The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

rest. Those that tried to get out got jellied; that was the artistic part, waiting at the rat-holes for the little rats to come out, letting them think they’d made it, and then just frying them from the feet up so they made torches. That green fur sizzled like crazy.
    It actually wasn’t much more exciting than hunting real rats, which were about the only wild animals left on Mother Earth, but there was more thrill to it; the creechies were a lot bigger than rats, and you knew they could fight back, though this time they didn’t. In fact some of them even lay down instead of running away, just lay there on their backs with their eyes shut. It was sickening. The other fellows thought so too, and one of them actually got sick and vomited after he’d burned up one of the lying-down ones.
    Hard up as the men were, they didn’t leave even oneof the females alive to rape. They had all agreed with Davidson beforehand that it was too damn near perversity. Homosexuality was with other humans, it was normal. These things might be built like human women but they weren’t human, and it was better to get your kicks from killing them, and stay
clean
. That had made good sense to all of them, and they stuck to it.
    Every one of them kept his trap shut back at camp, no boasting even to their buddies. They were sound men. Not a word of the expedition got to Muhamed’s ears. So far as old Moo knew, all his men were good little boys just sawing up logs and keeping away from creechies, yes sir; and he could go on believing that until D-Day came.
    For the creechies would attack. Somewhere. Here, or one of the camps on King Island, or Central. Davidson knew that. He was the only officer in the entire colony that did know it. No credit due, he just happened to know he was right. Nobody else had believed him, except these men here whom he’d had time to convince. But the others would all see, sooner or later, that he was right.
    And he was right.

FIVE
     
    It had been a shock, meeting selver face to face. As he flew back to Central from the foothill village, Lyubov tried to decide why it had been a shock, to analyze out the nerve that had jumped. For after all one isn’t usually terrified by a chance meeting with a good friend.
    It hadn’t been easy to get the headwoman to invite him. Tuntar had been his main locus of study all summer; he had several excellent informants there and was on good terms with the Lodge and with the headwoman, who had let him observe and participate in the communityfreely. Wangling an actual invitation out of her, via some of the ex-serfs still in the area, had taken a long time, but at last she had complied, giving him, according to the new directives, a genuine ‘occasion arranged by the Athsheans.’ His own conscience, rather than the Colonel, had insisted on this. Dongh wanted him to go. He was worried about the Creechie Threat. He told Lyubov to size them up, to ‘see how they’re reacting now that we’re leaving them strictly alone.’ He hoped for reassurance. Lyubov couldn’t decide whether the report he’d be turning in would reassure Colonel Dongh, or not.
    For ten miles out of Central, the plain had been logged and the stumps had all rotted away; it was now a great dull flat of fiberweed, hairy gray in the rain. Under those hirsute leaves the seedling shrubs got their first growth, the sumacs, dwarf aspens, and salviforms which, grown, would in turn protect the seedling trees. Left alone, in this even, rainy climate, this area might reforest itself within thirty years and reattain the full climax forest within a hundred. Left alone.
    Suddenly the forest began again, in space not time: under the helicopter the infinitely various green of leaves covered the slow swells and foldings of the hills of North Sornol.
    Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov had never walked among wild trees at all, never seen a wood largerthan a city block. At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest,