A Different Flesh (31 page)

Skins stink fast
, Martin signed.

Quick remembered promising to show the grizzled sim how to make leather. Now, in a way, he could keep that promise.
Rub skins with bark from spruce
, he signed.
Then stink slow, maybe not stink
.

Martin grunted again.
Do
, he signed. Before long, Quick was doing as much skinning, scraping, and curing as he had working the trap line. He had been a lot of things before, but never a cobbler for sims.

The cold, wet weather made his leg hurt worse, but with a different kind of pain, one he suspected would be with him the rest of his life: he knew several men with healed broken bones who were the best prophets of rain for miles around. Now at last he felt himself definitely on the mend. The successive triumphs were small but satisfying: he treasured the day he sat up by himself, the day he rolled over, the day he coupled with Sal with him on top. His sticks were still awkward, and so was she. That was not a posture sims often used. Neither, come to that, was female atop male; most often they mated from behind, like beasts.

Like any other beasts
, Quick realized he would have thought before his enforced sojourn here. Yet they learned far more than beasts. That applied to other things than seeing the utility of boots. Every so often, around the fire, the trapper would notice the subhumans joining as he and Sal did. He smiled every time. That was not one of the things he had intended to teach them.

Without the fire and the windbreak, the band of sims could not have survived. In the worst storms none of them went out, except to gather more wood. They huddled in their bedding close by the fire, hugging one another for extra warmth. Often they went a couple of days without food. They were used to going hungry.

Quick was not. His belly began to preoccupy him even more than his leg. Whenever the hunting party came back with game, his stomach heralded their arrival with growls a wolf would have been proud of.

Thanks in no small part to his hatchets, the fire never went out, nor did the sims have to sacrifice the windbreak or rob it so it became threadbare. Indeed, the females and youngsters cut so much more wood than they had been able to before that the band often used the piles of fragrant branches to thicken and restore their beds before using them to feed the fire. Quick had done that himself on the trapping line; fir branches made a fine mattress on which to lay a blanket.

Being now without a blanket, the trapper happily joined the sims in burrowing among the branches and using them to hold his body warmth. His nose grew so used to the thick, resinous smell of fir that he had to make a conscious effort to notice it. He found that the sap that oozed from the branches was easier to clean from his relatively smooth skin than to get out of the sims hair.

The sims spent a fair amount of time grooming one another under any circumstances; it was as much a part of their social lives as back-fence chatter was back in the Commonwealths. Quick did not mind taking part. Getting Sal's hair smooth and neat pleased him. He made an absent mental note to carve out a comb when he had the chance. The sap he cleaned from her hair left his hands constantly sticky, and spit did not take it off.

For a while he accepted that as just another nuisance. Then his whoop made sims all over the clearing jump. If spit did not dissolve the resin, neither would water. Now feathers would stay where he put them.

He had a couple of dozen shafts finished by the time Martin came into the clearing, staggering under the weight of the fawn in his arms. Quick was no archer, and was doubly hampered by having to shoot sitting down. Nevertheless, he sent several arrows close to a treetrunk that stood farther away than anyone could throw a stone.

His wrist raw and red from being lashed by the sinew bowstring, he handed the bow to Martin. The sim had used it only a couple of times before, but already showed signs of being a better marksman than Quick. Martin grunted when the first two arrows went where he aimed them, then said
“Hoo!”
as a third followed.

He shot again, as if to reassure himself it was no fluke, then thrust the bow back at the trapper.
Make more
, he signed. Quick had won over the skeptic.

With Sal's help, Quick went from cobbler to bowyer and fletcher. He had finished a handful of crude bows and close to a hundred arrows before he paused to wonder about what he was doing. Men had always pushed forward across America as they pleased, not least because sims lacked the weapons to fight back. A bow was nowhere near as potent as a gun, but it was vastly better than anything the subhumans had had before. Not only that, it was simple enough for them to make and care for themselves, which was not true of firearms.

