A Different Flesh (10 page)

He let the fire die to red embers that hardly interfered with his night sight. The moon, rounding toward full, spilled pale light over the forest ahead, smoothing its contours till it resembled nothing so much as a calm, peaceful sea.

The ear pierced the illusion that lulled the eye. Somewhere close by, a field mouse squeaked, briefly, as an owl or ferret found it. Farther away, Kenton heard a wolf howl to salute the moon, then another and another, until the whole pack was at cry.

The eerie chorus made the hair prickle upright at the nape of the scout's neck. Charles stirred and muttered in his sleep. No one, human or sim, was immune to the fear of wolves.

The pack also disturbed the rest of a hairy elephant, whose trumpet call of protest instantly silenced the wolves. They might pull down a calf that strayed too far from its mother, but no beasts hunted full-grown elephants. Not more than once, anyway, Kenton thought.

The normal small night noises took a while to come back after the hairy elephant's cry. The scout strained his ears listening for one set in particular: the grunts and shouts that would have warned of wild sims. No camp was in earshot, at any rate. Hunting males ranged widely, though, and these sims would from long acquaintance not be in awe of men, and thus doubly dangerous.

A coughing roar only a couple of hundred yards away cut short his reverie on the sims. The scout sprang to his feet, his finger darting to the trigger of his musket. That cry also roused Charles. The sim stood at Kenton's side, hatchet ready in his hand.

The roar came again, this time fiercely triumphant.
Spearfang
, Charles signed,
with kill
.

“Yes,” Kenton said. Now that the beast had found a victim, it would not be interested in hunting for others-such as, for instance, himself and the sim. In dead of night, he welcomed that lack of interest.

All the same, excitement prickled in him. The big cats were not common along the Atlantic seaboard, and relentless hunting had reduced their numbers even in the hinterlands of the Virginia colony. Not many men, these days, came to the governor at Portsmouth to collect the £5 bounty on a pair of fangs.

Kenton imagined the consternation that would ensue if he marched into the Hall of Burgesses with a score of six-inch-long ivory daggers. Most of the clerks he knew would sooner pass a kidney stone than pay out fifty pounds of what was not even their own money.

The scout snorted contemptuously. “I'd sooner reason with a sim,” he said. Charles grunted and made the question-mark gesture. “Never mind,” Kenton said. “You may as well go back to sleep.”

Charles did, with the same ease he had shown before. Nothing troubled him for long. On the other hand, he lacked the sense for long-term planning.

Kenton watched the stars spin slowly through the sky. When he reckoned it was midnight, he woke Charles, stripped off his breeches and tunic, and rolled himself in his blanket. Despite exhaustion, his whirling thoughts kept him some time awake. This once, he thought, he would not have minded swapping wits with his sim.

Sunrise woke the scout. Seeing him stir, Charles nodded his way.
All good
, the sim signed.
Spearfang stay away
.

“Aye, that's good enough for me,” Kenton said. Charles nodded and built up the fire while Kenton, sighing, stretched and dressed. Jokes involving wordplay were wasted on sims, though Charles had laughed like a loon when the scout went sprawling over a root a couple of days earlier. The turkey was still almost as good as it had been the night before. Munching on bulbs of wild onion between bites went a long way toward hiding the slight gamy taste the meat had acquired.

The way west was downhill now; the explorer and his sim had passed the watershed not long before they made camp. The little stream by which they had built their fire ran westward, not comfortably toward the Atlantic like every other waterway with which Kenton was familiar.

The scout strode along easily, working out the kinks a night's sleep on the ground had put in his muscles. His mouth twisted. A few years ago, he would have felt no aches, no matter what he did. But his light-brown hair was beginning to be frosted with gray, and to recede at the temples.

Kenton was proud the governor had chosen him for this first western journey, rather than some man still in his twenties. “Oh, aye, a youngster might travel faster and see a bit more,” Lord Emerson said, “but you're more likely to return and tell us of it.”

He laughed out loud. He wondered what Lord Emerson would have said after learning of his spearfang-hunting plans. Something pungent and memorable, no doubt.

