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Kaiila: The
mount of the Wagon Peoples, unkown in the northern hemisphere of Gor, is
the terrifying but beautiful kaiila. The kaiila is a silken, carnivorous,
lofty creature, graceful long-necked and smooth gaited. It is a viperous
and undoubtedly mammalian, though there is no suckling of the young. The
young are born vicious and by instinct, as soon as they can struggle to
their feet, they hunt, it is an instinct of the mother, sensing the birth,
to deliver the young animal in the vicinity of game. With the domesticated
kaiila, a bound verr or a prisoner might be cast to the newborn animal.
The kaiila, once it eats its fill, does not touch food for several
days.The kaiila is extremely agile, and can easily outmaneuver the slower,
more ponderous high tharlarion.It requires less food, of course, than the
tarn. A kaiila, which normally stands about twenty to twenty-two hands at
the shoulder can cover as much as six hundred pasangs in a single day's
riding.The head of a kaiila bears two large eyes, one on each side, but
these eyes are triply lidded, probably an adaptation to the environment
which occasionally is wracked by serve storms of wind and dust; the
adaptation, actually a transparent third lid permits the animal to move as
it wishes under conditions that force other prairie animals to back into
the wind or, like the sleen, to burrow into the ground. The kaiila is most
dangerous under such conditions, and, as if it knew this, often uses such
times for its hunt.
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