Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1953 (12 page)

           
“So am I,” admitted Sam, and yawned.
“Tonight we will sleep. If Giluhda comes sniffing around our cave tonight,
perhaps he will smell death. It is waiting here for him. Soon it will go out
and look for him.”

had
taken up their quarters in the cave by the
Big
River
. They breakfasted on venison once more, and
then Sam announced that they would head for the maple tree against which
Giluhda raged so repeatedly.

           
“If he comes there now, he will come
again,” said Sam, “and we can find him and kill him. But we must be sure that
he is somewhere else for a while.”

           
“Let him go to the drinking place
and get water,” replied his Indian friend, “and then he will go far away to get
food. He has eaten all the plants he likes near the drinking place. We will
watch until he is come and gone, then we will make ready to kill him.”

           
“That is good talk,” approved Sam.
“Let us go now.”

           
Otter put out his hand for the huge
spear. “I will carry this,” he said.

           
“And I will carry these,” added Sam,
taking the deerskin which had served for a bellows and also his own blanket,
folded and rolled. “We will need them to hold big stones, to make our spear
heavy when it falls on Giluhda from above.”

           
“Take my robe, too,” said Otter, and
Sam added it to his package,
then
took a gourd to the
river to draw a supply of water. He slung these things across his shoulders,
picked up his bow and
quiver
of arrows, and led the
way from the cave.

           
They trudged upstream toward the
drinking place. As they approached the cleared ground where Sam had first fired
at Giluhda, Otter moved ahead of Sam, motioned his friend to keep close to his
heels, and took some paces forward with great care. Finally he lifted his hand
to signal a halt, lowered the spear to the ground, and stood up again to listen.

           
“I hear something,” he whispered to
Sam, very softly.

           
Sam heard it, too—a loud and
powerful splashing.

           
He, too, laid down his burden of
robes and skins. Both he and Otter put arrows to their bowstrings, and then
they stole forward until they reached the clump of dogwoods from which Giluhda
had once moved to attack them.

           
They could see across the clearing
to the river. There stood Giluhda, his great hind feet planted in the mud and
his sturdy forelegs immersed in the water up to their thick-jointed knees. The
gigantic, hairy body swayed from side to side, stirring and churning the mud
and water together at the river’s edge. Giluhda’s trunk dipped down, then up
again to splash water over his shaggy flanks. Finally he held his trunk under
the surface of the river for several moments, then brought it out and curved it
backward over his shoulders. From it he blew a shining stream upon himself.

           
“Giluhda likes to go into the water
two times each day,” Otter said to Sam under his breath. “Maybe it is part of
his medicine.”

           
They stayed where they were,
watching the mountainous bulk wade out deeper. Giluhda stamped on the river
bottom, then lay down on one side and soaked luxuriously. He relaxed there,
like any pig in a wallow, and they could hear him grunt with satisfaction.
After a time he rose and turned over to he on the other side.

           
Finally he came lumbering out. His
coat of hair was dark and dripping from the bath as he trod heavily across the
middle of the clearing.

           
Sam felt as though his heart came
into his throat when that unthinkably massive enemy went past the place where
they hid. But Giluhda did not pause, or look their way. He headed for the game
trail and walked in among the trees. Otter watched him go, signalled Sam to
wait, and crept across at a crouch to where he could look down the open way.
After a moment he beckoned to Sam with a sweep of his bare arm. They followed
as quietly as two hunting cats, keeping within view of Giluhda’s broad rear
quarters.

           
Thus they went for a hundred yards or
so, Giluhda in complete assurance, Sam and Otter in silence and vigilance. Then
Giluhda stopped suddenly, and so did his two stalkers.

           
They saw him turn from the trail,
past the pair of oaks between which Sam had fled on the day of their first
effort to kill the big foe of the Twilight People. Creeping a few paces closer,
they watched.

           
He tramped toward the maple in which
he had treed Sam, and they heard his ill-tempered grumbling as he approached
it. Bowing his mighty brown boulder of a head, he butted at the tree as though
he were a huge, hornless goat. The tree swayed and creaked complainingly before
the pressure he brought to bear. Then he drew away and looked up into the
branches.

           
“He is trying to see if you are
there,” Otter muttered to Sam.

           
Sam gazed at Giluhda, and wildly
wished that his rifle were uninjured and back in his hands. Giluhda’s broad
left flank turned toward him. A bullet sent into that flank, well back of the
foreleg, might drive through the great layers of fat flesh and into the big,
angry heart. Or a shot just in front of the ear might find a thin bone at the
temple and plough to the brain. Sam restrained a mournful sigh at such a chance
for a shot, with no gun to aim and fire.

           
Giluhda prodded and pushed at the
maple tree again, then gave up and went on away through the forest. They
watched him go, crashing among the smaller growths. At last he was out of range
of their sight and hearing, and they both stood up and looked at each other.

