A Different Flesh (11 page)

The spearfang's powerful forelimbs wrapped round the buffalo's neck. Despite the beast's panic-stricken thrashing and bucking, the spearfang wrestled it to the ground. Excitement made the big cat's short, stumpy tail quiver absurdly.

The struggle went on for several minutes, the buffalo trying desperately to break free and the spearfang to hold it in place with front legs and claws. At last the spearfang found the grip it wanted. Its jaws gaped hugely. It sent its fangs slashing across the buffalo's throat. Blood fountained. The buffalo gave a final convulsive shiver and was still. The spearfang began to feed, tearing great hunks of dripping meat from the buffalo's flank.

Kenton swung up his musket, glad he had a double charge in the gun. Luckily, the spearfang was exposing its left side to him. He released the set trigger, took a deep breath and held it to steady his aim, touched the second trigger.

His flint and gunpowder were French, and of the best quality; only a farmer would use Virginia-made powder. Along with the twin triggers, they ensured that the musket would not misfire or hang fire.

The spearfang screamed. It whirled and snapped at its flank. But the wound was not mortal, for the spearfang bounded into the woods the way it had come.

“Oh, a pox,” Kenton said; the shot had struck too far forward to pierce the heart. He paused to reload before pursuing the big cat. He was not mad enough to follow a wounded spearfang armed only with a brace of pistols.

As he had been trained, Charles trotted ahead to find the trail. Kenton soon waved him back to a position of safety; the spearfang had left a blood-spattered spoor any fool could follow.

That overconfidence almost cost the scout his life. Once in the forest, the spearfang doubled back on its trail. Kenton did not suspect it was there till it burst from the undergrowth a bare ten yards to his left.

Those yawning jaws seemed a yard wide, big enough to gulp him down at a single bite. He had not time to turn and shoot; afterwards, he thought himself lucky to have got off a shot across his body, his musket cradled in the crook of his elbow.

With a lighter gun, he probably would have broken his arm. But one of the reasons he carried a five-foot, eleven-pound rifle was to let him take such snap shots at need. Because of its weight, it had less kick.

The spearfang pitched sideways as the ball, which weighed almost a third of an ounce, slammed into its face just below a glaring eye. An instant later, Charles's hatchet clove the beast's skull. Kenton thought his bullet had already killed it, but was honest enough to admit he was never quite sure. His narrow escape made his hands shake so much he spilled powder as he reloaded, something he had not done since he was a boy.

Charles had to set a foot on the spearfang's carcass to tug his hatchet free. He used it and his knife to worry the fangs from the cat's upper jaw, handed Kenton the bloody trophies.

“Thanks.” The scout wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with the back of his hand. “That, by God, is
£5
I earned.”

The sim shrugged. With his simple wants, money meant little to him. Ever practical, he signed,
Good meat back there
.

Here in this unexplored territory, £5 was of no more immediate use to Kenton than to Charles. The scout nodded, made his wits return to the business at hand. “So there is. Let's get at it.” He and the sim walked back toward the buffalo the spearfang had killed.

Kenton made a semi-permanent camp near the salt lick, building a lean-to of branches and leaves for protection against the warm summer rain. He went back to the lick for both deer and buffalo, and added three more sets of spearfang teeth in less hair-raising fashion than he had collected the first.

The hunting was so easy it required only a small part of his time. He ranged widely over the countryside, adding to his map and journal. The more he traveled, the richer he judged the land. Not only was it full of game, but the rich soil and abundant water were made for farming.

Sometimes Charles accompanied him on his journeys, sometimes he went alone. The sim traveled too, though not as widely as Kenton. Often he would bring back to camp small game he had slain himself: rabbits, turkey, a beaver, a porcupine that proved amazingly tasty once it was skinned. They made a welcome change of diet.

Saw strange thing
, Charles signed after one of his solitary jaunts.
Many buffalo bones
. He opened and closed his hands several times, indicating some number larger than he could count.

