Crisis On Doona by Anne McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye Page A

Mommy was stunned and the tiddler got mashed. Todd and Gypsy came round the corner, chasing the Mommy, Todd with his crossbow cocked. If Jilamey fell now, the Mommy would take him in one gulp.
    But Jilamey’s mount was an old campaigner, and once he felt his legs free, he danced backward as fast as he was able until he was stopped by the rails of the sty, where once again he reared, striking out with his front legs. The Mommy reared up, too, just as Jilamey, roaring commands at the rearing horse, slid off its rump, over the rails and straight into the sty, landing with a splat on his back in the muck.
    “Augh!” the youth cried, flailing his arms and legs. “Help me! I can’t get up!”
    Jilamey couldn’t see the danger he was still in, with the tiddler rousing from its mauling, and the Mommy equally interested in this convenient quarry. Todd shot a defensive charge under the Mommy’s tail: pain and noise alarmed it enough to divert its path so that it swerved into the tiddler. A second explosive burst in front of them, and both shot away, Todd in pursuit.
    Trying very hard not to laugh, Kelly swung off Calypso and, keeping a good hold on the reins, reached through the fence rails into the pen. It took an effort, but she got the young man to his unsteady feet and guided him back onto solid ground.
    “You’re out of the race, Master Landreau,” Kelly said, trying not to take a deep breath. The sour miasma of pig excrement made her gag. Calypso kept backing away from the stench, pulling Kelly’s arm nearly out of the socket. “Unless you can clean up real quick someplace.”
    As Jilamey, disgust and horror contorting his features, tried to scrape muck off his body, Kelly managed to catch his horse and then had trouble getting the horse to approach its erstwhile rider.
    “My snake? My second snake? What happened to it?” And to Kelly’s surprise, he started to run back to the place of his near demise, darting about, looking for the reptile.
    “That one’s long gone, Jilamey.”
    “But what’ll I do?” Jilamey looked so pathetic that Kelly nearly laughed aloud.
    “What we do is get you to the nearest blind and check you for cuts. You don’t want muck-infected wounds, I assure you.”
    “But I’ve got to get the second one,” Jilamey insisted.
    “Like that?”
    He tried to approach his horse, who kept backing away snorting.
    “It’s not far to the nearest blind, Jilamey. We’ll clean you up and maybe then the horse’ll let you on him.”
    “But they’re all going that way!” he said, dazedly looking back at the melee in the Boncyk yard. More riders were reinforcing Team One by that time, and the pigsties were well cordoned off from the snakes. “I must have my second snake.”
    “You’re lucky you got one!” she said, beginning to lose patience. “And we’ve got to clean you up. Then at least you can ride back to town.”
    The prospect of walking that far clearly won his attention. So, while Kelly on Calypso led his horse, they made their way to the nearest snake blind, which was not far away, but back in the woods away from the Boncyk farmyard. As she led him, she hoped that his stench would not entice a tiddler or Mommy to investigate his delightfulness. On the way, they met the backup riders who were going out to help Todd.
    “He took a fall,” Kelly said, over and over again, as her friends threw her puzzled glances. “Good hunting! Good hunting!” Wish I could finish it with you, she thought. Nerd-sitting is such a nuisance. Having to sit a Landreau was close to insult in her lexicon.
    Once the four spectators inside the tiny building got a whiff of Jilamey, there was no way he would be given room. Not even the heavily scented hunting box could overcome the odor clinging to the young man. There was, however, a barrel of rainwater just outside and it was the will of the many that Jilamey might have use of all of it. As there was no window on that side of the blind, he went outside and