A clattering commotion broke out ahead along the trail.  A trilling noise as of a cage full of parakeets all shrilling away and fluttering their wings against the bars of the cage mingled with sharper shrieks of rage and pain.

Seg put out a hand to halt Milsi and she walked on for a moment so that her stomach pressed against Seg's sinewy palm.  She was highly conscious of the contact; Seg did not notice.

He stared evilly along the trail, tensed ready for action and yet perfectly relaxed.  When he had sized up the situation out there his brain would tell his muscles what to do.  They would respond instantly.  That was the secret, albeit a simple one, of readiness for action.

Presently, as the uproar continued unabated, without gaining or losing volume, he padded cautiously forward.  He kept to the side of the trail, and he whispered so that no one more than two or three paces away could overhear.

"Watch for those dratted killer vines, Milsi."

"Oh - yes!"

The trail bent here as the monster who had made it failed to break through a tree all of five hundred seasons old.  With his side against the tree, Seg peered cautiously around, and along the farther extent of the trail.

What he saw filled him with astonishment.  Milsi joined him, and sucked in her breath, and said: "They are dinkus.  Savage.  They used poisoned darts."

"So I see."

The dinkus appeared to be caught up in a situation at once horrific and comic.  They were pygmies.  Each dinko stood about one meter tall, built like an apim, with the exception that from the cunningly fashioned shoulder blades swung four arms instead of two.  Each man was stark naked apart from a bark apron.

They did use poisoned darts, which they shot from blow pipes.

They were engaged in a fight between two different tribes, as was evident from the colors of the feathers they wore in their clay-matted hair, and their private fight had been interrupted by a toilca.  Therein lay the comic aspect of the horror.  To a dinko a toilca was a monstrous beast.

"I really do think this is no concern of ours, Milsi."

"You are right.  Yet they are so - and they cannot shoot their darts at the toilca's scales and hope to penetrate."

Looking out, Seg saw that the toilca had already ripped up or squashed half a dozen of the dinkus.