Luana (2 page)

Mother and cub were well into their meal when it happened.

Abruptly, a nervous buzzing filled the air. It was a totally alien, previously unencountered sound—a faint rasping at the sensitive ears of the panthers. Nervously, Uma looked up and around. There was nothing to be seen that might produce such a sound.

The odd buzzing grew louder. Uma growled at Chaugh. Despite his continuing hunger there was no thought of protest at that particular warning. He immediately left the bone he had been gnawing and shot off into the nearby jungle. Uma was nearly sated, but still reluctant to abandon her kill merely to a new sound. It grew louder, suddenly seemed to come from all around. She backed slowly off the carcass, snarling defiance.

Suddenly she saw it. It was a huge bird, the largest she had ever seen. It made strange sounds in its throat, and sun fire was coming from its beak.

And it was diving straight at her.

She whirled, and a few strides took her into the underbrush. By all reason she ought to have taken Chaugh and made for the safety of the distant den. Only a reluctance to abandon so fine a kill, especially one still untouched by scavengers, kept her by the watering place. She crouched nervously and held her ground. Nearby, Chaugh mewed puzzlement.

The bird of fire struck the distant lake once, wrapping itself in a sparkling curtain of sun-dappled water. It continued to charge towards Uma at terrific speed. At the last possible second she turned and ran, Chaugh close on her heels. In the branches above Wu clung tightly to Ohoh and made for the topmost limbs.

Then all was quiet. Somewhere a hornbill guffawed raucously. Already crickets essayed long-distance weather reports, and small furry things crunched leaves and worried for their own tiny lives. The night sounds were beginning.

They had no business going back. There was no need for such recklessness. But after so many days of hunger, Uma was not ready to go back to living on rats. She made a decision, turned, and started back the way they’d come. Chaugh followed cautiously at her heels, ready to run at the first warning growl.

The bird was there, all right. Now shaded to a rich red, sunlight washed its wings in molten copper. One of those wings was broken, bent and dangling unnaturally from the body proper. The great bird had slid all the way across the river, over the watering place, and into the first trees. Behind it the river ran somnolent as before, and the first fish of night were beginning to jump.

To Uma’s relief the bird had not touched the carcass of the bull. In fact, the monstrous flier seemed quite dead. Besides the badly broken wing, its beak no longer spouted sun fire and it was badly crushed in on itself. Now Uma’s curiosity came to the fore. She moved forward slowly, still ready to bolt into the bushes at the first hint of life. Truly, it was far larger than any bird she had ever seen.

She halted in mid-step.

The thing smelled not of the sweet soft odor of bird, but rather the powerful, heady, rarely encountered scent of man. Here indeed was time for caution!

Then there was a thump on the bird’s soaring back, and Uma looked up. Wu had landed there, swinging down from a drooping vine. She chittered curiously at the pantheress. Two days ago Uma’s sole interest in Wu would have been to regard her as a possible snack. But tonight she was stuffed on giraffe haunch and curious about everything. She ignored the chimp.

She moved closer to the head of the bird. Chaugh followed at her heels, now somewhat bored. Any danger was apparently past. His belly was fuller, and he was growing drowsy.

Wu put a hand on the skull of the bird and swung inside. A moment later Uma put both front paws on the edge of a crack in the skull and peered in. What they saw inside the head of the dead bird had no meaning for Wu or Uma.

Broken cases of books were scattered about. Flasks and beakers and other glassware, some still intact, most broken in place, spilled from soft packing containers. Other chemical research equipment lay clumped in odd piles about the cabin. The man smell was powerful and fresh in here.

Only the smell of death was stronger.

Two large man-things sat in the front of the skull, unmoving. One was a female man-thing, but only Wu guessed at that. To the left, silhouetted in the last light firing in through the broken eyes of the great bird, was a third man-thing. It sat quietly, perched on the edge of a metal ledge, and it did not seem to be dead.

Even so, Uma was puzzled. It was a man-thing, that was clear, but much smaller than the other two. Its color, like those of the two dead man-things, was different from the few man-things she had seen. It was a very light brown, though its long fur was as black as Uma’s own. Scraps of cloth-skin trailed from the small man-thing, and dark bruises showed about the body. There was little blood and what there was came from the other man-things.