After some thought, he decided it did not matter. For one thing, ideas did not move quickly from one band of sims to the next: how recently this band had acquired hand-talk showed that. For another, even with bows the sims could hardly become more than a nuisance. And finally, staying alive now counted far more than any hypothetical trouble in the future. In such matters, the trapper was an eminently practical man.

He grinned from ear to ear when the hunting party began coming back with more game than they ever had before.
Not need close
, one signed, holding a rabbit with blood on its white fur in front of Quick's face. The male kissed the trapper's cheek, then patted his own belly.
Kill from far, eat good
.

Save for a single infant, not a sim had died this winter, though it was the desperate time of year for the wild bands. Quick was amazed at the difference the extra fuel and now the extra food made.

But winter was also the desperate time of year for the other predators that roamed the woods. One morning a female started to push aside a chunk of the windbreak, then shoved back the piled branches with a shriek of fright. A wolf bayed in anger and frustration and hunger. Around the windbreak, the rest of the pack took up the chorus. The sims were besieged.

Sal shivered, next to Quick. Cold had nothing to do with it.
Wolves stay
, she signed.
Stay, stay, stay. We hungry, hungry. We go out, they eat. They eat enough, then finally go
.

The rest of the sims seemed sunk in the same fearful depression. None showed any sign of trying to drive the wolves away, nor did they reach for the bows that lay by the fire. Their wits were slower than humans' after all, Quick saw: they had trouble grasping that what served so well on the hunt would also defend them.

He was sure they would eventually have worked it through for themselves, but lacked the patience to wait. He shouted till he had Martin's attention. His voice also roused the devil's choir outside the windbreak, but he did not care about that.
Take bows, arrows
, he signed.
Shoot wolves
. He rendered that by pantomiming drawing a bow back to his ear.
Shoot wolves, those you not shoot run away
.

The big male rubbed his long, chinless jaw as he wrestled with the idea. He sprang to his feet with a wordless yell, ran for the weapons. He dashed to the windbreak, peered through. Quick heard a snarl from the far side. The wolf was not afraid of a sim, especially not with a barrier between them.

Martin aimed the bow through a gap in the branches. He let fly. The wolf's fierce growls turned to a yowl of agony that went on and on. The howls from the rest of the pack stopped abruptly.

Quick feared and hated wolves: after sims, they were the most dangerous creatures in the woods. A bear or a spearfang, of course, was more than a match for a wolf, but a pack of wolves would run even a spearfang off its prey. Had the trapper been able to stand, he would have gone to the windbreak to fire his rifle and pistol at the beasts.

The sims proved able to deal with things on their own. Martin dashed to another hole in the windbreak. He shot again. A wounded wolf ki-yied in pain. That was enough to send more males rushing up to grab the rest of the bows and arrows. In minutes, several more wolves had been hit, and the rest of the pack was in full retreat. The male sims took clubs and spears outside the windbreak to finish off the animals they had wounded.

Roast wolf tasted much better than Quick had thought it would.

A few days later, the weather turned clear and unseasonably warm. The trapper, with the aid of Sal and of the crutches he had fashioned weeks before, stood up for the first time since the sims had brought him into the clearing. The effort even a couple of steps required left him weak and gasping. His left leg was, from lack of use, almost as feeble as his right, which he still did not try to touch to the ground.

But he was upright at last. The sense of freedom that brought was intoxicating. He leaned over and kissed Sal on the lips. He had never done that before. The motion almost made him fall. Sal steadied him. They both laughed. He kissed her again. This time they did slide to the ground, carefully, still laughing, and ended up coupling.

Afterward Sal got up to gather wood, leaving Quick by himself; she took pleasure in the act, but knew nothing of lazing in the afterglow. A smile still on his lips, Quick watched her retreating form.

There, he thought, goes a hell of a woman. Hearing the word in his own mind brought him up short. It had been a while since he took a real look at how he felt about her.

