A Different Flesh (27 page)

With their bellies full, though, the sims, never reflective in the first place, did not care to look ahead. The youngsters ran through the clearing, wrestled with one another, and pestered their elders, for all the world like so many unruly children back in Cairo or Portsmouth or Philadelphia. Some of the adults made beds of branches and leaves, curled up, and went to sleep, ignoring the youngsters' squawks and shouts. A mother nursed a baby. The old sim and a young adult male squatted by the fire, chipping stones. The young adult absently swatted at a youngster that disturbed them. When it came back to watch what they were doing, the male let it stay.

Other adults had a different idea for passing the time. Three or four couples paired off and mated. The rest of the sims paid them no particular attention, nor did they seem to feel the lack of privacy. When a running youngster was about to crash into one pair, the male reached out from its position on its knees behind the female to fend off the little one.

Henry Quick found the rutting sims no more interesting than did the rest of the band. He had been away from women a long time, but not long enough to think of a sim as a partner. He would as soon have coupled with a pack mare.

Some trappers, he knew, did that. Some mated with sims, too. He knew what he thought of them: the same as most people thought. “You son of a sim” would start a fight anywhere in the Commonwealths.

Thus he was taken by surprise when the female sim to whom he had given the fox meat touched him on the leg again, this time much higher up than before.
Want
—? the female signed. The last gesture it used was not a standard part of hand-talk, but not easy to get wrong, either.

To remove any possible misunderstanding, the female crouched on hands and knees, looking back over its shoulder at him. Neither that nor the sight of its cleft between hairy and rather boyish buttocks did anything to rouse his ardor.

No
, he signed; hand-talk was not made for tact. He softened his refusal as much as he could:
You, I not same
.

The sim, luckily, seemed more curious than angry.
Not fit
? it asked, eyeing his crotch as if to gauge what his trousers concealed. He left that unanswered. He had seen enough sims to know their masculinity was hardly so rampant as jokes and stories made it out to be, but he was no more than average that way himself.

Not want
—? the female signed after a moment, and used that gesture of its own invention again.

Full
, Quick temporized. He patted his stomach.

Apparently that impeded performance among sims too, because the female gave a small, regretful hoot.
Later
? it signed.

The trapper shrugged and spread his hands.
You, I not same
, he repeated. The female shrugged too, and went off to get a few more whortleberries. To Henry Quick's relief, it did not come back to him. He'd meant to imply that men and sims were so different no offspring could come from a mating. He did not know whether the sim was bright enough to follow that. He did know it was a lie.

He had never seen a crossbreed. The repugnance almost everyone felt for coupling with the subhumans had a lot to do with that: few of mixed blood were born. Fewer still lived. The human parents in the matings usually made sure of that, to save themselves from disgrace. The ones that did survive were good for driving lawyers to distraction, and for a host of tales whose truth the trapper was in no position to judge.

He yawned. Back by his own campfire, he would have been asleep hours ago. Here he had neither his own blanket nor the nests sims made for themselves. He stretched out on the ground. The big blaze the sims had going was plenty to keep him warm. He was tired enough not to worry about sleeping soft. He rolled over, threw aside a twig that was poking his cheek, and knew nothing more till the sun rose.

He woke with a crick in his neck and a bladder full to bursting. He walked into the bushes at the edge of the clearing to relieve himself. By the smell, and by the way his boots squelched once or twice on the short journey, the sims were not so fastidious.

They had already begun their endless daily round of foraging. Henry Quick was glad to see that the importunate female was gone from the campsite. Otherwise, he thought with wry amusement, it might have wanted to go into the bushes with him to see just what sort of apparatus he had.

The males, who hunted in a group rather than scattering one by one, were still by the fire. The trapper went up to the one that had guided him here.
Good food
, he signed.

