with

knees; and the lortel, after catching a few bugs in the grass and eating them, had settled down on her shoulder and dozed off too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s still three hours till Big Moonrise, and it’s bound to be some time before then. Now you’ve found a waterhole, we’ll just stay here together and wait. The one thing to remember is not to let yourself start getting excited about them.”
The pony stood huge and chunky beside her, its forefeet on the edge of the hollow, staring down. Muddy water trickled from its knobby flanks. It had brought the warm mud-smells of a summer pond back with it to hang in a cloud about them.
There was vague, dark, continuous motion at the bottom of the hollow. A barely noticeable stirring in the single big pool of darkness that filled it.
“If I were alone,” the pony said, “I’d get out of here! I know when I ought to be scared. But you’ve taken psychological control of my reactions, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Grandma. “It’ll be easier for me, though, if you help along as much as you can. There’s really no danger until their transmitter has come through.”
“Unless,” said the pony, “they’ve worked out some brand-new tricks in the past few hundred years.”
“There’s that,” Grandma admitted. “But they’ve never tried changing their tricks on us yet. If it were us doing the attacking, we’d vary our methods each time, as much as we could. But the Halpa don’t seem to think just like we do about anything. They wouldn’t still be so careful if they didn’t realize they were very vulnerable at this point.”
“I hope they’re right about that!” the pony said briefly.
Its head moved then, following the motion of something that sailed flutteringly out of the depths of the hollow, circled along its far rim, and descended again. The inhabitants of Treebel had a much deeper range of dark-vision than Grandma Wannattel, but she was also aware of that shape.
“They’re not much to look at,” the pony remarked. “Like a big, dark rag of leather, mostly.”
“Their physical structure is believed to be quite simple,” Grandma agreed slowly. The pony was tensing up again, and it was best to go on talking to it, about almost anything at all. That always helped, i