He led Kenton to the spot the next morning. The scout whistled in surprise as he looked down into a dry wash at the tangle of whitened bones there. “Must be a hundred head, easy,” he said.

Charles repeated the sign for an indefinitely large number. Together they scrambled down the steep side of the ravine, going slowly and often grabbing at bushes for support. Kenton tried to imagine what could have made a herd plunge down such a slope. Even at full stampede, the buffalo should have turned aside.

Then the scout was among the bones. Scavengers had pulled apart many skeletons. Bushes were pushing through rib cages, climbing over skulls. The herd had met disaster at least a year ago, Kenton judged.

Many great legbones were neatly split lengthwise, almost all the skulls smashed open. When Kenton found a fist-sized lump of stone with an edge chipped sharp, it only confirmed what he had already guessed. He tossed the hand-axe up and down.

Charles recognized it at once.
Sims. Wild sims
.

“Aye. No animal could've gone for the beasts' brains and marrow so.” Likely, Kenton thought, the subhumans had driven the buffalo into the gully. He glanced round, as if expecting to see a sim crouching behind every shrub. He had never doubted sims lived west of the mountains, but this was the first sure sign of it, and a sobering reminder.

Big killing
, Charles signed, his eyes traveling the scattered bones. Kenton wondered what was going through his mind, wondered if he was proud of the slaughter his distant cousins had worked. Some Englishmen trained their sims to hate and fear the wild ones. The scout had never seen the need for that. Finding out he was wrong might prove costly.

He did his best to keep his voice casual. “Let me know before you join them, eh?”

Charles's face was troubled.
Joke
? he signed at last.

Kenton dimly realized how hard it had to be for sims to keep track of men's vagaries they could not share. “Joke,” he said firmly. Charles nodded.

They spent a while longer investigating the ravine. Kenton turned up a few more stone tools, but nothing to show that the sims had come back to this immediate area since the year before. That was some relief, if not much.

When Charles wanted to go off for some purpose of his own, Kenton said only, “I'll see you back at the camp this evening.” The last thing he wanted was the sim thinking he mistrusted him. He wished he had kept his mouth shut instead of letting his stupid wisecrack out.

Thinking such dark thoughts, the scout decided to return to the salt lick. The chunk of venison he had cached in a tree probably would not be fit to eat by nightfall, not in this heat. And game was so easy to come by west of the mountains that he did not have to put up with meat even a little off.

He wormed his way to his familiar cover. Excitement coursed through him as he looked into the clearing round the lick. A spearfang had just slain a plump doe and was dragging the carcass back into the bushes to feed. Almost without conscious volition, his rifle sprang to his shoulder and spoke.

The spearfang yowled with anguish as it staggered away from its kill. Kenton reloaded, hurried after it. He held his gun at the ready, although he did not think he would need it for such desperate work as before. The big cat's uncertain gait reflected a wound that would soon be fatal.

So it proved. Less than a furlong from the fallen deer, the scout found the spearfang dead, its mouth gaping in a last defiant snarl. Insects were already lighting on the carcass. They buzzed away as Kenton stooped beside it.

He set down his rifle, used his knife and a stone to pry out the beast's fangs. They were a fine pair, not much shorter than the gap between his thumb and little finger when he splayed them wide. He bound the two long canines with a rawhide thong, slipped them into his pouch with the rest.

He caught a slight motion out of the corner of his eye. Still on his knees, he turned. “See, I'll be rich yet, Char—”

The words caught in his throat. The sim behind him was naked, and shorter and stockier than his companion. It hefted a stone in its right hand.

The tableau held for several seconds. The sim stared at Kenton as if unsure it believed its eyes. The scout cursed himself for putting his musket to one side. The sim could hurl its rock before he grabbed the gun. And even at a bare twenty feet, he might miss with a pistol.

All the same, his right hand was easing toward his belt when three more sims, all adult males, slid silently out of the woods. He ground his teeth—no chance now to get rid of the lot of them.