He had a spare bootlace in one of the pouches that hung from his belt. He dug it out. Yes, it was long enough for him to cut a couple of lengths from the end and still do what he wanted with it. He cut off the extra pieces, tied them to the main length at one end, and made loops at the other end of each. Then he tied the makeshift belt round the sim's middle.

Carry knife, axe
, he signed.
Have them to use. Have hands free
. The sim did not seem to understand. It rubbed its chinless jaw, staring at Quick, but made no move to put the tools in the loops.

The old grizzled male looked from the trapper's belt to the leather lace he had given the other sim. Its eyes lit. It let out a soft hiss of wonder; Quick remembered making that very same noise when, as a boy, he had seen his first steam railroad engine.

The grizzled sim stepped forward, took the knife from the younger male's hand, and thrust it through one loop. Then it pointed, first at the hatchet, then at the second loop. It gave an imperative barking call, pointed again. It might never have learned hand-talk well, Henry Quick thought, but its years had given it a wisdom of its own.

After it repeated its gestures a third time, the younger sim finally got the idea. It pushed the hatchet handle into the vacant loop; the head kept the hatchet from falling through. The sim looked at its empty hands, at the tools it still had with it. Suddenly it grinned an enormous grin.
Good
, it signed at Quick.
Good. Good. Good
.

Have more
? another male asked.
Make
?

No more
. Henry Quick apologetically spread his hands. He suggested,
Make from plants, from skins
—

The old sim could follow hand-talk, no matter how much trouble it had using the gestures.
Make
, it signed, and pointed to itself. Before long, Quick suspected, every sim in the band, or at least every hunting male, would be sporting a belt. Some would be made of vines and would break, others of green hides that would stink and get hard and wear out quickly. They would be better than no belts at all, he supposed.

He was pleased to have found something to give in exchange for the feast of the night before. Sims had so little that he was surprised they had offered to share, in spite of his earlier gift. Now they were less likely to resent him for accepting.

In daylight, the journey back to his trap line took less than half as long as it had by night. When he returned to the clearing where his latest camp was, he checked his pack. No sims had been near it, though they never would have had a better chance to steal. On the other hand, he thought, smiling, they'd had plenty just as good.

He went the round of the traps near the clearing, reset the ones that needed it, and dealt with the couple of furs he had taken. He should have had one more; a trap still held the bloody hind leg of a ringtail. That was all that was left of the black-masked beast, though. When he first saw the tracks around the trap, he thought the sims had robbed him after all. Then he noticed the claw marks in front of the toes. A bear had taken the chance to seize prey that could not flee.

He swore, but resignedly; that sort of thing had happened to him many times before, and would again. Bears could be as big a nuisance as sims. Some bands of sims, like the one in whose territory he was now, could be made to see that working with him got them more than robbing him did. The only thing a bear understood was a bullet.

A grouse boomed, somewhere off among the spruces. Henry Quick forgot about the bear, at least with the front part of his mind. He sidled toward the noise. The grouse's dull-brown feathers concealed it on its perch, but not well enough. He got almost close enough to knock it down with a club before he shot it.

He bled and gutted the bird, handling the gall bladder with care so it would not break and spill its noxious contents into the body cavity. He wished he were back at his base camp; the grouse would be better eating after hanging for several days. But he was on the move, and had no time for such refinements. The dark, rich meat would be plenty good enough tonight.

So it proved, though he roasted it a couple of minutes too long; grouse was best rare. He would have liked to flavor it with some bacon instead of crumbs from his salt beef, but the rashers he'd brought were long gone; he'd eaten them as soon as they began to go rancid.

Picking his teeth with the point of his knife, he laughed at himself. All this fretting about fancy cooking was a sure sign he'd been in the wilderness too long. That night he dreamt of eating pastry full of fruit and cream until he had to cut a new notch in his belt, in its own way as sensual a dream as his more usual imaginings of sweet-scented girls reaching up to him from featherbeds thick enough to smother in.

