Among the A-ma-soo-kit, the Trees of Truth, any spoken word became fact. The idle improvisations of a father diverting his little one had taken shape, flesh, life.
The one who held him was the oldest, with a mat of buckskin beard turning gray. Some of his myriad teeth were broken. This captor grunted to the younger black-beard and the terrible woman-mountain with the braids. The dark giant drew from his girdle-thong a stone knife as long as a scythe, with which he began to whittle.
First he uprooted a cedar sapling, and pared away its branches with powerful slashing digs of his blade. Then he sharpened the tip, like a pencil. Beside the trail lay a fallen trunk of pine, dead and beginning to rot. Setting down his pole, the young giant caught this log in his huge hands and with a single humping of his muscles wrenched it in two lengthwise. Kneeling, he set the sharpened point of cedar upon the exposed inside of one slab, and began twirling the stake briskly between his palms.
Thus spun, the point drilled a hole. Wood meal crawled out. It smoked from the friction, glowed. The giantess, with a fistful of shredded bark, evoked a flame that greatened and put forth smudge—fire made by rubbing sticks. Fire for what?
Beneath big skillful hands the fuel quickly caught. The flames grew and climbed. The grizzled monster that held Clay nodded his big bushy head in approval. It was a cooking fire.
His huge captor lifted him. The cedar point turned toward his stomach. The other two giants watched with relish, and the tongue of the giantess, like a red banner, came into view to moisten her lips.
This, Clay thought with the corner of his brain kept sensible, was an end that nobody would ever believe. He would never be seen again. Helen, back at the cabin, would tell a story that would not make sense. Even if searchers found his bones, stripped and crushed—
“You let my Daddy alone!” commanded someone close at hand.
The voice was young, shrill and indignant. Clay bracing himself to feel the crushing impalement of the cedar stake, knew that voice, and in despair counted his sacrifice as useless—Helen hadn’t hidden, hadn’t escaped. She had followed his abhorrent captors, was coming among them.
“Let him alone,” she was repeating, “or I’ll—” There was deadly, confident menace in her little-girl voice.
The grizzled giant lowered both his hands, with the spit in one and Clay in the other.
His huge single eyes widened and protruded grossly. The firelight made it gleam like a very nasty jewel. The fulvid tangle of beard parted, the open mouth writhed over the rows of broken fangs.
Clay managed to turn his head as he hung in the prisoning grip.
He had never realized how small Helen was, how frail. She seemed barely as long as any one of the great bare feet among which she had planted herself. Her arms were set akimbo, her head flung back so that the hood drooped from it, her eyes glittered. So Clay had seen her often before when her young temper was up. Only one thing was really strange about Helen.
In a corner of her mouth, clamped tight between her six-year molars, rode the English briar pipe he had dropped. Above and around Helen’s ruffled hair whirled a wreath of tobacco smoke. Even as he saw all this, she puffed out a bigger, bluer cloud.
“Why did you—” Clay tried to begin, but no words came. He was done for, unable to move or speak. Helen looked, not at him, but at the giants.
“I guess I’ll show you!” she squealed at the three staring hulks, just as she might