Charles stopped with a perplexed grunt, very much the sort of sound a true man might have made.
Ahead strange sound
, he signed.

Kenton listened, but heard nothing. He shrugged. His eyes were as sharp as the sim's, but Charles had very good ears. They were surely not a match for a hound's, nor was the sim's sense of smell, but Charles could communicate what he sensed in a way no animal could match.

“Far or close?” the scout asked.

Not close
.

“We'll go on, then,” Kenton decided. After a few hundred cautious yards, he heard the rumble too—or perhaps
felt
would have been the better word for it. He thought of distant thunder that went on and on, but the day was clear. He wondered if he was hearing a waterfall far away. “Kenton's Falls,” he said, trying out the sound. He liked it.

Charles turned to look at him, then made as if to stumble over a root. The sim got up with a sly grin on his face. Kenton laughed too. Charles had made a pun after all, even if unintentionally.

The game path they were following twisted southward, bringing the edge of a large clearing into view. Kenton stared in open-mouthed wonder at the teeming, milling buffalo the break in the trees revealed. There were more of them than Virginia herds had cattle.

The beasts were of two sorts. The short-horned kind, with its hump and shaggy mane, was also fairly common east of the mountains; it closely resembled the familiar wisent of Europe. The other variety was larger and grander, with horns sweeping out from its head in a formidable defensive arc. Only stragglers of that sort reached Virginia. They were notoriously dangerous to hunt, being quicker and stronger than their more common cousins.

The rumble the sim and scout had heard was coming from the clearing; it was the pounding of innumerable buffalo hooves on the turf. Charles pointed to the herd, signing,
Good hunting. Good eating
.

“Good hunting indeed,” Kenton said. Its meat smoked over a fire, a single buffalo could feed Charles and him for weeks. But the scout saw no need for that much work. With the big beasts so plentiful, it would be easy to kill one whenever they needed fresh meat.

Good hunting in another way also, the scout realized. A herd this size would surely draw wolves and spearfangs to prey on stragglers. Kenton smiled in anticipation. He would prey on them.

“Let's get some meat,” Kenton said matter-of-factly. Charles nodded and slipped off the trail into the trees. The scout followed. He could just as well have led; the sim and he were equally skilled in woodscraft. But he would not go wrong letting Charles pick a spot from which to shoot.

Once away from the trail, the scout felt as though the forest had swallowed him. The crowns of the trees overhead hid the sun; light came through them wan, green, and shifting. Shrubs and bushes grew thick enough to reduce vision to a few yards, but not enough to impede progress much. The air was cool, moist, and still, with the smell of earth and growing things.

Steering by the patterns of moss and other subtle signs, Charles and Kenton reached the clearing they had spied in the distance. It was even larger than the scout had thought, and full of buffalo. More entered by way of a game track to the north that was wider than most Virginia roads; others took the trail south and west out.

Charles picked a vantage point where the forest projected a little into the clearing, giving Kenton a broad view and a chance to pick his target at leisure. “Good job,” the scout murmured. Charles wriggled with pleasure at the praise like a patted hound.

But Kenton knew there was more to the sim's glee than any dog would have felt. Charles's reasoning was slower and far less accurate than a man's, but it was enough for him to understand how and why he had pleased the scout. People who treated their sims like cattle or other beasts of burden often had them run away.

Kenton shook his head slightly as he aimed at a plump young buffalo not thirty yards away. If Charles wanted to flee on this journey, he had his chance every night.

The flintlock bucked against the scout's shoulder, though the long barrel of soft iron reduced the recoil. Buffalo heads sprang up at the report; the animals' startled snorts filled the clearing. Then the buffalo were running, and Kenton felt the ground shudder under his feet. If the sound of the beasts' hooves had been distant thunder before, now the scout heard the roar as if in the center of a cloudburst. Charles was shouting, but Kenton only saw his open mouth—his cry was lost in the din of the stampede.

The cow the scout had shot tried to join the panic rush, despite the blood that gushed from its shoulder just below the hump and soaked its shaggy brown hair. After half a dozen lurching strides, blood also poured from its mouth and nose. It swayed and fell.

