"We don’t", said Lop. "Oh, we can carry the liver and the colts. And of course his balls. But the other stuff is like Stuhhsik pudding. We’ll get the kits and a knife and eat it here."

And so we did.

Lop was right. The bloody mess that came out of the bandul cunts was what bliss would taste like if you could eat it. Lop inspected the two unborn colts lying furthest away from the grove and pronounced them "too far along" for ideal eating. They’d be good enough, he declared, if it weren’t for what was better. The dead mare had only half thrown her colt. It was very young, hardly as big as Tim and Mickey. Lop was purring and licking his whiskers at the idea of eating it. I was astonished when he got down behind her and reached into her cunt. Into her cunt. He was up to the arm-pit, grunting and churning, and after a couple of tries managed to pull it out of her. And a couple of big, puddingy hunks of something soft and bloody. He said something about there being more in there but he couldn’t get at it. (That’s some cunt!)

"Here", he said, holding out his arm to the kits. "Want a treat? Lick this off."

I was horrified, but after a few tentative laps, the boys were licking away like they hadn’t eaten in days. Well, they hardly had. Lop sat there holding his arm away from his side. The kits licked and licked and licked at the fur. I thought their little tongues would drop out.

Lop was looking at me with the funniest expression. He wrinkled his nose.

"It tickles", he explained. It was cute. At the same time, it gave me a slightly uneasy feeling, the sight of two youngsters eagerly licking that striped arm, heavy with muscle, covered with gouts of something bloody and fatty that came out of a giant cunt.

As for the colt, Lop was right about that, too. Even the kits with their tiny teeth ate it skin, bone, and all. The taste was sweet. And delicate. The others weren’t the same, we had to cut them up, later, and roast them. But the contrast between roast bandul colt and roast monux was impressive. (Not that I have any complaint about monux. That meal with Lop, the first hot food I’d had in months, was something I’ll never forget. For more than one reason.)

We weren’t exactly starving, though you can’t say any of us had been well-fed for months, and it had been a hard couple of days. We all overate outrageously. When we couldn’t swallow any more, we went back to the edge of the grove. Crawled back, more accurately. A true feast. We all fell asleep. Right there. Lop and I were so stuffed that I think for the first time since we’d met we lay down together without either one of us thinking about a link. Or thinking about anything. Thought was impossible.

Hours later, we woke up to the screech of vultures. They were busy on the other baby ponies, and on the bodies of the two bandul.

"Quick!" said Lop, jumping to his feet and grabbing the knife. The two of us ran out, waving our arms and yelling. "Uh-oh", said Lop, heading for the stallion. "Looks like they got his–no–hey, look! Everything’s fine", and he knelt down by the mountainous rump and cut off the animals balls. Scrotum and all, not like the way he’d done the monux’s. ("Cooking pouch", he explained. "Delicious. You sure you’ve never had bandul nuts?") Then we went to the mare and slit open her belly. Her liver was a meter long and three quarters of a meter through and weighed more than we could carry. Or could eat. Lop cut it roughly in half. Not an easy thing with that little knife.

"Oh, well", he said, with a sigh, looking down at the butchered bandul corpse with a resigned air. "Nothing for it. Even if we could figure out how to get it all back to camp, it would spoil before we could eat it all. So much the better for the vultures." So off we went, Lop lugging the liver and me with the two colts.

Well, Lop was right about the balls, too. He tied the cut end of the scrotum with a strip of hhtus vine and boiled it for about an hour and a half. When he slit open the "cooking pouch" the contents were the opposite of the crunchy monux nuts we’d eaten raw. Creamy and delicious. A rich, musky flavor unlike anything I’d ever tasted. The liver we cut in chunks, and roasted on sticks. Lop showed us how to get a crust on the outside. Even without seasoning it was wonderful. The kits didn’t care for the bandul nuts (kits usually don’t, Lop remarked), but they ate liver until they couldn’t walk. And for more solid fare, if only slightly more solid, we roasted strips of thrown coltling on sticks.