From outward appearance, it was also a female.

“Coop-chi?” said Wu, and Uma snorted, startled at the sudden sound.

The man cub moved then. Its mouth went very round and it said, “Oh!” Then it performed a strange motion, putting one paw to its mouth and hissing at them.

“Shussh . . . be very quiet. Mummy and Daddy are asleep.” Then the man cub’s eyes rolled up and it fell to the floor. It made little noise, for it wasn’t much bigger than Chaugh.

A slight tensing of muscles brought Uma effortlessly into the cabin. Wu, very bold now, did not leave. Below, on the cooling sand, Chaugh waited and mewed impatiently. Uma could only sniff uncertainly at the man cub, but Wu went directly to it, prodded and tapped curiously here and there. Clearly the man cub was not dead. Both Uma and Wu knew this immediately.

Wu put a powerful arm around the cub’s waist and started to pull. That was when Uma growled warningly. She shook her great head and blinked, dazed at her own actions. Distant events were confusing themselves with present ones. Wu paused and looked up. Clear simian brown met unfathomable panther black in locked exchange. A unique, freak spark jumped between them.

The female chimpanzee had lost a second infant to a marauding black eagle. And Uma also remembered. When her other cubs had been killed she’d left that den forever, never to return. It had been better for Chaugh. Perhaps it would be better for this cub also. She growled again, but approvingly this time, and turned.

With the man cub under one arm, Wu moved into the forest. Uma paced alongside and a very curious Chaugh brought up the rear, sniffing occasionally at the strange long fur that trailed from the man cub.

At first, the man cub proved impossible. Despite Uma and Wu’s best efforts, it would only sit in one place and make strange mewing sounds and wet its face. This attitude changed slowly. When it finally began to eat the bananas and nuts and other fruits that Wu had gathered from the forest, Uma shared in the chimp’s pleasure. And then there was that first, hesitant day when it tried the meat that Uma always brought and prepared for it.

They were forced to move slowly with the new cub—Uma guarding the man cub while Wu gathered food from the jungle, Wu taking her turn on watch when hunger forced Uma and Chaugh to hunt. There was no conscious sense of partnership between the two, only an unwavering feeling of rightness, mixed with satisfaction neither could express.

Eventually the man cub was able to keep up with Wu and Ohoh in the trees, and with Uma on the ground. She grew stronger and larger. With each day, each month, Wu and Uma grew more certain than ever the cub was female. In a surprisingly short time she was able to gather her own fruits and berries, and even help Uma and Chaugh on the hunt.

One day they found a sick lion cub. It had crawled into the cover of the jungle edge from a peninsula of veldt. Possibly its mother had been killed, or its pride simply abandoned it. Neither Wu nor Uma wished to have anything to do with it. Instead it was the man cub, now called Luana, who insisted on adopting and caring for the shivering orphan. She scolded Wu and Uma for their lack of concern, a shocking process neither female had yet grown used to. But if the man cub wanted to trouble herself with the sickly kitten, neither mother would object. She was now quite capable of hunting for two.

In the natural course of time Uma grew old and less steady in herself until one day, on the hunt, she fell afoul of a stampeding water buffalo and was killed. Chaugh, grown now to enormous proportions, elected to stay with his childhood playmates.

Then came the day when circling for food brought them back to a spot that seemed somehow familiar. The great dead bird was still there, turning red now not from the fickle sun, but with rust and metal rot. Wu tried to keep her back, but there was no keeping back the distant memories that impelled Luana forward. The old chimp could only watch silently.

Luana entered the cabin half hopefully, half fearfully. She found nothing, as Wu could have told her. The books were still there, though. The precocious Luana had been able to read. Printed shapes on paper still had meaning, and the pictures helped. Despite Wu’s nervous denial, there was knowledge to be gained here.

For a long time then they lived near the watering place. But not in the dead bird itself, for at night Luana could not abide it. Besides, Chaugh pointed out gruffly, their presence so close to the watering place would frighten away good game. The panther was contemptuous of Luana’s visits to the dead bird, but held his tongue. The hunting here was excellent, and they found an abandoned den nearby in a giant’s jackstraw tumble of dead trees. If man-sister wanted to waste her time thus, he would not object.

