Norton, Andre - Anthology (20 page)

           
It was a
great country, the explorers agreed when they reached it. The way there had not
been easy. Miles before they reached the notch, they had had to cut their way
through a forest of alders that stretched along the sides of the river. Chujee
had gone ahead on foot, swinging an ax in time to his strides with the effortless
skill of an old woodsman. With each swing the steel bit clear through the soft
white wood of a slim trunk. Behind him, Nawputta had stumbled, the leading
agouti's reins gripped in his tail.

           
When they
had passed through the notch, they climbed up the south side of the gorge in
which they found themselves and in the distance saw another vast blue rampart,
like the one they had just cut through, stretching away to the northeast. (This
had once been called the
Allegheny Mountains
.) Age-old
white pines raised their somber blue-green spires above them. A huge
buffalo-shaped cervid, who was rubbing the velvet from his antlers against a
tree trunk, smelled them, snorted, and lumbered off.

           
"What's
that noise?" asked Nawputta.

           
They
listened, and heard a faint rhythmical thumping that seemed to come out of the
ground.

           
"Dunno,"
said Chujee. "Tree trunks knocking together, maybe? But there isn't enough
wind."

           
"Perhaps
it's
stones in a pothole in the river," said
Nawputta without conviction.

           
They kept
on to where the gorge widened out. Nawputta suddenly pulled his agouti off the
game trail and jumped down. Chujee rode over and found the scientist examining
a pile of bones.

           
Ten minutes
later he was still turning the bones over.

           
"Well,"
said Chujee impatiently, "aren't you going to let me in on the
secret?"

           
"Sorry.
I didn't believe my own senses at first. These are the bones of Men! Not
fossils; f
resh
bones! From the looks of them they're the remains of a
meal. There were three of them. From the holes in the skulls I'd say that our
friend Nguchoy or his partner shot them. I'm going to get a whole specimen, if
it's the last thing I do."

           
Chujee
sighed. "For a fellow who claims he hates to kill things, you're the
bloodthirstiest cuss I ever saw when you hear about a new species."

           
"You
don't understand, Chujee," objected Nawputta. "I'm
what's
called a fanatical conservationist. Hunting for fun not only doesn't amuse me;
it makes me angry when I hear about it. But securing a scientific specimen is
different."

           
"Oh,"
said Chujee.

           
They peered
out of the spruce thicket at the
Man.
He was a strange object to them, almost hairless, so that the scars on his
yellow-brown skin showed. He carried a wooden club, and padded noiselessly over
the pine needles, pausing to sniff the air. The sun glinted on the wiry bronze
hair that sprouted from his chin.

           
Nawputta
squeezed his trigger; the rifle went off with a deafening
ka-pow!
A
fainter
ka-pow!
bounced
back from the far wall
of the gorge as the Man's body struck the ground.

           
"Beautiful!"
cried Chujee.
"Right through the heart!
Couldn't have done better myself.
But I'd feel funny about
shooting one; they look so
Jmu."

           
Nawputta,
getting out his camera, tape measure, notebook, and skinning knife, said:
"In the cause of science I don't mind. Besides, I couldn't trust you not
to try for a brain shot and ruin the skull."

           
Hours later
he was still dissecting his prize and making sketches. Chujee had long since
finished the job of salting the hide, and was lolling about trying to pick up a
single pine needle with his tail.

           
"Yeah,"
he said, "I know it's a crime that we haven't got a tank of formaldehyde
so we could pack the whole carcass back, instead of just the skin and skeleton.
But we haven't got it, and never did have it, so why bellyache?"

           
Much as he
respected Nawputta, the zoologist got on his nerves at times.
Not that he didn't appreciate the scientific point of view
;
he was well-read and had some standing as an amateur naturalist. But, having
managed expeditions for years, he had long been resigned to the fact that you
can carry only so much equipment at a time.

           
He sat up
suddenly with a warning "S-s-st!" Fifty feet away a human face peered
out of a patch of brake ferns. He reached stealthily for his rifle; the face
vanished. The hair on Chujee's neck and scalp rose. He had never seen such a
concentration of malevolent hatred in one countenance. The ferns moved, and
there was a brief flash of yellow-brown skin among the trees.

           
"Better
hurry," he said. "The things may be dangerous when one of 'em's been
killed."

           
Nawputta
murmured vaguely that he'd have the skeleton cleaned in a few minutes. He was
normally no more insensitive to danger than the guide, but in the presence of
this scientific wonder, a complete Man, the rest of the world had withdrawn
itself into a small section of his mind.

           
Chujee,
still peering into the forest, growled: "It's funny that Nguchoy didn't
say anything to us about the Men. That is, unless he
wanted
us to be
eaten by the things. And why should he want that? Say, isn't that pounding
louder? I'll bet it's a Man pounding a hollow log for a signal. If Nguchoy
wanted to get rid of us, he picked an ingenious method. He and his partner kill
some of the Men, and we come along just when they've got nicely stirred up and
are out for
Jmu
blood. Let's get out of here!"

           
Nawputta
was finished at last. They packed the skin and skeleton of the Man, mounted,
and rode back the way they had come, glancing nervously into the shadows around
them. The pounding was louder.

           
They had
gone a couple of miles and were beginning to relax, when something soared over
their heads and buried
itself
quivering in the ground.
It was a crude wooden spear. Chujee fired his rifle into the underbrush in the
direction from which the spear had come. A faint rustle mocked him. The
pounding continued.

