A Different Flesh (30 page)

Sal went right on caring for him as she had all along. She also got better and better as his assistant in the effort to unravel the secrets of the bow. She would have been better yet, he thought glumly, had her mentor been worth a damn. She copied his blunders faithfully, one by one, but stopped making them as soon as he did. He knew a lot of people back in the Commonwealths who, having settled on a particular mistake, would keep making it till the end of time.

He also knew a lot of people who would have turned up their noses—in the most literal sense—at the continuing unpleasant labor involved in disposing of his wastes and getting the filth off him afterwards. Sal never faltered. In the days when he was still on his feet, he had improvised a good many strange wipes for his hindquarters, but in that regard Sal's ingenuity outdid his. He was grateful, and sometimes amused. He would never have thought of using grouse feathers, for instance.

Sal also kept using that same wooden cup to help him pass water. He sometimes thought the simple desire to piss while upright would be what finally drove him to his feet. He was glad he had the sense to recognize that urge as a sign of returning health, and did not try to act on it too soon.

Another sign came not long afterward, on a day where, even by the fire, the wind held a chilly promise of the snow that would come soon. As he had countless times before, Quick called Sal's name and asked for the cup. She finished working the seeds out of a couple of pinecones she had found, brought it over to him.

She took him in hand, again as she had so often before. What happened then, though, was new and strange, for he felt himself stiffening at the sim's touch.

It was hard to say which of them was more surprised. Henry Quick had been lustful enough out on the trap line, but there is nothing like a compound fracture of the leg and a long bout of fever to make a man put aside such concerns.

Had Sal ignored his rise, simply put his penis in the cup and waited, the moment would have passed. The sim seemed about to do just that, then paused, looked down, and quietly said,
“Hoo!”

Quick started to sign for Sal to take her hand away, but the sim, still perhaps more in the spirit of experimentation than anything else, stroked him for the first time with deliberate intent. His recovering body responded to the touch before his mind could will it not to. And in any event, once he was fully, rampantly, and so unexpectedly erect, his mind had very little to say.

The sim swung astride him, lowered onto him. He gasped; entering Sal felt no different from having a woman. Even so, seeing her there above him, hairy, chinless, and heavy-browed, made him shut his eyes in a spasm of revulsion.

Yet the act went on, whether he watched or not. And indeed, closing his eyes, regardless of the reason, made matters seem much more familiar. He felt the thick hair on Sal's thighs and buttocks as she rode him, but that sensation was distant, insignificant, when set against the explosion building in his loins. Nor were the small, wordless noises the sim made unlike the ones he had heard in bedrooms back in the Commonwealths. Too often those were from women who sighed more for his coins on the dresser than for himself; the sim had no such art.

No wonder, then, that his hips bucked of themselves, or that his hands reached out to take hold of Sal's breasts. He almost jerked them away again, for the hair that covered all the breasts but the nipples reminded him he was in no bedroom now. Then climax swept over him, and for an endless instant he did not care where he was.

Sal rolled away as soon as he was through. He kept his eyes shut, trying to sort things out; he felt simultaneously as fine and as wretched as he could ever recall.

He opened his eyes. Sal was looking at him. He nodded, not yet trusting either speech or hand-talk. The sim nodded back.
Good
, Sal signed.

“All right,” the trapper said, surprising himself as usual when he spoke out loud. His equanimity was coming back. How many times had he told himself that if he was going to live with the sims he would have to live like a sim? A wry grin settled on his face. Eating grubs was all very well, but he had not expected to take things quite this far.

Again
? Sal asked, and no grin, no matter how wry, could survive that question. Once he could explain it away, even to himself, as something beyond his control. Repeating the act, though, would be committing himself to what he, along with almost everyone in the Commonwealths, thought of as disgusting.

And yet the coupling had not been the sordid sort of masturbation he imagined mating with a mare or ewe might be. Sal had been a partner in the act, not a mere uncomprehending receptacle for his lust. Indeed, that he was being asked whether he wanted to go again said a good deal. In the end, the question, more than anything else, was what decided him.

“All right,” he repeated. The sim could not have understood his words, but got the meaning from his tone. As sims were wont to do, Sal took him literally, and at once set about restoring his manhood. He thought that would be futile so soon after the first round, but his body, long deprived, proved him wrong. The sim mounted him again. Normally he preferred riding to being ridden, but his leg made that not worth thinking about.

This time the joining was slower, less fervent. Quick left his eyes open. The sims in the clearing were paying hardly more attention to him and Sal than they would have to a pair of their own kind, and the difference, he judged, was not prurience, only curiosity about how he performed. Once they saw he functioned much like them, they went back to whatever they had been doing.

He still did not look much at Sal, concentrating instead on what he was feeling. As before, that was like in its essence to having a woman, but now he noticed the peripheral differences more. The hairiness of the sim's body distracted him once or twice. Only later did he wonder if his own relatively smooth skin was as strange to her.

He did notice the sim's strength when she—in the middle of coupling, he could not think of Sal as it—grasped him as they mated. He had never bedded a woman at least as strong as he was.

That thought diverted Quick's attention again. He wondered how the males would react to his joining the band in this last, most intimate sense. Some had partners who mated more or less steadily with them, but the dominant males of the hunting party, Martin and two or three others, also coupled with the unattached females of the band. Now the trapper was part of that hierarchy. He wondered where he fit. He could not hunt. He could not even walk. If he was to gain importance, it would have to come through his wits.

Anyway, he thought as sensation built toward release, it was too late to worry now.

But afterward he worked away on the bow and arrows with more concentration than he had shown for several days. Nor could he stifle a twinge of alarm when Martin loomed over him, hands on hips, to inspect what he was up to. But the sim, as usual, was businesslike.
Sticks fly
? Martin asked.