           
“Will he come back?” asked Sam.

           
“First he will look for food,” said
Otter. “I have said that the things he likes are all gone from this part of the
woods near the river. He will come back when he has eaten and is ready to drink
again. That will be a long time.”

           
“And he comes here to remember that
he hates us,” added Sam.

           
He walked to a point under the maple
tree, and studied its racked stem and the gouged, trampled earth around it.
Then he returned to the twin oaks and stared thoughtfully up into their
branches.

           
“Let’s bring the spear and the other
things to this place,” he said at last. “Quickly, so that we can make
everything ready before Giluhda comes back.”

           
They set off at a trot for the place
where they had left their equipment. Almost as swiftly they bore the things to
the very roots of the two oaks, and put them down again.

           
“Now what will we do?” asked Otter.
“What do you see up there in the tree?”

           
For Sam gazed
again into the branches of the oaks.
With his eye he selected a strong
horizontal
one, that
sprang out from one oak almost
directly above the spot where Giluhda had been briefly lodged. It was at least
twenty-five feet from the ground, and a good six inches through at its mid
point.

           
“That one will do,” he said, half to
himself, and turned away without answering Otter’s question. He saw a length of
vine, strung back and forth through some shrubs, and with his knife he cut it
away and dragged it free. He wound it into a coil and tucked it through his
belt.

           
“Now I am going to climb,” he said
to Otter, and suited the action to the word. He drew himself up to the lowest
fork, then to another above that, and so on until he sat astride the horizontal
branch. From that position he sighted carefully downward, shifting his body
once or twice to bring himself above the very spot where Giluhda had wedged
himself. Finally he knicked the bark with his knife, to indicate an exact point
on the branch, and then he uncoiled the length of vine and lowered one end.

           
“Tie the spear to the vine for me,”
he called down from his high perch.

           
Otter did so, and Sam pulled up the
heavy weapon, hand over hand. He laid it crosswise to the horizontal branch,
like an arrow across a bow, with the steel point aiming downward. Then, with
one end of the vine, he tied it at the very place where he had nicked the bark,
so that one third of the butt end of the spear extended above the limb and the
rest hung below. This done, he slid quickly down to earth and stood under the
spear point. He looked upward, then at the space between the trees, then at the
spear again.

           
“If Giluhda is caught between those
trees again,” he remarked to Otter, “the spear will hang just above his back.”

           
“And you will cut the vine and let
it fall,” guessed Otter.

           
“I will let it fall, but it must be
held by more than a vine,” said Sam. He knelt and unrolled the remains of the
second deer hide. It was almost as stiff and dry as parchment.

           
“We must soak this,” he decided, and
scooped out a hollow place between two roots of the largest oak. He crammed the
hide into this, and poured all the water from his gourd on top of it. Sloppy,
half-liquid mud churned up, covering the hide from sight.

           
“Now,” he said, “you must help me to
find stones. I want heavy ones, as big as your head.”

           
Otter had ceased to ask questions
about his white friend’s wishes and methods. He poked obediently among the
trees. “Here is one,” he reported after a moment. “And here is another.”

           
Sam, too, rummaged around and found
several pieces of rock, each of them weighing from twenty to twenty-five
pounds. He and Otter stacked them in a pile under the oaks, and went searching
for still more. For fully two hundred yards around the oaks they quested,
bringing back the stones they discovered. After more than an hour’s searching
and lugging, they had collected some forty pieces. Their total weight would be
several hundred pounds, Sam calculated.

           
“That is enough,” he announced, and
dragged the hide from where it had been soaking. The water had not removed all
of the stiff dryness, but it was more supple, and had stretched somewhat. He
spread it flat and with his knife cut two broad straps, each about three inches
wide and the length of the hide itself. He tucked these in his belt, and again
he climbed the tree to the branch where his spear was fastened.

           
He used the broad pieces of soaked
hide to tie the ash pole securely, taking care not to disturb the weapon’s
perpendicular position. With all his strength he drew the lashings tight, and
fastened them with hard double knots. Scrambling down, he shook out his
blanket, then Otter’s robe, then the oiled skin that had been the bellows.

           
“These will hold our stones,” he
said. “We will make bags of the robe and the blanket. Help me. We will use
strips of the soaked deer hide to fasten the edges together.”

           
It was quickly done. The work looked
crude, but it was stout. Sam pointed up to the spear again.

           
“We will fasten them to the spear,
just below where I tied it to the branch,” he said. “Then we will put in the
stones, one by one. That will make the spear, when it falls, heavy enough to
push into Giluhda’s body.”

           
Otter nodded, to show that he
understood. Sam mounted back to the spear, with more strips of wet hide. He let
down his vine cord. Otter fastened the bellows to it, and then Sam drew up in
turn the bags made from his blanket and Otter’s robe. All three of these he
lashed securely to the spear haft, so that they bagged emptily downward.