           
The notch
loomed high before them, though still several miles away. The timber was
smaller here, and there was more brush. They had originally come along the
river, and followed game trails up the side of the gorge at this point. They
hesitated whether or not to go back the same way.

           
"I
don't like to let them get above me," complained Nawputta.

           
"We'll
have to," argued Chujee. "The sides of the notch are too craggy; we'd
never get the agoutis over it."

           
They
started down the slope, on which the trees thinned out. A chorus of yells
brought them up sharply. The hairless things were pouring out of the deep woods
and racing toward them.

           
"The
agoutis won't make it with those loads," snapped Chujee, and he flung
himself off his mount.

           
Nawputta
did likewise, and his rifle crashed almost as soon as the guide's. The echoes
of their rapid fire made a deafening uproar in the gorge. Nawputta, as he fired
and worked the lever of his gun, wondered what he'd do when the magazine was
empty.

           
Then the
Men were bounding back into the shelter of the woods, shrieking with fear. They
vanished. Two of their number lay still, and a third thrashed about in a
raspberry bush and screeched.

           
"I
can't see him suffer," said Nawputta. He drew a bead on the Man's head and
fired. The Man quieted, but from the depths of the forest came screams of rage.

           
Chujee said
dryly, "They didn't interpret that as an act of mercy," as he
remounted.

           
The agoutis
were trembling. Nawputta noticed that he was shaking a bit himself. He had
counted his shots, and knew before he started to reload that he had had just
one shot left.

           
The yelping
cries of the Men followed them as they headed into the notch, but the things
didn't show themselves long enough for a shot.

           
"That
was too close for comfort," said Nawputta in a low voice, not taking his
eyes from the woods. "Say, hasn't somebody invented a rifle whose recoil
automatically reloads it, so that one can shoot it as fast as one pulls the
trigger?"

           
Chujee grunted.
"Yeah, he was up in the Colony demonstrating it last year. I tried it out.
It jammed regularly every other shot. Maybe they'll be practical some day, but
for the present I'll stick to the good old lever action. I suppose you were
thinking of what would have happened to us if the Men had kept on coming.
I— Say, look!"
He halted his animal. "Look up
yonder!"

           
Nawputta
looked, and said: "Those boulders weren't piled up on top of the cliff
when we came this way, were they?"

           
"That's
right. When we get into the narrowest part of the notch, they'll roll them down
on us. They'll be protected from our guns by the bulge of the cliff. There's no
pathway on the other side of the river. We can't swim the animals because of
the rapids, and even if we could, the river's so narrow that the rocks would
bounce and hit us anyway."

           
Nawputta
pondered. "We'll have to get through that bottle neck somehow; it'll be
dark in a couple of hours."

           
Both were
silent for a while.

           
Chujee
said: "There's something wrong about this whole business; Nguchoy and his
partner, I mean. If we ever get out of this—"

           
Nawputta
interrupted him: "Look! I could swim one agouti over here, and climb a
tree on the other side. I could get a good view of the top of the cliffs.
There's quite an open space there, and I could try to keep the Men away from
the boulders with my gun, while you took the agoutis down through the notch.
Then, if you can find a corresponding tree below the bottle neck, you could
repeat the process while I followed you down."

           
"Right!
I'll fire three shots when I'm ready for
you."

           
Nawputta
tethered his animal and hoisted himself up the big pine, his rifle held firmly
in his tail. He found a place where he could rest the gun on a branch to sight,
and waved to the guide, who set off at a trot down the narrow shelf along the
churning waters.

           
Sure
enough, the Men presently appeared on top of the cliff. They looked smaller
over the sights of Nawputta's rifle than he had expected; too small to make
practical targets as individuals even. He aimed into the thick of these dancing
pink midges and fired twice. The crash of the rifle was flung back sharply from
the south wall of the gorge. He couldn't see whether he had hit anything, but
the spidery things disappeared.

           
Then he
waited. The sun had long since disappeared behind the ridge, but a few slanting
rays poked through the notch; insects were briefly visible as motes of light as
they flew through these rays. Overhead a string of geese flapped southward.

           
When
Nawputta heard three shots, he descended, swam his agouti back across the
river, and headed downstream. The dark walls of the gorge towered almost
vertically over him. Above the roar of the rapids he heard a shot, then
another. The agouti flinched at the reports, but kept on. The shots continued.
The Men were evidently determined not to be balked of their prey this time.
Nawputta counted—seven—eight. The firing ceased, and the zoologist knew that
his companion was reloading.

           
There was a
rattle of loose rock. A boulder appeared over his head, swelled like a balloon,
swished past him, and went
plunk
in the river beside him, throwing spray
over him and his mount. He kicked the animal frantically and it bounded
forward, nearly pitching its rider into the river at a turn.

           
Nawputta
wondered desperately why Chujee hadn't begun shooting again. He looked up, and
saw that the air over his head seemed to be full of boulders hanging suspended.
They grew as he watched, and every one seemed headed straight for him. He bent
low and urged the animal; he saw black water under him as the agouti cleared a
recess in the trail with a bucking jump. He thought: "Why doesn't he
shoot? But it's too late now."

           
The
avalanche of rock struck the trail and the river behind him with a roar; one
rock passed him so closely that he felt its wind. The agouti in its terror
almost skidded off the trail. Then they were out in the sunlight again, and the
animal's zigzag leaps settled into a smooth gallop.

           
Nawputta
pulled up opposite Chujee's tree.