Fear that man

hilt, and slashed downard.
        The spider reared.
        The stream of web fluid ceased abruptly, and the Beast wobbled backward down the inclined silken plane, throbbing its voice like a thousand flutes gone sour. It staggered sideways like a drunk. I wanted to shout that it might try to roll over on her, but my mouth was blocked with fast-drying web, and I could not move my arms to clear it.
        She pulled the knife out, found the second eye with it. The spider flailed, ran at the cliffs, found it too much trouble to climb out and still bear the pain that was wracking it. Blindly, it stumbled from one cliff to the other, seeking some pathway in the darkness and finding none. Then it rolled.
        “Lotus!” I screamed. But it came out a choked, reverberating whisper, strained through the matting on my lips.
        But she was flying again, her wings beating furiously until they had taken her high enough to catch the low breezes. They fluffed out then, carried her back and forth across the chasm, letting her watch the spider.
        It died. Slowly, and with lots of kicking. Once I was sure it was going to blunder onto the web and fall in on Crazy and me, but it never did. When it was down for good, Lotus drifted in to the web, settled very gently at its edge. “Andy! Crazy!”
        I tried to call out. The result was a low-key vibration in the web.
        “I hear you! I’ll get you out.”
        I blessed her elongated ears. A moment later, she began hacking into the silken fiber with her knife. In time, she reached me, cut away the fuzz that bound my arms and closed my mouth. Together, we removed Crazy, ready for the worst.
        But it wasn’t that bad at all. He was still unconscious, but the webbing had matted over the grub-spine wound, putting a stop to the blood that had been fountaining from it.
        “We’ll have to take him back,” I said.
        “The cameras?”
        “We were only setting up the second one.”
        “You finish.”
        “I can’t just-”
        “You finish,” she insisted. “I checked ahead. Follow the main trail for half a mile, and you’ll cross six major intersections. That should give us enough coverage to see if the Beast uses these trails regularly. If you bring the floater here first, I can get to the medikit and take care of Crazy.”
        “He may be-”
        “He’ll be okay. There’re enough supplies in the floater to fix him up without any trouble.”
        She was a good nurse; I knew that from wounds of my own she had bound. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Actually, it was four minutes, but when I settled the floater down next to the pieces of web, she already had Crazy uncovered and clean of every fragment of the stuff. I took the cameras, slung them over my shoulders, and set out-lugging what two were meant to carry-keeping my gun drawn and an eye out for hairy trees…
        
        Three hours later, I stumbled back, worn out and showing it. Lotus and Crazy were sitting there laughing about something. “Nice way to get out of work,” I said, standing over them.
        Crazy looked up and whinnied that silly whinny of his. “You can have this blasted arm if you want. I’d rather have gone setting the cameras than nursing this.”
        “A likely story.”
        “We’d better be getting back,” Lotus said. “Looks like a storm, and I don’t want to see what might come tramping around in the rain.”
        It was heavy rain that gave Fanner II’s vampire plants their most voracious appetites.
        “Okay. Can you walk, Crazy?”
        “I can manage.”
        
         One day, the men start looking like animals to you. Noses metamorphose into snouts. Eyes grow beadier. Ears suddenly become tufted with hair. Fingernails take on the appearance of claws. And you realize you are allowed to shoot animals: it is within you to shoot animals, though men are off limits. You go to oil your guns… But you also realize you are just imagining them as animals so that you will be able to shoot them and revenge your mother-and maybe wipe out that entire chapter of your life. Deep down, you fear that you want to spill the rich blood of men-spill it and drink it…
        I must have been moaning in my sleep. It was an old and often felt dream, recurring through all the years that I could remember. I say that I must have been muttering, for when I slipped from the dream to the dark reality of