What is "noctambulo"

Usage examples of "noctambulo".

A looming massive noctambulo stood before him, no more than twenty feet away, blinking and gaping in the light.

The noctambulo simply stared at him, slowly opening and closing its long rubbery beak in the silly way that noctambulos had.

He lowered the beam, turning it at an angle so he could continue to see the noctambulo without blinding it.

How much communication existed between the day and night identities of each noctambulo was something that no one had been clearly able to determine.

Since the noctambulo did not seem to want to explain why it had been following Joseph through the woods, perhaps did not even know itself, Joseph let the point pass.

There was something dreamlike about conducting a conversation with a noctambulo, but Joseph was glad enough for company of any sort after the unaccustomed solitude of his sojourn in the forest.

Finally he looked up and noticed that the noctambulo had moved a short distance upstream from him and was grubbing about intently in the mud of the shore with its great scooplike hands, prodding and poking in it, dredging up large handfuls of mud that it turned over and over, inspecting them with almost comically deep attention.

Joseph perceived that the noctambulo was pulling small many-legged creatures, crustaceans of some sort, from nests eight or nine inches down in the mud.

Covertly he glanced across at the noctambulo, who had hunkered down at the edge of the stream and was taking up the little mud-crawlers one by one, carefully folding the edges of one big hand over them and squeezing in such a way as to split the horny shell and bring bright scarlet meat popping into view.

Gingerly he picked up one of the mud-crawlers and tried to crack it open with his hand as he had seen the noctambulo do.

When he had eaten six of the crawlers he decided that he had had enough and pushed the rest of the heap back toward the noctambulo, who gathered them up without comment and set about devouring them.

Joseph watched with unforced admiration as the noctambulo unerringly sniffed out an underground burrow, laid it bare with a few quick scoops of its great paddle-shaped hands, and pounced with phenomenal speed on the frantic inhabitants, a colony of small long-nosed mammals with bright yellow eyes, perhaps of the same sort that Joseph had seen staring down at him the night before.

The noctambulo had its face deep in the abdomen of one of the little beasts and was already happily gnawing away.

The noctambulo by this time had finished its meat and had excavated some thick crooked white tubers as a second course.

In great delight Joseph finished one tuber and then a second, and was reaching for a third when the noctambulo intervened.