There were other good things to eat in that stand of trees, and the liver lasted for two days of feasting before it started to go bad. So we were happy to just hang around, eat, talk, snooze. And link. And link. And link.

I’d always heard that rupellids were a hot-blooded bunch. If so, it was catching. I’ve never felt so hungry for bliss in my whole life. Hot to feel his black in me. Hot to feel mine in him. And unable to decide which I wanted more. It was like just after being opened, only better. Much better.

My butthole wasn’t aching much any more. It was getting used to him, I guessed. I regretted it a little. There was something right about the feeling that he was almost too much for me. It fit somehow with the rest of that rugged body. But the feeling of being disemboweled never changed, the feeling that my belly would literally explode if his nuts didn’t snap. I sometimes wonder if it was anything like wlkwim felt when they were pregnant with twins.

It was about that time, maybe a little later, when I tumbled to something. Lop’s hkshihh It was like a drug. Like sishemu in bloom. One whiff of it, and I was right down at, well, his animal level. A beast with balls and something hard and horny. A good noseful of his hkshihh and all I could think about was a tail-hole stretched to the limit by a certain man’s black, its deeply hidden point pulling wave after wave of beauty into me until his balls snapped SkhtuS into me and the bliss from it started creeping through my whole body. And at the exact same time my mind would be full of thoughts of his third hand and my black, and feeling more and more beautiful with every pull, rising steadily to the dizzying beauty of my balls emptying themselves. And "empty" it was.

Lop’s husky purring. His mumbled endearments. It was a drug. I was helpless. Literally. It wasn’t exactly that I was choosing to be linked–fucked–by a man I’d never seen before a few weeks ago. I suppose my hkshihh got Drushka all excited and vice versa. But nothing like this.

Both of us were deep red from belly-button to ankles. And if my muzzle was as red as Lop’s, there wasn’t much difference between my face and my cock-sheath.

One morning, while we were in the bandul grove, Lop did something extraordinary. For the first time, I mean.

I woke up with the sun in my face and Lop’s arms around me. Nothing new about either thing. We were on our sides. Lop was hugging me from behind and licking me and purring. I could feel one of his hands on my belly, just above my sheath. He was holding me, pressing my backside against his body. I felt his tail slither between my legs, and loop around my balls. It felt so beautiful. I arched my back and shivered with happiness. He was holding me real hard. I felt the tail tighten. Tighten and sort of increase the grip. He was really holding me.

And he was talking into my ear. He was purring so hard I could barely hear the words. But it was something about how my black was his black and I wanted his black and I was going to get his black and he was going to drive my seed. Like a hammer, or some such thing.

I couldn’t do anything but lie there, feeling so beautiful. He was holding me tight. Of course I started to smell my hkshihh, and I could scent his, too. I was happily thinking about who would be linking to who in the next few minutes, since linking was inevitable.

"O-h-h-h, Perry", I heard him say, in a raspy voice, just as the most amazing thing happened. He didn’t move. He was holding me too tight for either one of us to move. But–I felt his black going into my tail-hole! It went in real fast, too. It felt so different. I felt my mane stand on end. I yelped. Not that it ached. It simply hurt. No. It felt beautiful, so beautiful. The ache came a moment later. I was opened so long ago I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was like. But I remember thinking, when Lop linked me that morning, that he was opening me.

The feeling was so startling I didn’t know what had happened. Then it came to me: he was holding me so that when he shot his black, it went straight out of its sheath into my butt!

He didn’t start humping right away. For one thing, thanks to the grip his tail had on them, he’d have ripped my eggs off if he’d even tried to move his pelvis. He lay still, for a little bit, breathing deeply and whispering, through the deafening purrs, "Feel me? Feel me in you? Feel my drill, stud? Hot stud. Hot asshole–Oh, man–"

He relaxed his hold on my nuts. Then I felt his tail snake around my thigh. And he started to pull. It felt strange. I could feel his cock so clearly, or something. It was beautiful. My nuts snapped before his did. I was juicing and he was purring "Oh, kitten", and "Empty those nuts", and similar stuff. When his own nuts snapped I don’t know which of us was closer to dying from happiness.