Waking hungry to a blanket in the middle of a forest clearing was hard. Even eating what was left of the grouse did not help much, though it would have been an expensive luxury if ordered in a cafe east of the mountains. Too much of what he did involved things that were expensive luxuries east of the mountains. What he craved were the luxuries he could
only
get back there.

The intensity of that craving ended up undoing him. The next clearing around which he had a set of traps was over on the west side of the one the sims used. The trail he had blazed to it swung a lot farther north than it had to, so he could give the sims' clearing a wide berth. Now that the subhumans had shown how friendly they were, he decided to take the direct route. If he did that the rest of the time he was there, he thought, he could save several days' travel and set out for the fleshpots of the east that much sooner. The sims, he told himself, would not mind.

Nor did they. He happened on a party of hunting males not long after he set out. Several saw him, and nodded his way as they might have to one of their own band. But he had not reckoned on the bear.

For all his woodscraft, the first he knew of it was when it loomed up on its hind legs like some ancient, brooding god, not fifty feet from him. In that moment he had a good shot at its chest and belly, but he held his fire. Bears, even silvered bears like this one, rarely attacked without being provoked.

But it did not do to count on a bear, either. This one peered his way. He was close enough to see its nostrils flare as it took his scent. It gave an oddly piglike grunt, dropped to all fours, and barreled toward him.

He threw his rifle to his shoulder, fired, and ran. The bear screamed. He heard its thunderous stride falter. But it still came on, roaring its pain to the world and crashing through bushes and firs like a runaway railroad engine. And in a sprint a bear, even a wounded bear, is faster than a man.

Henry Quick wished he had time to reload. Back in Plymouth Commonwealth, he had heard before he set out on this trapping run, they had most of the kinks out of a repeating rifle. He would have given five years' worth of furs to have one now. He threw away the gun he did have so he could run faster. If he lived, he'd come back for it.

He never remembered feeling the blow that shattered his right leg. All he knew at the time was that, instead of sprinting in one direction, he was suddenly spinning and rolling through the undergrowth in a very different one. That saved his life. The bear had to change directions too, and it was also hurt.

In the second or two its hobbling charge gave him, he jerked out his pistol, cocked it, and squeezed the trigger. He seemed to have forever to shoot. His hand was steady, with the eerie steadiness the shock of a bad injury can bring. The bear's mouth gaped in a horrible snarl; the pistol ball shattered a fang before burying itself in the beast's brain. The bear sighed and fell over, dead.

“God, that was close,” the trapper said in a calm, conversational voice. He started to pull himself to his feet—and the instant he tried to put any weight on his leg, all the pain his nervous system had denied till then flooded over him. He fainted before he could shriek.

The sun had moved a fair distance across the sky when he came back to himself. The moment he did, he wished he could escape to unconsciousness again. He tasted blood, and realized he had bitten his lip. He had not noticed. That pain was a trickle, set against the all-consuming torrent in his leg.

Tears were streaming down his face by the time he managed to sit up; the world had threatened to gray out several times in the process. His trouser leg was wet too, not only from where he'd pissed himself while unconscious but also farther down, where the bear had struck him. Blood was soaking through the suede.

He held himself steady with one hand in a thorn bush while he walked the other down his leg to the injury. Something hard and sharp was pressing against the inside of his trousers. He groaned, this time not just from the pain. With a compound fracture—and heaven only knew how much other damage in there—he would soon be as dead as if the bear had killed him cleanly. He wished it had. This way hurt worse.

His hands shook so badly that he took a quarter of an hour to reload his pistol. A lead ball would end his misery no less than the bear's. But after the weapon was ready, he did not raise it to his head. If he had been able to charge it with powder and wadding and bullet, how could pain's grip on him be absolute?

He began to drag himself toward the bear. That took longer than loading the gun had, though the body was only a handful of paces from him: he passed out several times on the way. At last he reached the carcass. If he was going to try to live, he would need to eat. The bear was food, for as long as it stayed fresh.