Perhaps he could frighten them off. He drew a pistol. That alone would have sent wild Virginia sims running; they had seen too often what guns could do. But these sims knew nothing of firearms. One drew back its arm to cast its stone.

Kenton fired the pistol into the air. At the report and the burst of white smoke, the sims shouted in fright. The scout thought they would flee, but the one that had its rock ready let fly with it, and that rallied the others. They rushed at Kenton.

He dodged the missile, snatched out his other gun, and fired at point-blank range. As happens too mournfully often in the heat of action outside romances, he missed. He brought the pistol down club-fashion on a sim's head. The subhuman staggered but still surged forward to grapple with him; sims had thicker skulls than humans.

Afterward, the scout was just as glad not to remember much of his fight with the sims. What he could recall hurt. He never quite lost consciousness, but after a while he could not fight back much, either. The sims were not sophisticated enough for deliberate cruelty, but when four of them were beating him into submission the result came close enough to satisfy any but the most exacting critic.

When he came back to himself, one sim was carrying him by the feet and another with its hands dug into his armpits. He wondered why the sims had not killed him on the spot. Twisting his head, he saw that the four he had battled were only part of a larger band. There must have been ten males altogether, most of them bearing big joints of meat from the deer the spearfang had killed and from the spearfang itself.

With so much other food, he thought, they could afford to indulge their curiosity about him. Humans were as fascinating to sims as the reverse; indeed, sims had kidnapped Kenton's great-grandmother when she was a baby, and had done nothing worse than compare her with one of their own infants before her father rescued her.

Men would have made the scout walk once they saw he could. The sims kept carrying him. Before long, he decided he would rather have walked; it was quite the most uncomfortable journey he had ever taken.

The hunting party was traveling northwest. They topped a ridge and started down the other side. Kenton saw smoke in the distance. The rise must have kept him from spying it before; his exploratory jaunts had gone farther south.

He still had some hope. Along with a hind leg of the doe, one of his captors was carrying his musket. The sim had no idea it held a weapon, or at least not a firearm. It was toting the gun upside down, and now and then would swing it like a club. That might have prompted it to pick up the piece, that or its never having seen anything like the musket before.

Another sim, worse luck, had appropriated the scout's belt. The subhumans might have been ignorant of gunpowder, but they had seen Kenton use a pistol as a bludgeon. To them, his powderhorn and the hilt of his knife (which was all they had seen, as it was still in its sheath) might have made similar weapons.

The very notion of a belt was new to them. One set down the haunch it was carrying and wrapped a vine around its middle. Then it stopped, looking foolish; the chipped stone it had borne with the meat had neither handle nor sheath to attach to the makeshift waistband.

The sim that had kept its comrades from panicking when Kenton fired in the air let out a loud hoot. It pulled free another, shorter length of vine. Pushing out its lips with concentration, it wrapped one end of the vine several times around the stone tool and the other around the leafy belt.

The scout would not have cared to have a large rock knocking against his thigh at every step he took, but from their grins, calls, and embraces, all the sims seemed to be greeting the contrivance with the same rapture Englishmen would have given to a flying machine.

Twilight was near when the band of sims made its triumphal entry into the camp. Females and young came pelting forward to greet the returning hunters. They shrieked with delight when they saw the bounty of meat the males were bringing to them, then suddenly fell silent on noticing Kenton.

The sims that had carried him so long dumped him unceremoniously on the ground not far from the fire. They wrapped vines around and around his arms and legs. He was not sure they made any knots, but the tough plants were so twisted over and under each other that it hardly mattered.

Then the whole troop was all over him, touching, pinching, prodding; their heavy smell filled his nostrils. His clothing fascinated them. They kept running their fingers over the sueded leather. At first they seemed to think it part of him, but then they discovered his tunic could be unbuttoned, his trousers lowered.

The sims pointed and hooted at the relatively hairless skin they had exposed. Kenton felt a horrid stab of fear as they poked at his privates, but the examination, though rough, was not malicious. And with his bladder full to bursting, it was a relief to void himself without having to foul his trousers.