Deph-hinuf would have instantly liked Alvin.

I don't see how it could have been otherwise, for until I had met Alvin, Deph-hinuf was easily the least hoonish hoon that I had ever known.

I best remember her deep thoughtful eyes, a loose informal way of walking, and a white scratchy beard that I could cling to when I was very young.

Deph-hinuf was my grandmother.

Deph-hinuf loved life. Some ers go through life; some ers get on with their life. My grandmother both absorbed and participated in life. She could make a joke about almost anything, but not in a Tymbrimi or Tytlal sort of way, for she would never let her sense of humor interfere with her job. Work in and of itself was not her life; she refused all offers for any type of employment, including those with widely varying increases in pay, if that job would have taken her away from Hurmuphta--and family.

She paid attention to the little details.

One thing little being the Rousit.

Without any forbearance of patron client relations, without any forethought of consequences, and usually without even knowing what she was doing, Deph-hinuf could sometimes drive a Rousit crazy. The poor little er was caught between two mutually exclusive choices. To go to a male hoon for a good deep umble, and then have that male then ignore it while he continued with whatever he was doing, or to go to Deph-hinuf and become the center of her attention.

Humans have a joke about the grandparents spoiling the grandchildren, and a supposition that certain traits skip a generation. Wild, subdued, then wild again. Well, the joke and the trait are certainly not exclusive to wolfling humans. I definitely took after my grandmother instead of my mother.

Deph-hinuf was also a bit of a risk taker, and that was what killed her.

Not a happy story, but one that needs to be told.

She worked for the government, the more or less expected role for a hoon with above average test scores. It was with Government Imports at the big Hurmuphta Port warehouse; the biggest building at Hurmuphta Port. So tall that a large ship could unload from its midside hatch directly into a storage bay.

Government Imports didn't import anything for the Hoon. Deph-hinuf dealt with diplomatic improbables. There was a better more exact hoonish title, but what the job description boiled down to in Anglic was 'preventing coup.' Deph-hinuf was in charge of the innumerable seldom accessed but immeasurably necessary items that would, could, or should be needed if and when a clan allied or neutral to the Hoon decided to pay a visit to Hurmuphta. There's a certain minimum requirement of supply as dictated by the small but eminently self-aggrandized Institute for Travelers' Aid and Comfort, and woe be it to an established civilized planet that happens to run out of any one of the seventeen standard types of toilet paper.

These other clans rarely showed up. In fact Hurmuphta does not have a single embassy. It's easier to just take the few quick B space jumps over to Chiphwandashu, the older, more populated, more cultured hoon colony planet.

There was rarely a reason to come to Hurmuphta.

Hurmuphta was the youngest of the hoon colony worlds, only having been leased for a little bit over a thousand years. (Arilerah, being the home of the Rousit, is not defined as a colony world.)

The only real planetary exports Hurmuphta had were the Hoon themselves. They were educated and trained for work in the Galactic Institutes, or for doing the exact same thing by way of contract work to other clans. Hurmuphta was a world without any appreciable rare minerals, no unusual geographical sights to behold, and no biological oddities. In fact, three times in a row the Galactic survey found no pre sapient or even potential pre sapient creatures. Hurmuphta was a pretty average boring planet.

So of course it was perfectly suited for leasing to the Hoon.

Rules, though, are rules. There would be no counting coup against the Hoon Clan. The warehouse had to be fully stocked at all times.

Fully stocked but rarely used.

But some foods go bad with age, some toiletries have to have a fresh smell, and sometimes ceremonial robes go out of style--especially when a clan changes its 'administration.' There was always a steady amount of maintenance work for keeping Deph-hinuf and her crew busy.

On the day my grandmother died, however, the work actually involved pulling items for use.

A small Institute for Uplift party was coming to Hurmuphta to look at our Rousit.

As Hurmuphta was an uninteresting planet, we became a sort of repository for the uninteresting Rousit. We got the ones that were being excluded from future uplift breeding projects.