Jukakhan, the young lion, was less tolerant. He had no memories of the strangely cold, incredibly hard bird-thing. Despite man-sister’s assurances, he could not be compelled to enter it. Old Wu, still fearful, scolded Luana continually, and then scolded her for ignoring the scolding. Ohoh, now nearly grown, watched curiously at first. Later, he found the bird-thing a delightful plaything to explore.

One day Luana showed them a thing she had made. It was long and thin, part irontree heart and part bird-thing, with tough liana mating the two. It looked a lot like the two long claws she had fashioned from the skin of the bird, only much bigger.

“What is that?” muttered Jukakhan. “Man-sister?”

“It’s called a ‘spear,’ ” she rumbled back. “I saw a picture of it in one of the books and thought I could make one, too.”

“A spear?” the lion growled, rolling its back in the clean sand. “What does it do? What is it good for?”

“It’s like a long claw, like the little ones I made before, only it’s used differently. The pictures show how.”

“Bah!” replied Jukakhan. “What good is a single claw?” He flexed, showing a great many indeed. “ ’Tis better to have several, I think.”

He rolled over onto his feet and sprang playfully. Luana quickly reversed the long claw so that the wooden end faced up and the tip of sharpened bird-skin dug into the ground. Jukakhan hit the wood chest first. It bent slightly but the heavy irontree stalk did not break. The lion’s eyes bugged and all the breath went out of him with a whoosh. He landed heavily but managed to keep his feet. On a branch high above, Ohoh and Wu nearly fell off the branch with laughter. Chaugh, who knew man-sister’s abilities a little better, merely growled knowingly.

Jukakhan coughed, snarled. The sound would have chilled the blood of a normal man, but Luana could read the lion’s eyes.

“I still keep my opinion—but I modify it, too.”

“As well you’d better,” Luana grinned. “If I’d used the other end you’d now have a hole in you large enough for a fanged one to pass through.”

“True enough,” agreed Chaugh.

“All right, brother,” Jukakhan replied playfully, cuffing the panther on the side of his head. “I have confessed my error; let me be, now.”

“Yes, let it be, you two great corpulent shouting idiots!” chittered Ohoh. He bounced back and forth on his branch above while Wu watched tolerantly. Taunting the big cats was the young chimp’s greatest pleasure at times.

“And you, chatterbox,” Jukakhan called, “mind your manners or one day I shall set sentiment aside and have you for breakfast.”

Ohoh ripped off a large brown nut and threw it. It bounced off Chaugh’s flank and the panther started.

“You and what five others, blowhard?”

Luana giggled, a high, musical tinkling like water running onto metal plates. Her brothers were pleased. It was an odd sound and one they had tried to copy, without success. Nor could they properly analyze
how
it affected them. Nonetheless, they were pleased.

Luana continued to grow. When her too small rags finally succumbed to the subtle onslaught of weather and dry rot, she made small bindings for parts of her body from animal skin. She still foraged in the trees with Ohoh and Wu for fruits and edible leaves, a pastime which Jukakhan and Chaugh found unbearably insulting. They could not understand how, now that she was a fine hunter, she could continue to eat weeds and roots. Luana continued to eat vegetable matter from force of habit, which was just as well for her. A diet of pure meat and fish would not have been good.

Her brothers’ protests and arguings would vanish when she took up the metal claws and went with them to the hunting places. Working together, the three of them rarely failed to bring down a fine wildebeest or impala or wart-hog. Then a good hunt would be followed by a better meal.

Nor would any other predators ever dispute their kill. Luana was a strange, threatening figure to most, and Jukakhan and Chaugh were true giants of their kind. The three roamed at will, crossing territories with impunity. Somehow Luana would convince a territory master that they meant no challenge, and so they passed where others would have been called to fight to the death. Even the Great Pride took no exception when the three crossed its section of veldt and forest, the females merely snarling irritably and keeping a closer eye on their cubs. Not a few eyed the towering Jukakhan with something quite other than animosity.

Wu had continued to age. A day came when the old chimpanzee was startled by a harmless tree-lizard. She jumped quickly for a nearby branch, but age and decaying strength betrayed her and she crashed to the forest floor far below. All mourned, but only Ohoh disappeared.