: Quinquepedalian by Anthony Piers Finlay Virgil Illustrator -

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Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 16, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1963

QUINQUEPEDALIAN

Illustrated by FINLAY

It lay there, an indentation in the soil, two inches deep and nine feet in diameter. It was flat, it was smooth, and the sand and the dirt were twined with rotted leaves and stems in a marbled pattern. The edge, cut sharp and clean, exposed a miniature stratum leading up to the unpressed forest floor, and spoke of the weight that had stood on that spot, molding the earth into the shape of its fundament.

It was the mark of a foot, or a hoof, or whatever it is that touched the ground when an animal ambulates. One print--

Charles Tinnerman shook his head somberly. A single print could have been a freak of nature. This was one of many: a definite trail. They were spaced twenty or thirty feet apart, huge and level; ridges of spadiceous earth narrowed toward the center of each, rounded and smooth, as though squirted liquidly up between half-yard toes. Some were broken, toppled worms lying skew, skuffed when the hoof moved on.

Around the spoor rose the forest, in Gargantuan splendor; each trunk ascending gauntly into a mass of foliage so high and solid that the ground was cast into an almost nocturnal shadow.

At dusk the three men halted. "We could set up an arc," Tinnerman said, reaching behind to pat his harness.

Don Abel grunted negatively. "Use a light, and everything on the planet will know where we are. We don't want the thing that made that," he gestured toward the trail, "to start hunting us."

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