The Rousit shipped to Hurmuphta were not sterilized; it was a basic tenet that the Rousit could not live sanely in a non-familial setting. A sociological imperative that couldn't be erased by mere gene grafting. They both bred and led normal lives on Hurmuphta. However, no Rousit could leave the planet without first being made sterile.

So there was a lot of activity the day before the delegation arrived. Items for five different races were to be taken from the warehouse to Hurmuphta City. They might not be used, but if needed they would be instantly available.

Every employee was needed that day, including one that shouldn't have been there.....

Anyway, one employee showed up with traces of a mild type of itchysac. An aged male who was even a bit older than Deph-hinuf. But he was proud of his perfect attendance work record, and valued that more than what he considered to be only a mild inconvenience. He drove one of the hover-lifts. Turned out he was a bit too proud. Naht-Phatsu by name. Not that it matters.

The warehouse consisted of rows of open isles with multiple racks stretching from floor to ceiling. Naturally, under the rules of Ifni, Murphy, or whoever-you-name-as-a-scapegoat, a lot of items that were to be needed were to be found on the top rack.

Even some small items that really should have been stored elsewhere.

Ynnin toothpaste had been stored on top of the larger boxes that took up most of the top rack space to one side of the center isle.

It was just high enough to be a bother for a female. Any female, as all hoon females are genetically shorter than the taller males.

Deph-hinuf could have gone back to the end of the rack to fetch a step ladder. She could have waited for her male helper to come by. She could have even waited for the hover-lift to come back to pull out the topmost large box with all of the smaller items that rested on top of it.

But instead of taking any of these choices, she did what was natural for any male or female hoon when something was just barely out of reach. When locked in a straight position, the twisted middle arm bone and twisted middle leg bone both add a few much needed centimeters of height or reach.

So she brought her legs in straight and twisted and locked both her middle leg bones and did the same to a single middle arm bone to extend her reach for those few extra centimeters that were needed to reach one of those silly tubes. Silly in her opinion, though she'd never state so out loud. The Ynnin were one of the few races that actually used silicon...

It was an unsteady position, so she used her toehooks to reach into the row of holes that were always provided at the edge of a workway for just such a purpose.

She still needed only just a little bit more.

Deph-hinuf took one leg's toehooks out of the holes and twisted her hips a bit. To steady herself, she used her unlocked arm to grab a plastic band that ran around one of the bigger boxes.

And that's when Naht-Phatsu sneezed.

A human's sneeze is nothing compared to that of a hoon's. Humans don't have a tendency to break panes of glass. Then again, for that very reason, a hoonish home isn't built with panes of glass for windows.

Naht-Phatsu had his hand on the hover-lift's controls. His sneeze put the hover-lift into a high speed reverse.

It slammed into the rack.

Any hoon in a normal 'splayed' stance would have been able to absorb the blow. Deph-hinuf, however, was standing with one foot in the air and one foot toehooked into the deck. Both feet were still in the middle bone locked position. One arm was raised in the locked position, and the other arm holding a very heavy box.

Not a natural stance.

Everything on the rack moved with the blow.

She started going backwards. The box she was holding and the box on top of that came with her. For all that combined weight, one set of toehooks was not enough.

She went over the side. All but a very small part of her.

Sixty meters straight down.

Not a guaranteed fatal fall. Not with the near instant medical care anyone but my husband has always had as an expectation of daily life.

But again, Deph-hinuf did not fall under normal circumstances. She was in partial shock from the loss of her toehooks. There wasn't enough time to unlock the one arm and both legs, and a straight legged hoon will always fall head first.

In a head first fall, a hoon will instinctively raise their arms above their head. She got one arm to wrap around her head. The other arm with the locked bone stood straight out.

That arm was the first thing to hit the floor.

The lower forearm was driven straight into my grandmother's skull.

All for a tube of toothpaste.

* * * *

I became distraught, but my mother became devastated.

"We need to move away from Hurmuphta for the good of our daughter," she would say to Twaphu-anuph.

Repeatedly.

In the end, my father had to comply, and Kazzkark was the first good job opportunity.

---Dor-hinuf