As often as I’ve felt Lop’s hard black go shooting out of his sheath straight into my tail hole, that way, I’ve never forgotten the first time. Like you never really forget being opened. Or forget your first cunt. Or your first wlkatar.

I liked doing the same thing to Lop, too. Liked it well enough–I guess I really prefer pegging his ass the usual way. Maybe the main thing about that "instant fuck" thing–that’s what Lop called it–is his beautiful reaction. Groaning, moaning, and purring like his head will come right off. When you’re holding tight to a big hunk of a cat from behind and letting your black slam into him all by itself, and his body turning as hard as a tree-trunk while this deep groan comes out of him. Well. It’s a thrill all around. I admit that.

But you give up a lot, too. The look on that face as he feels my black easing into him, for example. The only thing more wonderful is his face as I take the cock he gives me. Teeth bared, ears down, a snarl almost. Like he’s at the end of his rope.

Lop and I debated, sometimes, what made the sheath-to-ass-fuck feel so different. It wasn’t just the suddenness. You wouldn’t normally bone a guy that abruptly, true, but that didn’t seem to be the whole story. In the end, we decided it was probably because there was no time for the SkhtuS to collect at the tip of the black, so that the only lubricant was the hkshihh. There’s quite a bit more pull, compared to the slickness of SkhtuS.

Lop told me that one of their wives had picked up the trick at a wlkatar, and talked about it. He and his co-mates did it with the women from time to time. Someone–Lop thought it was himself–got the idea of trying it to link with a co-mate. Lop was the only one who liked it, though. Taking the black that way, that is. His co-mates didn’t mind fucking cunt that way, but definitely preferred to show black before linking one another.

"It fits", he said, fixing a crooked, scarred grin on me. "For a green-eyes. One more thing I should have noticed."

We wandered for perhaps two more months and a bit, camping sometimes and then being on the move for several days at a time. The kits were a source of pleasure and comfort. When I was discouraged–especially before I hooked up with Lop–the little ones were a struggle and a strain, but they were so sweet and besides they gave me reason to go on. But with two of us, it was different. Oh, and another thing that was different: the short-whiskers totally adored Lop. Whatever the explanation, they were lively and droll, and their unfiltered emotions were refreshing.

To call Lop a "source of pleasure and comfort" would be just vapid. It was wonderful to go to sleep in his arms. It was even more wonderful to wake up in them. Not to mention waking up to the beautiful feelings of someone licking your tits or balls.

He stuck by his twisted notion of being a sort of wlkwy, but in good rupellid style he must have pegged me twice for every time I "fucked" him, and let me tell you, I was getting me a whole lot of fucking. All the fucking I could handle. He tried to claim that it was part of his "green" nature to take black in his mouth. I mean, actually make me snap that way, and then eat my juice. Maybe rupellids do that. I never had anybody, wlko or wlkwy, do that to me. It had never crossed my mind you could do anything like that. Or want to. Until I met Lop. It’s funny what you can learn to like. I can’t imagine that he got a bigger kick out of than I did. Both ways, I mean.

Nothing feels like a mouthful of black. Or a mouthful of SkhtuS when it comes to that.

Finally, when several weeks had gone by when we hadn’t smelled smoke, even faintly, we agreed it made sense to think about a permanent site.

"All we have to do is find water", Lop said. "However we do that."

"Oh! Yes!", I responded. "I’m about to go crazy!"

Lop was a little better at smelling water than I was, but as it turned out we didn’t need his refined senses. One day there was a shift in the wind, and the smell of water to the southwest was so strong that it nearly knocked us off our feet. We hiked over a low rise, and there was this lake! Huge. Even from where we were, the far shore wasn’t visible. I guessed we were about a hundred meters above the water, on a rocky cliff. Way down below there was a little bay. A pretty thing. It appeared to be empty, but from where we were, it looked like a prime family site. It took some hiking to get to it. Not the distance, exactly, but the picking our way along and backtracking when it became clear that we couldn’t go any further that way.

