Blood Brothers of Gor

Chapter 36 THE PIT

I scanned the skies.

"Hurry!" I ordered the girl.

"Yes, Master!" she said, cutting at the grass with a turf knife.

One covers the framework of branches and poles, over the pit, with plates of sod, with living grass. In this way, the grass does not discolor in a matter of hours. Sometimes one must wait for two or three days in the pit.

The pit is some ten feet in length, some five feet in width and some four feet in height. It must be long enough to accommodate the hobbling log, the hunter and, at times, the bait.

We heard a cry, as of a fleer. Cuwignaka had seen it first. "Down!" I said, seizing the girl, pulling her down into the high grass.

I cursed, looking upward. A solitary rider, one of the Kinyanpi, was taking his way northwestward.

This was an area in which they, too, did this sort of hunting.

"Get back to work," I told the girl.

"Yes, Master," she said.

The hobbling log had been dragged to this place, by two kaiila, in the night. The dirt from the pit is hidden under brush or scattered in the grass.

"It is finished," said the girl, putting the last plate of sod in place.

"Put the turf knife in the pit," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

She placed the turf knife in the pit, through the hold which we had left as its entrance. The turf knife is a wooden-bladed, saw-edged, paddlelike tool. It is used to cut and saw sod and, when the handle is held in the right hand and the right blade is supported with the left, it may be used, also, rather like a shovel, to move dirt.

I then tied one end of a rawhide rope about her right ankle. The rope was about fifteen feet in length.

"Get into the pit," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

I then followed her into the pit and, within it, we sat down, facing one another. The hobbling log was on my left and on her right. I looped the rope on her right ankle twice about the hobbling log. A much stouter rope was already tied about it, with its loose end, several feet in length, coiled atop it. Other ropes lay near us in the pit.

I looked up, through the opening in the pit. It was about eighteen inches square. A similar opening, somewhat smaller, was at the other end of the pit. It had its purpose. I could see the sky through the opening, and the clouds.

"We now wait," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.