Is That What People Do? by Robert Sheckley

girl with short, tousled blonde hair appeared in the hatchway. “Can’t we come out now, Father?”
    “No!” Simeon said. “It’s not safe. Get inside, Anita.”
    “I’ll watch from here, then,” she said, staring at Danton with frankly curious eyes.
    Danton stared back and a faint and unfamiliar tremor ran through him.
    Simeon said, “We accept your offering. We will not, however, eat it.”
    “Why not?” Danton reasonably wanted to know.
    “Because,” said Jedekiah, “we don’t know what poisons you people might try to feed us.”
    “Poisons? Look, let’s sit down and talk this over.”
    “What do you think?” Jedekiah asked Simeon.
    “Just what I expected,” the military leader said. “Ingratiating, fawning, undoubtedly treacherous. His people won’t show themselves. Waiting in ambush, I’ll bet. I think an object lesson would be in order.”
    “Right,” said Jedekiah, grinning. “Put the fear of civilization into them.” He aimed his rifle at Danton’s chest.
    “Hey!” Danton yelped, backing away.
    “But, Father,” said Anita, “he hasn’t done anything yet.”
    “That’s the whole point. Shoot him and he won’t do anything. The only good native is a dead native.”
    “This way,” Jedekiah put in, “the rest will know we mean business.”
    “It isn’t right!” Anita cried indignantly. “The Council—”
    “—isn’t in command now. An alien landfall constitutes an emergency. During such times, the military is in charge. We’ll do what we think best. Remember Lan II!”
    “Hold on now,” Danton said. “You’ve got this all wrong. There’s just me, no others, no reason to—”
    A bullet kicked sand near his left foot. He sprinted for the protection of the jungle. Another bullet whined close and a third cut a twig near his head as he plunged into the underbrush.
    “There!” he heard Simeon roar. “That ought to teach them a lesson!”
    Danton kept on running until he had put half a mile of jungle between himself and the pioneer ship.
    He ate a light supper of the local variety of bananas and breadfruit, and tried to figure out what was wrong with the Hutters. Were they insane? They had seen that he was an Earthman, alone and unarmed, obviously friendly. Yet they had fired at him—as an object lesson. A lesson for whom? For the dirty natives, whom they wanted to teach a lesson....
    That was it! Danton nodded emphatically to himself. The Hutters must have thought he was a native, an aboriginal, and that his tribe was lurking in the bush, waiting for a chance to massacre the new arrivals! It wasn’t too rash an assumption, really. Here he was on a distant planet, without a spaceship, wearing only a loincloth and tanned a medium bronze. He was probably just what they thought a native should look like on a wilderness planet like this!
    “But where,” Danton asked himself, “do they think I learned English?”
    The whole thing was ridiculous. He started walking back to the ship, sure he could clear up the misunderstanding in a few minutes. But after a couple yards, he stopped.
    Evening was approaching. Behind him, the sky was banked in white and gray clouds. To seaward, a deep blue haze advanced steadily on the land. The jungle was filled with ominous noises, which Danton had long ago found to be harmless. But the new arrivals might not think so.
    These people were trigger-happy, he reminded himself. No sense barging in on them too fast and inviting a bullet.
    So he moved cautiously through the tangled jungle growth, a silent, tawny shape blending into the jungle browns and greens. When he reached the vicinity of the ship, he crawled through the dense undergrowth until he could peer down on the sloping beach.
    The pioneers had finally come out of their ship. There were several dozen men and women and a few children. All were dressed in heavy black cloth and perspiring in the heat. They had ignored his gift of local fruit. Instead, an aluminum table had been spread with