It wasn’t just that both of us were desperate for water. In plain fact the little bay and its beaches and cliffs was prime real estate. The lake was a big one. It had a protected feel to it. Because of the high ground, you couldn’t see far up and down the shore, which suited us fine.

Lop was carrying Tim when we finally got to the water’s edge. Water! Big water! The only time I’d ever felt so excited, I think, was when Druska’s and my first twins were born. My mane bristled as I watched Lop wade through the tall grass to the edge of the water, look back at me with an expression of such open delight on his face that he looked like a boy, and spin into the water. Yes, spin. He was still holding onto Tim, and when he dove, he somehow rotated his body so that his shoulders planed into the water. Tim squeaked with terror and delight. He was sitting on Lop’s chest, much more out of the water than in it, as Lop swam around on his back. Whooping and calling out insults.

"Hey! Monux-bait! Wash the shit out of your tail! C’mon in, stud", he called. "It’s great!"

I wasn’t up for rupellid stunts, so I waded in with Mickey on my shoulder.

It was wonderful. I wasn’t in any hurry. I wanted to savor the feel of the water as the level rose up my legs. We hadn’t seen water more than a few dozen centimeters deep in months. Mickey was squirming and fussing. When I was up to my knees I put him in the water and he splashed around happily. By now, Tim had climbed off his "raft" and paddled over to Tim and the two of them were giggling and playing, thrashing sometimes but sometimes showing an eel-like agility. I was relieved. I’d worried they might have–I don’t know–gone funny, somehow, being away from water for so long, at such an age.

"You swim like a fish", Lop said, as I stroked over to him. He splashed water in my face. I pushed his head under. He threw himself on me with such force that I wheezed and swallowed water and starting coughing, but I got my footing and pulled up his ankles, which made his head sink before he struggled free, and he started coughing. The two of us were laughing and squealing like little blue-eyes.

Lop jumped me again, and at about the same instant I felt Lop’s tail take my balls, I glimpsed his black.

Of course, even before he growled "fuck me" I got a whiff of you know what. I was black, and all I could even think about was building a fire in Lop that would never go out.

We fucked. First fuck at our new home. And our first sex in water. We used to do that all the time–well, link of course, not fuck–when Drushka and I were young. I took Lop from behind. The water wasn’t all that deep where we were. The bottom was sandy and firm. The roots of our tails were just under the surface when we were standing up.

I surprised myself. There was actually some blood on his chest. I’d gotten through his fur to his skin in my excitement. And he told me he’d wondered if I’d tear his nuts off, my tail was looped so tight around them. He told me all that later, though. He didn’t say anything about it at the time. Not at all. At the time it was all "Oh kitten, Oh stud, Oh fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!" and reaching back to hold my butt with his hands, pressing me into his body so hard I was afraid he’d tear my buttocks off with his claws.

I just about died when my nuts snapped. And then, strangely, my black was like Lop’s. I mean, it didn’t slip! I was so excited. I stood there behind him, arms around him, tail around his nuts between our legs. His tail was around my thigh. (Maybe I would have ripped his balls off if I’d have been free to, well, fuck him as hard as I wished.) He was standing very still, lost in bliss I guess. I was about to ask the hunk if he’d like to return the favor with a wad of his SkhtuS, when I peeked around his arm and saw his front. His black was slipping. Only the end of his sheath was out of the water, but I could see his belly and sheath and there were globs of SkhtuS floating in the water by his belly. I slid a hand down his front and immediately encountered a big, sticky-slick place on his fur. That wasn’t water. He’d juiced. Flat-out juiced. He’d filled my hole with his black just that morning, which is maybe why I was so hot. But it doesn’t explain why his nuts had snapped. And shot, into the water, more SkhtuS than I’d ever–

I got down on my knees in front of him, still in the water, practically beside myself with the sheer pleasure of it. The water came up to my chest, well, higher than that. Holding him by the nuts, I licked his belly and sheath clean. He he played with my ears and mane. He was mumbling about his bliss. Telling me he loved me. The kits were a few meters away, spashing about and squealing and laughing.

