What? Did you want me to just leave the baby [bloodsucking, acid-spitting, color-changing, most-dangerous-creature-in-the-galaxy] to die?
There are naturalists who care about their work, and then there is Aran.
Aran climbs ice-covered cliff-faces to prove that there is another species of violet snow toads. Aran wanders the southern Rim Mountains looking for sea spines and prarie snouts and doesn’t mind when he runs into a nest of spitting vipers. Like the best naturalists, Aran is high on enthusiasm and low on caution.
And so, when he finds out that the eggs of the mysterious great tree-dwelling venomous tentacled land-devils of the Joias system are about to hatch, Aran doesn’t sigh and say that it’s too bad they can’t go observe because travel to the Joias system is highly restricted, or because the mere thought of space-flight makes him hyperventilate, or because one of his colleagues is probably trying to kill him, or even because land-devils are the most deadly creatures ever encountered by humans and pretty much everyone who has ever gone to their planet has died horrible deaths.
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: land-devils only hatch eggs every fifty or sixty years. Aran cajoles his best friend, Istvay, into coming with him.
Everything goes smoothly until Aran notices one of the eggs has fallen out of the nest and been abandoned by the parents. Good naturalists know that you shouldn’t intervene in nature, no matter how cruel things seem–it’s the circle of life. Great naturalists know when to have a heart.
Aran saves the egg.
But escaping the very territorial (and very angry) land-devil parents is only the beginning of Aran’s problems. Now he has to figure out how to raise a creature that can melt the bars of most cages with acid, can bite through a glove and two layers of protective lining, and that has a venom that might kill him.
But it is kinda cute, and Aran names her Ani.