The World That Couldn't Be (Sci-Fi Classic). Clifford D. Simak

      Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.

      Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face.

      "No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha."

      "The hell I don't," said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.

      He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.

      It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.

      "Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha."

      "I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left."

      * * * * *

      Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.

      "It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there...."

      "Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around."

      "Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the Cytha."

      "If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out. "If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what happens to you?"

      "We will grow the corn ourselves."

      "That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that Cytha."

      "But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it."

      Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.

      It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless.

      "Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat."

      "Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the vua, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine—need it very badly. And what is more, out there—" he swept his arm toward the sky—"out there they pay very much for it."

      "But, mister...."

      "I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm."

      "No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation.

      "You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly.

      * * * * *

      He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.

      Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants.

      He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village.

      Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.

      He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothes-line, limp in the breathless morning.

      Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do.

      Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.

      Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook.

      Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.

      Shotwell reached for a towel.

      "What's going on?" he asked.

      "Cytha got into the field."

      "Cytha?"

      "A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of vua."