Cirocco didn’t protest; it sounded good to her, though she could never have suggested it. She walked downstream, often passing the marks Gaby had made. At one point she had to leave the sandy shore and go up onto the grass to avoid a large pile of boulders. When she reached the grass she saw a series of oval brown spots spaced like footprints. She knelt and touched them. They were dry and brittle just like the grass where she had slept. “I’ve found part of your trail,” she told Gaby. “Your feet couldn’t have touched the grass more than a second, and yet something in your body killed it.” “I saw the same thing when I woke up,” Gaby said. “What do you think of it?” “I think we secrete something that’s poison to the grass. If that’s true, we might not smell very good to the kind of large animals that might normally take an interest in us.” “That’s good news.” “The bad part is that it might mean we have very different sorts of biochemicals. That’s not so good for eating.”
