Demetrian Biology

Poul Anderson's The Avatar is a richer work than we had remembered but this is always the case. Anderson invests care and attention in minute details that his readers forgot unless they reread and analyze a lot. The previous post should have included data that were becoming too involved so have been held over until now:

lodix, the clover-like Demetrian ground cover, is blue-green and trilobate;

petalled arrowhead and sunbloom grow among the lodix;

there are also coppices of native trees - redlance (tall) and daphne (supple);

swarming insectoids are flamewings (gorgeously coloured), hopshrubs (which leap) and humbugs (which are many);

bright frailie cruise;

a minstrel warbles from a branch;

bucaeros swoop;

a drague hovers (yet another of our hovering predators);

what sound like birds are hypersauroids, the only kind of Demetrian vertebrate;

a cooling south breeze carries half-familiar pungencies;

across the road is pasture for imported cattle that have become fantastically red and also imported barley;

Caitlin plucks moonberries, pearl apples and dulcifruct which, although edible, lack some vitamins and amino acids;

she walks from the bus at Freidorp to Trollberg on a ridge ahead with the Phaecian snowpeaks and Mount Lorn beyond;

Caitlin meets a garm, a gray, tiger-sized carnivore which never attacks Terrestrial animals, disliking their scent;

the Upland Folkmeet has declared garms protected;

neither fears the other.

More details than I had expected when I began to summarize them.