Plot
A small group of Sleestak assemble in an underground trap designed to capture a pig-like creature, installing a temporary periscope to spy on the pig. Ta runs into the pig, who chases him away.
Meanwhile, Will sharpens a knife at the base of High Bluff while Holly watches Rick on the pendant. Ta arrives and sees Will's knife. He realizes it could be used to kill the pig and tries to steal it, but is caught in the act. As Holly watches her father in the pendant, she sees him fall into the trap and disappear.
Rick awakes beneath the opening into which he fell. He finds himself surrounded by Sleestak, realizing he is safe as long as he stays in the pool of light cast by the sun. Will and Holly arrive with rope to retrieve him, but are chased away by Grumpy, whose right leg slips into the cave-in while in pursuit of Spot.
Watching the pendant, Holly sees that Rick has been taken to the Lost City. She and Will go to Enik and plead with him to help save Rick. Enik promises to find Rick's location, but not save him. He travels alone to the Library of Skulls, where he sees that Rick has been chained in the Nursery as food for the Sleestak hatchlings. Enik persuades the Council of the Sleestak to trade Rick for a pig like the one they had sought, then returns to the children and explains the situation. He adds that the newborn Sleestak will hatch at sunset and eat their father.
Will and Holly return to the trap and cover it in branches and string it with a noose. In search of bait, they convince Ta that the noose is a swing and offer him the knife if he will sit on the swing. As Ta swings, the pig comes and charges, but falls into the trap. Will and Holly shunt the pig toward the Nursery, and the Sleestak leader returns Rick.
Read more about this topic: Fair Trade (Land Of The Lost)
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“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)