Poul Anderson - Fortune Hunter

After cleaning up indoors, I stepped outside for a look at the evening. I’d only moved here a few days ago. Before, I’d been down in the woods. Now I was above timberline, and there’d just been time to make my body at home—reassemble the cabin and its furnishings, explore the area, deploy the pickups, let lungs acquire a taste for thinner air. My soul was still busy settling in.

I missed sun-flecks spattered like gold on soft shadow-brown duff, male ruggedness and woman-sweet odor of pines and their green that speared into heaven, a brook that glittered and sang, bird calls, a splendidly antlered wapiti who’d become my friend and took food from my hand. (He was especially fond of cucumber peels. I dubbed him Charlie.) You don’t live six months in a place, from the blaze of autumn through the iron and white of winter, being reborn with the land when spring breathes over it—you don’t do this and not keep some of that place ever afterward inside your bones.

Nevertheless, I’d kept remembering high country, and when Jo Modzeleski said she’d failed to get my time extended further, I decided to go up for what remained of it. That was part of my plan; she loved the whole wilderness as much as I did, but she kept her heart on its peaks and they ought to help make her mood right. However, I myself was happy to return.

And as I walked out of the cabin, past my skeletal flitter, so that nothing human-made was between me and the world, suddenly the whole of me was again altogether belonging where I was.

This base stood on an alpine meadow. Grass grew thick and moist, springy underfoot, daisy-starred. Here and there bulked boulders the size of houses, grayness scored by a glacier which had once gouged out the little lake rippling and sparkling not far away; a sign to me that I also was included in eternity. Everywhere around, the Wind River Mountains lifted snow crowns and the darker blues of their rock into a dizzy-ingly tall heaven where an eagle hovered. He caught on his wings the sunlight which slanted out of the west. Those beams seemed to fill the chilliness, turning it somehow molten; and the heights were alive with shadows.

I smelled growth, more austere than in the forest but not the less strong. A fish leaped, I saw the brief gleam and an instant later, very faintly through quietness, heard the water clink. Though there was no real breeze, my face felt the air kiss it.

I buttoned my mackinaw, reached for smoking gear, and peered about. A couple of times already, I’d spied a bear. I knew better than to try a Charlie-type relationship with such a beast, but surely we could share the territory amicably; and if I could learn enough of his ways to plant pickups where they could record his life—or hers, in which case she’d be having cubs—

No. You’re bound back to civilization at the end of this week. Remember?

Oh, but I may be returning .

As if in answer to my thought, I heard a whirr aloft. It grew, till another flitter hove into sight. Jo was taking me up on my invitation at an earlier hour than I’d expected when I said, “Come for dinner about sundown.” Earlier than I’d hoped? My heart knocked. I stuck pipe and tobacco pouch back in my pockets and walked fast to greet her.

She landed and sprang out of the bubble before the airpad motors were silent. She always had been quick and graceful on her feet. Otherwise she wasn’t much to look at: short, stocky, pug nose, pale round eyes under close-cropped black hair. For this occasion she’d left off the ranger’s uniform in favor of an iridescent clingsuit; but it couldn’t have done a lot for her even if she had known how to wear it.

“Welcome,” I said, took both her hands, and gave her my biggest smile.

“Hi.” She sounded breathless. Color came and went across her cheeks. “How are you?”

“Okay. Sad at leaving, naturally.” I turned the smile wry, so as not to seem self-pitiful.

She glanced away. “You’ll be going back to your wife, though.”

Don’t push too hard . “You’re ahead of yourself, Jo. I meant to have drinks and snacks ready in advance. Now you’ll have to come in and watch me work.”

“I’ll help.”

“Never, when you’re my guest. Sit down, relax.” I took her arm and guided her toward the cabin.

She uttered an uncertain laugh. “Are you afraid I’ll get in your way, Pete? No worries. I know these knockdown units—I’d better, after three years—”

I was here for four, and that followed half a dozen years in and out of other wildernesses, before I decided that this was the one I wanted to record in depth, it being for me the loveliest of the lovely .

“—and they only have one practical place to stow any given kind of thing,” she was saying. Then she stopped, which made me do likewise, turned her head from side to side, drank deep of air and sunglow. “Please, don’t let me hurry you. This is such a beautiful evening. You were out to enjoy it.”

Unspoken: And you haven’t many left, Pete. The documentation project ended officially last year. You’re the last of the very few mediamen who got special permission to stay on and finish their sequences; and now, no more stalling, no more extra time; the word is Everybody Out.

My unspoken reply: Except you rangers. A handful of you, holding degrees in ecology and soil biotics and whatnot—a handful who won in competition against a horde—does that give you the right to lord it over all this?

“Well, yes,” I said, and segued to: “I’ll enjoy it especially in present company.”

“Thank you, kind sir.” She failed to sound cheery.

I squeezed her arm. “You know, I am going to miss you, Jo. Miss you like hell.” This past year, as my plan grew within me, I’d been cultivating her. Not just card games and long conversations over the sensiphone; no in—the-flesh get-togethers for hikes, rambles, picnics, fishing, birdwatching, deerwatching, starwatching. A mediaman gets good at the cultivation of people, and although this past decade had given me scant need to use that skill, it hadn’t died. As easy as breathing. I could show interest in her rather banal remarks, her rather sappy sentimental opinions… “Come see me when you get a vacation.”

“Oh, I’ll—I’ll call you up … now and then ... if Marie won’t…

mind.”

“I mean come in person. Holographic image, stereo sound, even scent and temperature and every other kind of circuit a person might pay for the use of—a phone isn’t the same as having a friend right there.”

She winced. “You’ll be in the city.”

“It isn’t so bad,” I said in my bravest style. “Pretty fair-sized apartment, a lot bigger than that plastic shack yonder. Soundproofed. Filtered and conditioned air. The whole conurb fully screened and policed. Armored vehicles available when you sally forth.”

“And a mask for my nose and mouth!” She nearly gagged.

“No, no, that hasn’t been needed for a long while. They’ve gotten the dust, monoxide, and carcinogens down to a level, at least in my city, which—”

“The stinks. The tastes. No, Pete, I’m sorry, I’m no delicate flower but the visits to Boswash I make in line of duty are the limit of what I can take… after getting to know this land.”

“I’m thinking of moving into the country myself,” I said. “Rent a cottage in an agrarea, do most of my business by phone, no need to go downtown except when I get an assignment to document something there.”

She grimaced. “I often think the agrareas are worse than any ’tropolis.”

“Huh?” It surprised me that she could still surprise me.

“Oh, cleaner, quieter, less dangerous, residents not jammed elbow to elbow, true,” she admitted. “But at least those snarling, grasping, frenetic city folk have a certain freedom, a certain… life to them. It may be the life of a ratpack, but it’s real, it has a bit of structure and spontaneity and—In the hinterlands, not only nature is regimented. The people are.”