In The Hoon's Fur Past
With every story there is a beginning.
Besides all of the personal stories that I'll be doing of myself, my husband,
my mother, and others, Alvin suggested that I do a short story on the history
the Hoon.
Facts can always be gotten from a Library Unit. Stories, on the otherhand,
are more personalized, more stylistic, and therefore more likely to be
remembered.
Humans do not need to know more 'facts' about the Hoon.
They need to know more of 'our story.'
A factual rendition of the lifecycle of a hoon mentions that leg fur changes
color at about five years of age. An infant's fur is very dark, lightens
gradually with age, but shoots through to the pure white almost overnight.
That's what you get from reading from a Library Unit. Facts.
If you ask the same unit 'why?', the response tends to become vague and
clouded in mysticism.
Facts are freely given; but ask anything that leads to an opinion or a
political decision, and a Library Unit will start to clam up.
The Wolfings of Earth know the reason for this.
Library Units do not want to give out more than just the bare facts about the
pre-uplift status of any race of the Civilization of the Four Galaxies.
The Guthatsa made no radical changes to hoon physiology.
Speech and higher reasoning, yes, to join Galactic Civilization.
And they made the male's throat sac much more vibrant.
Oh did they make it vi....
(Hrrmmm.....ahh....yes. Thank you very much Guthatsa / -ul Hoon, but there's
no need to go into too much detail about that in _this_ chapter.)
They never had anything to do with the changing color of our leg fur.
Two hundred and eighty seven thousand years ago, the Guthatsa found
proto-hoon living in the mountain vales of our planet.
What you humans would have called Alpine Vales.
Short fairly cool summers and long hard winters.
We Hoon are built for a colder climate than the tribes of Earthclan.
Our long legs and smaller feet were designed to punch through crusted over
snow in order to reach a solid footing.
Toe hooks can dig into ice.
Rather than merely being a sexual trait, there's been some revisionist
thought as to the development of the throat sac. Nothing, mind you, that can be
supported from Library research, and the Guthatsa will politly decline to discuss
any details of pre Uplift hoonish life.
In a complete turnabout, I guess you could say that some hoons are having "a
right down regular 'Wolfling thought.'
(Do not, however, say that outloud to just any hoon. First find out if they
have ever been sailing...)
In traversing the snowy valleys, females stayed to the rear and carried the
very young in their arms. The males went ahead to scout out the safe path. Safe
from preditors, safe from thin ice, deep snow, and avalanches.
The boom from a throat sac developed as a communal chant to bring down unsafe
snow and ice.
Compared to human children, hoon infants are already bean sprouts. Even
today, a surprised and startled hoon infant is going to instinctively tuck itself
into a fetal position.
But there is just too much there to completely tuck. The toes tend to stick
out from the butt, and there really isn't any place for the long neck and head
to tuck.
The head and neck of a baby hoon weigh much more than its lower legs.
So if in an accident or bad storm the female drops her infant, it's highly
probable that that baby will land head first.
And legs with darker fur are much easier to find in the snow than if they
were white like an adult's legs.
Once they are old enough to walk by themselves, they then need the same
adult's protective colorization. In a mother's arms, the darker color is hidden by
the mother's white scales and arm hair.
The changing color of leg fur has nothing to do with our sapience.
If I have correctly interpreted the rules to Anglic bad punning, I am now
permitted to say that our changing fur color is part of our pre Uplift "leg a
see."
---Dor-hinuf
William Taylor
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Ready to put up, Steve.
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