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There was, I could see, a pair of sleen in one case, and two
larls in another pair of cases, with a sliding partition between them. I saw one
humanoid creature, a male with a receding forehead and excessively hairy face
and body, bounding about in one case, racing along and leaping with his feet
against the wall and then with the momentum established dashing along the next
wall of the case and then dropping to the floor to repeat again this peculiar
circuit.
In the very low case, on the floor of which apparently grew real grass, I saw a
pair of shaggy, long-horned bosk grazing, and in the same case but in a
different corner was a small head, no more than five adult animals, a proud male
and four does, of tabuk, the single-horned, golden Gorean antelope. When one of
the does moved I saw that moving beside her with dainty steps were two young
tabuk, the first I had ever seen, for the young of tabuk seldom venture far from
the shaded, leafy bowers of their birth in the tangled Ka-la-na thickets of Gor.
Their single horns were little more than velvety stubs on their foreheads and I
saw that their hide, unlike that of the adults, was a mottled yellow and brown.
When one of the attendant Muls happened to pass near the case the two little
tabuk instantly froze, becoming almost invisible, and the mother, her bright
golden pelt gleaming, began to prance away from them, wile the angry male
lowered his head against the Mul and trotted in a threatening manner to the
plastic barrier.
There were several other creatures in the cases but I am not sure of their
classification. I could, however, recognize a row of brown varts, clinging
upside down like large matted fists of teeth and fur and leather on the heavy,
bare, scarred branch in their case. I saw bones, perhaps human bones, in the
bottom of their case.
There was a huge, apparently flightless bird stalking about in another case.
From its beak I judged it to be carnivorous.
In another case, somnolent and swollen, I saw a rare golden hith, a Gorean
python whose body , even when unfed, it would be difficult for a full-grown man
to encircle with his arms.
In none of the cases did I spy a tarn, on of the great, predatory saddle birds
of Gor, perhaps because they do not thrive well in captivity. To live a tarn
must fly, high, far and often. A Gorean saying is that they are brothers of the
wind, and how could one expect such a creature to survive confinement? Like its
brother the wind when the tarn is not free it has no choice but to die.
Priest-Kings
page 191
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