It was a perfect homecoming.

It was not believable that such a spot had never been occupied, and soon enough Lop and I found evidence that it had been. A wlko site, no question. But you could hardly tell at a glance. Kshuntsun vines had covered everything, and there was grass growing everywhere, and shrubs.

Later we learned that the place had been abandoned, but at the beginning as we explored I was dreading coming across wlko remains. We didn’t. Well, if the place had been raided by hunters, vultures and carrion weasels and hhihks beetles would have made short work of whatever the hunters left. But what was obvious was that it had been occupied. There was an excellent stone hearth under the vines, beautifully made. And in other ways (we found) the site had been changed by its inhabitants to make it more comfortable.

"What is this place?" Lop asked, the first morning. We were just sitting around after a good swim, enjoying the sight and smell of big water, and purring at our amazing good luck, before buckling down to making a start on clearing out the weeds.

"I don’t know. It’s months’ walk north and west of my turf."

"Don’t you guys have a geography?"

"Well, um, yes, sort of. North of Clan 32 there’s a string of lakes. I only know the names. Never been there. Long Lake. Two Island Lake. Red Bluff Lake. Many Springs Lake. Um, well, Round Lake; let’s see, Cold Lake, Marble Lake, Deep Marble Lake, Sand Lake–. Doesn’t really tell you much. I mean, this could be any of them. They’re just names to me."

Something like two years went by. The kits were coming along nicely, about a third grown and handsome. Lop and I were both concerned about them. They were OK, but we both knew that the future was going to be a problem.

We were happy enough with one another. "Happy enough?" We were thrilled with one another. To the point of embarrassment. Lop was red from his whiskers to his ankles, and I was too. The parts I could see, anyway. Anyone could tell from looking at us that we were both wallowing in hkshihh. I sometimes wondered if other wlko could tell that the deep red at the corners of our mouths came from sucking on one another’s hkshihh-soaked testicles. Or so I suspect. At least, I myself never saw a wlko red that way before. Well, if anyone was dirty-minded enough to suspect such a thing, no one was so rude and crude as to say so right out loud.

Well, though, as I say, we both were worred about the kits. Wonderful boys. I think Lop was more–I mean, I know he was more of a parent than I was. He was more mother than anything, but it wasn’t the point. Growing up with their only family being two sexual perverts wasn’t the point. We both worried a lot about their stunted family life, but were at a loss as to what to do about it. Lop kept saying, gallantly, that he’d be willing to take wives for the kits’ sake, and even fuck them. But he was right in his view that finding even one wlkwy who would be willing to have a rupellid co-mate would take some looking. Probably the only thinkable deal, in fact, would be that Lop not do any fucking. That would suit Lop fine. And he said so. It was a fantasy of Lop’s that a "stud" like me needed more than one cunt to satisfy me. His and some wlkwim’s, he meant. Me, I didn’t think it was a good idea to say I didn’t have much interest in cunt, myself.

Anyway, any such negotiations seemed impossibly complex. It would be hard enough if I had clan connections and knew the people, and could make up some story about why Lop and I wanted to be co-mates. Or maybe I was kidding myself. Possibly there just was no way to keep the whole idea from striking everyone as just weird.

But the real concern was what would happen when the boys got old enough to marry. Lop surprised me by putting words to my thoughts when he said it would be criminal for these boys not to have wives and children, since they were so beautiful.

That was the one ace in the hole. If they kept on developing the way they were going, the boys’ looks would help overcome the odd things about their background, when it came time to look for mates for them.

Provided we could bring them up properly. It was inevitable, I suppose, but I think they were around four and a half when Lop and I noticed them, in their play, sucking on each other’s scrotums. Hardly more than hard little bumps at the base of their little sheaths, but they were holding on to one another and–

"Man, Perry", Lop growled at me, lurching to his feet. "Hey! Hey! Kits!"

The young innocents were startled by the call. It was almost a screech.