Henry Quick shrugged. It was always a good question. After endless effort, he had figured out how to chip reasonably small, reasonably sharp arrowheads—they were better points than he got by simply whittling away at the tip of the arrow, at any rate. Now he was having trouble making the miserable arrows go straight.

The first ones he'd tried just spun crazily, which was good for making the sims laugh but not much else. Then he vaguely remembered that proper arrows had feathers at the back to make them fly true. Getting feathers was no problem. The sims threw rocks well enough to bring down a lot of birds. But getting the feathers to stay on the arrows was a whole different question. The sims knew nothing about glue, and Quick did not know how to make it either.

So far his best solution was cutting thin grooves in the shafts and sliding the feathers into them. That was not nearly good enough. Once in a while, one of his arrows would fly straight and thwock into a tree with enough force to stick, which made the sims hoot appreciatively. More often, a feather would come out in flight, which made the arrow behave as if it were trying to dodge its target instead of hitting it.

Sal continued to help in his bow-building efforts, and to care for him as she had been doing. She never understood much English besides her name, but he passed a lot of time talking first to her, then with her, in hand-talk. They did best at the purely pragmatic level. She understood why the people back in the Commonwealths wanted the furs he had come to trap.
Furs warm
, she signed, running a hand over his relatively naked skin.
No hair, need warm
. She stroked her own red-brown hair to emphasize the contrast. Her hair had grown thicker, almost furry, as the season changed.

When Quick tried to explain that people coveted furs for their beauty as well as their warmth, he ran into a blank wall. Sims did have an aesthetic sense of sorts, but it was limited to things they made themselves. A fur was just a fur.

He did better getting across the idea of rarity. Begging for food was a simple kind of bargaining, and the sims had learned he would give them his strange and wonderful metal tools in exchange for furs.
In my band
, he signed,
many tools, few furs. Here many furs, few tools. You want tools, we want furs
.

Sal nodded.
Why few furs there
? she asked. Her hand-talk was far more fluid than it had been when he first met her band. She, and to a lesser extent the rest of the band, had also learned from Quick a number of signs they had not known before.

Many people
, he answered.
Much hunting
.

Sal understood that. A band of sims that grew too large for its territory to support soon shrank again from starvation.

Some parts of life in the Commonwealths—railroads, steamboats—Quick did not even try to explain. Getting across the idea of a house, a permanent place to live, was hard enough, as was describing domesticated plants and animals. To Sal, it all seemed a vision of unparalleled abundance.
Warm place to sleep
? she signed.
Plenty to eat? No hunting
?

The trapper nodded, admitting it.

Why come here
? Sal asked.

To get furs
, was the only answer Quick could put across. Wanderlust meant nothing to the sim; Sal's band knew a territory perhaps twenty miles square as intimately as anyone could, but nothing of the world beyond it. Explaining that he often found the company of his fellow men oppressive was also next to impossible.

You, they fight
? Sal asked.

No
, he signed, but then, after thinking about it, had to add,
I stay with other men long time, maybe fight
. He knew how impatient he could get with people's foolishness. He really did not have that problem with the band of sims. They were not smart enough to make idiots of themselves on purpose; what brains they had, they had to use.

He wanted to do something for Sal, to show his gratitude in a more permanent, more substantial way than their coupling. After the first few times, he had stopped worrying about whether those matings constituted bestiality. That was more because he thought of himself as a member of the sim band than because he suddenly reckoned her human, but the effect was the same: he concentrated on their similarities rather than their differences.

The problem was that the sims lived at the barest subsistence level. Things that would have been appropriate back in the Commonwealths were incomprehensible and so valueless here. Before he fully realized that, Quick spent a good deal of time whittling a piece of pine into the shape of a spearfang. Sal looked at it when he proudly presented it to her. She was interested; she had never seen an image before. But she was not really pleased.

Inspiration struck when the trapper saw how the hunting party of males behaved when they came into the clearing on a day after the snow had begun to fall. The sims threw down the carcasses they had brought into the clearing, then, as one, rushed to put their feet as close to the fire as they could.

Quick smelled singeing hair, but did not blame the sims a bit. For him, even healthy, going out into the snow barefoot would have meant at the very least losing toes to frostbite. The sims' feet were hairy above and had thickly callused soles, so that risk was less for them. Nothing, however, could make such shoeless travel anything but icy.

The females, Sal among them, also had to brave the winter to forage and to cut firewood. Henry Quick suddenly realized that, while his boots did not have laces anymore, they were much better than nothing. Before Sal went out the next time, he showed her how to put them on her feet.

She did not like them; they must have felt strange and confining. But when she came back, her broad grin gleamed like the snow that still clung to the load of fir branches she was carrying.
Warm
, she signed unbelievingly, pointing to her feet.
Warm
. She let out a loud hoot of glee, bent down beside Quick to hug him and plant exuberant kisses on his face and shoulders.
Warm
, she signed again.
Feet warm
.

Quick felt warm himself, no easy trick that winter. He was glad he had found a gift that made her happy.

The boots also made the other sims jealous. Quick tried to fix that as fast as he could; he did not want Sal to suffer when he'd only meant to help. The only solution he came up with involved sacrificing his trousers, which he could not wear anyhow. They made several pairs of improvised footgear, not as good as real boots but far superior to bare feet, even hairy, leathery bare feet.

His makeshift cordwainery let Sal keep the boots that had been his. That relieved him a great deal, but only for a few days.

Martin had probably the best set of makeshifts. Once he was convinced they did some good, he signed,
All hunters need
.

Leather gone
, Quick answered. Martin gave a dissatisfied grunt. The trapper hoped the sim would not demand the tunic off his back. He needed it. Also fearing the big male would take his boots away from Sal, the trapper suggested,
Make foot things from skins of animals you kill
.