Several other buffalo, most of them calves, were down, trampled, when Kenton and Charles went out into the clearing, which was now almost empty. The scout took the precaution of reloading—this time with a double charge—before he emerged from the woods, in case one of the buffalo still on their feet should decide to charge.

Crows and foxes began feasting while Charles was still cutting two large chunks of meat from the tender, fat-rich hump. Soon other hunters and scavengers would come: spearfangs, perhaps, or wolves or sims. Kenton preferred meeting any of them on ground of his own choosing, not here in the open. He drew back into the woods as soon as Charles had finished his butchery. They got well away from the open space before they camped, and Kenton made sure they did so in a small hollow to screen the light of his fire from unwelcome eyes.

After he had eaten, he wiped his greasy hands on the grass, then dug into his pack for his journal, pen, and inkpot. He wrote a brief account of the past couple of days of travel and added to the sketch map he was keeping.

As always, Charles watched with interest.
Talking marks
? he signed.

“Aye, so they are.”

How do marks talk
? the sim asked, punctuating the question with a pleading whimper. Kenton could only spread his hands regretfully. Several times he had tried to teach Charles the ABCs, but the sim could not grasp that a sign on paper represented a sound. No sim had ever learned to read or write.

Then the scout had an idea—maybe his map would be easier than letters for Charles to understand. “Recall the creek we walked along this morning, how it bent north and then southwest?”

The sim nodded. Kenton pointed to his representation. “Here is a line that moves the same way the creek did.”

Charles looked reproachfully at the scout.
Line not move. Line there
.

“No; I mean the line shows the direction of the creek. D'you see? First it goes up, then down and over, like the stream did.”

So
? In their deep, shadowed sockets beneath his brow ridges, Charles's eyes were full of pained incomprehension.
Line not like stream. How can line be like stream
?

“The line is a picture of the stream,” the scout said.

Line not picture
. Charles's signs were quick and firm.
Picture like thing to eyes. Line not like stream
.

Kenton shrugged and gave up. That had been his last, best try at getting the idea across. Sims recognized paintings, even pen-and-ink drawings. Abstract symbols, though, remained beyond their capacity. The scout sighed, got out his blanket, and slept.

Instead of returning to the clearing, Kenton decided to parallel the game track down which the buffalo had fled. Mockingbirds yammered in the treetops high overhead, while red squirrels and gray frisked along the branches, pausing now and then to peer suspiciously down at the man and the sim.

“An Englishman I met at Portsmouth told me there are no gray squirrels in England, only red ones,” Kenton remarked.

No grays? Who ate them
?

Kenton smiled, then sobered. There was more to the question than Charles, in his innocent ignorance, had meant. People on both sides of the Atlantic were still hotly debating the notion someone had put forward a generation before: that the struggle of predator against prey determined which forms of life would prosper and which would fail.

The scout liked the idea. To his mind, it explained why such beasts as spearfangs and hairy elephants lived in America but not in Europe, though their ancient bones had been found there. Humans, even savages, were better hunters than sims. Already, after less than a century, spearfangs were scarce in Virginia. No doubt they had been exterminated east of the ocean so long ago that even the memory of them was gone.

The thought of life changing through time horrified folk who took their Scripture literally. Kenton could not fathom their cries of protest. America had shown so many wonders the Bible did not speak of—sims not the least—that using Scripture to account for them struck him as foolish. Like most colonists, he preferred to judge truth for himself, not receive it from a preacher.

A little past noon, the scout began hearing the low rumble of many buffalo hooves again. He found a herd gathered at a salt lick, pushing and shoving each other to get at the salt like so many townswomen elbowing their way to a peddler's cart. He took out his journal and noted the lick. When settlers eventually came, they could use the salt to preserve their meat.

He had not intended to hunt that day, not when he and Charles were still carrying some of the buffalo hump. But a tawny blur exploded from the far side of the clearing and darted toward a yearling cow at the edge of the herd. The spearfang's roar sent the buffalo scattering in terror and made ice walk up Kenton's back.