Venalse and Doryid left before dawn the next morning to walk out to the very tip of the ridge. From here they could see what the rising sun showed of the landscape upriver. The underman den was not hard to spot in the level light – dark holes in a low cliff just above the riverbank. They sucked their teeth and agreed that this side did not look promising. There was little ground between the river and the cliff and the entrances were almost certainly fortified. Attackers would be exposed from above and to the side and have the river at their backs. A back door sounded like a better prospect.

They arrived back to find an early parrot had delivered to the party a long and rambling account of underman movements in the night, none of it directly relevant at the moment. Rakt was inclined to discount much of it anyway, on the ground that parrots were untrustworthy birds, greatly inclined to falsehood.

The next move was to check to see if they could locate the other entrance. A further walk took Venalse and Doryid to a high point where they could survey the ground above the river. A thickly-wooded bluff on this side fell away to a narrow slot that marked a side stream. Beyond that, the ground rose steeply to a small plateau covered with thick scrub. One quite large area of ground below the rise was covered with boulders, and it was presumably here that the back entrance would be found. Doryid glumly observed that it might take a day or more just to search every cranny in one small part, more if the entrance was concealed.

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They returned to the campsite in a thoughtful mood, to find Kosohona conversing amicably with a large anteater. Chrys, Rakt and Grymwer sat nearby, uttering encouraging noises from time to time. The anteater, it turned out, had resided in the boulder patch until the undermen arrived. Although hampered by a severe lisp, it was able to convey the distress occasioned by the loss of its home and paint a moving picture of the many amenities and comforts the boulder patch had offered, now pitifully replaced by what it pictured as the anteater equivalent of a miserable hovel.

With patience, sympathetic encouragement and persistent gentle enquiry, Kosohona was able to extract reasonably precise information on the entrance to the underman caves. It was not as accurate as could be hoped, as the informant’s point of view never rose much above knee height and relied as much on smell as vision. Still, when they compared notes after the anteater had departed in search of lunch, they were confident that they could locate the underman back door without too much difficulty. They decided there was no point in delay - they would go in next morning.