack odor. If something had this it would be accepted. If it lacked it, it would not be accepted. Indeed, the lack of the pack odor apparently triggered the attack response. the hideous squeal which was so terrifying, so shrill and piercing, which had such an effect on the other animals, was presumably something like a stranger-in-our-midst signal, a stranger-recognition signal, so to speak. It, too, presumably, was intimately involved in the pack’s general response, its defense response, or stranger-rejection response, so to speak. Clearly, it played a role in calling forth the attack response, or in transmitting its message to the other members of the pack.
I looked at the pack. It was now relatively calm. There was no sign of Nim Nim. Players of Gor – 279-281
