H. Piper - Fuzzies and Other People

Once, he saw a big bird in a tree, its head under its wing. It was too far to throw; he wished he had one of the bows Pappy Jack and Pappy Gerd had taught how to make, and some arrows. That bird would have been good to eat. He wished he were back at Hoksu-Mitto, with Pappy Jack and Mamma and Baby and Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko and Cinderella… and Unka Pancho, and Auntie Lynne, and Pappy Gerd and Mummy Woof, and Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome, and… as he walked, he said all the names of all his friends at Hoksu-Mitto, wishing that he was with them again.

Sometime, he thought, after sun-highest time — noon, lunchtime — he saw a zarabunny sitting hunched into a ball of fur. It didn’t like the rain any more than he did. He hurled a stone and hit it, and then ran to it before it could get up, and stabbed it in back of the ear with his knife. Then he squatted and skinned it. At first, he thought of making a fire and cooking it on a stick, but it would take too long to find dry wood and make the fire and cook it, and he was hungry again. He ate it raw. After all, it had only been very short time that he had eaten anything at all that had been cooked.

One thing, he would have to make himself better weapons than stones to throw.

The third time he came to a stream and crossed over it, he found hard-rock, not black like the shining-stone-rock of Yellowsand, but good and hard. He hunted until he found two pieces the right size and shape, and put them in his shoulder bag. By this time, the rain had stopped and it was getting foggier and darker, and he thought that dark-time was near.

He made a sleeping-place in the next hollow, beside a stream and against the side of a low cliff. First he found a standing dead tree and cut at it with his knife until he had cut off all the wet wood and made fine shavings of the dry wood. These he lit, and put sticks on the fire; as they dried, they caught, until he had a good fire, warm and bright. By this time it was growing dark, and the fire made light on the rocks behind him. He gathered more wood, some pieces so big that he could hardly drag them, and stacked it where the fire would dry it. He did this till it was too dark to see, and then he sat down with his back to the rocks and took the two pieces of flint out of his shoulder bag.

One, he decided, would be an axe: he could chop wood with it for other fires and kill landprawns with it. The other would be the head of a spear, which he could throw or stab with. For a long time he looked at the stone, making think-pictures of what the axehead and the spearhead would be like when he had finished them. Then he took out his trowel, which had a handle of made-stuff, plastic, and began pressing with it on the edge of the stone. The stone gouged and scarred the plastic, but the rock chipped away in little flakes. Now and then he would lay it aside and go to put more wood on the fire. Once, he heard a bush-goblin screaming, far away, but he was not afraid; the fire would scare it away.

The spearhead was harder to do. He made it tapering to a point, sharp on both edges, with a notch on either side at the back; he knew just how he was going to fasten it to the shaft. It took a long time, and he was tired and sleepy when he had finished it. Laying it and the axehead aside, he put more wood on the fire and made sure there was nothing between it and him, so that it would not spread and burn him, and curled up with his back to the rock and went to sleep.

THE FIRE HAD burned out when he woke, and at first he was frightened; a bush-goblin might have come after it had gone out. But the whole hollow smelled of smoke, and bush-goblins could smell much better than people. The smoke would be frightening in itself.

He dug his hole with the trowel and filled it in; he drank from the little stream, and then ate what was left of the half cake of estee-fee he had eaten the day before. Then he found a young tree, about the height of a Big One, and dug it up with his trowel and trimmed the roots to make a knob. The other end he cut off an arm’s length from the knob and split with his knife and fitted the axehead into it and made a hole in it below the axehead with his bore-holes thing. He passed wire through that and around on either side of the stone, many times, until it was firm and tight. Pappy Jack and Pappy Gerd and the others said this should be done with fine roots of trees, or gut of animals, but he had no time to bother with that, and wire was much better.

Then, with the axe, he cut another young tree, slender and straight. The axe cut well; he was proud and happy about it. He fitted the shaft to the spearhead, using more wire, and when that was done he poked through the ashes of the fire, found a few red coals, and covered them with his trowel. Pappy Jack and Pappy George and Pappy Gerd and everybody always said that it was a bad never-do-thing to go away and leave a fire with any life in it. Then, making sure that he had not forgotten any of his things, he picked up his axe and spear and started off through the woods toward the big river.

A little before noon he found another zarabunny, and threw the spear, hitting it squarely. Then he finished it with a chop on the neck. That made him happy; he had used both his new weapons, and they were good. He made a small fire here, and after it had burned down to red coals he put the back-meat of the zarabunny on sticks and cooked it, as he had learned at Hoksu-Mitto.

Pappy Jack was wise, he thought, as he squatted beside his little fire and ate the sweet hot meal. He had wondered why Pappy Jack had insisted that all Fuzzies learn these things about living in the woods, when they would have Big Ones to take care of them. This was why. There would be times like this, when Fuzzies would lose their Big Ones, or become lost from them, just as he had. Then they could do things like this for themselves.

He decided not to eat all the zarabunny. He had taken the skin off carefully; now he wrapped what was left of the back-meat and the legs in it, and tied it to his shoulder bag. He would cook and eat that when he made camp for the night.

The fog was still heavy, with thin rain sometimes. He made camp this time by finding two big bushes with forks about the same height and cutting a pole to go between them. Then he cut other bushes to lean against that, and branches to pack between. There were ferns here, and he gathered many of them, drying them at the fire and making a bed of them. He was not so tired today, and all the soreness of his muscles had gone. After he had cooked and eaten part of the zarabunny, he smoked his pipe and played with some pebbles, making little patterns of what he had done that day, and then went to sleep.

It was still foggy and rainy the next morning. He cooked one of the hind legs of the zarabunny that he had saved, and then killed the red coals left of his fire and went on. Toward the middle of the morning, he found a land-prawn and chopped off its head and cracked the shell. He did not make a fire for this; land-prawns were best raw; cooking spoiled the taste. Big Ones ate many things without cooking them, too.

About the middle of the afternoon, he found a goofer chewing the bark off a tree. This was wonderful luck — meat for two whole days. He threw the spear and caught the goofer behind the shoulder with it, and then used the axe to finish it. This time he did build a fire, and after he had gutted the goofer, he began to think about how he would carry it; it weighed almost as much as he did. He decided not to skin it here. Instead, he spitted the liver and the kidneys and the heart, all of which were good, and roasted them over the fire. After he had eaten them, he cut off the head, which was useless weight, and propped the carcass up so that the blood would drain out. When this was done, he tied each front and hind leg together with string, squatted, and got the whole thing on his back, the big muscles of the hind legs over his shoulders. It was heavy, but, after he got used to it, it was not uncomfortable.