That her body pleased him had been a surprise, but was no longer. Now he noticed her hairiness, her features, hardly more than had she been black or had very blue eyes. He was used to her, as one person grows used to another.

What did surprise him was how much he liked her. He knew that had grown from her caring for him, but there was more to it now. Her happiness mattered to him: why else had he given her his boots, and worried so much over whether Martin would take them away that he devised substitutes?

And if he desired her, and at the same time wanted to gladden her in other ways—He startled himself by speaking out loud. “If that's not love, I don't know what the devil is.”

The summer before, using that word in connection with a sim would have seemed as ridiculous as thinking of a female sim as a woman. He shrugged, not so disturbed as he expected to be. Living as part of the band had changed his perspective.

Sims weren't human, he thought, but they were people. He nodded slowly, pleased with the distinction. The sims had been living in these woods for who knew how many years. For the first time, Quick felt guilty over the way humans were supplanting wild sims all across the continent. Even tame sims depended on their masters' whim for security. The trapper had trouble finding that right, but at the same time did not know what else could have happened.

The more the sims hunted with bows, the deadlier they grew. The males brought in such an unending stream of game that the clearing constantly smelled of cooking meat. The whole band began to lose the gauntness that went with winter.

None of them, though, was fat; to Quick, a fat wild sim was a contradiction in terms. So he thought, at any rate, until he noticed Sal's belly beginning to protrude. Yet she showed no extra flesh on her limbs or in her face. The trapper scratched his head and kept on trying to get about with his crutches.

His right leg was never going to be the same. There was an enormous knot of bone where the leg had been broken and had not healed straight, which made it a little shorter than its mate. Quick stumped patiently back and forth, putting as much weight on it as he could. Day by day it bore more, but he knew he had made his last trapping run. He would need a stick for the rest of his life.

He was exercising—his mind, he would have sworn, somewhere far away—when the reason Sal was putting on weight dawned on him. He sat down heavily. No matter how often his body had joined with hers, he had never thought issue might spring from it. In hindsight, that was stupid. In hindsight, of course, a lot of things were stupid.

He stayed on his haunches, lost in his own thoughts. When Sal came back from a foraging trip, she gave him a reproachful look.
Not walk
? she asked.

No
. Henry Quick pointed at her.
Baby in you
?

She glanced down at herself. The bulge was obvious, so obvious that Quick again kicked himself for not figuring out what it meant before. She signed,
Baby in me
.

She did not say anything about him being the father, though since that first time she had rarely coupled with any partner but him. After a moment, he realized he had never seen any sim in the band use the sign for father. They valued mating for its own sake, not for the sake of children, and had never made the connection between the two.

He wondered what to do, and wished he were callous enough for her pregnancy to make no difference to him. He had intended to head back toward the Commonwealths as soon as the snow melted. Now … it would not be so easy.
You want me stay here
? he signed.

Where go
? Sal asked.

To men like me
.

Sal frowned. One of him was strange enough; visualizing many of his kind took more imagination than she had. At last she signed,
Winter not gone
.

“Only too right it's not,” Quick said aloud. Even on a mild day like this one, the breeze made his teeth chatter. At first he thought Sal had changed the subject, but after a moment he realized such subtlety was beyond her. She'd simply pointed out that, whatever he decided to do, he wasn't going to do it tomorrow, or the day after either.

He thought about what staying with the sims and never going back to the Commonwealths would be like. He cared for Sal as he had for no woman on the other side of the Rockies, and she was carrying his child. That counted for something, but he was not sure in which direction it swung the balance. Son of a sim was a bad enough thing to call a man, but father of a sim …? Still, he could be like a god if he chose to stay. There was so much the sims did not know—

He laughed at himself. Like a god, was it? A god who huddled naked, cold, and stinking in fir branches, who ate whatever was alive (or had been lately) and was glad to get it, who could not even use his own speech but had to content himself with a clumsy, limited makeshift? Anyone who bought godhood on those terms deserved to think he had it.