Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“Well now, I’m sorry,” said the young leader. “Awfully sorry.” His men grinned a little more widely.

“You ought to be!” said Marie, towelling away. “Just because something’s happened to the world doesn’t mean the people can’t be decent! Anybody with any brains would offer to help, instead of bursting out like that, like thugs—”

“We’ll be glad to help,” said the young man. “You don’t understand us, that’s why we came over, to help you—”

“I should think so!” snapped Marie. “That’s more like it. Here, when there’s hardly any people left in the world, those that are left need to stick together. Well, maybe I shouldn’t jump down your throat like that—” She was still continuing to towel Wendy vigorously in her almost-dance, in spite of the fact that Wendy now, plainly, wanted only to be released. “But if you’d just had to swim an icy river like that, you’d be a little upset too, when a bunch of men with guns—”

“Mommy, I’m dry now!” Wendy was protesting, squirming in Marie’s grasp.

“Hold still, dear!” said Marie. “As I was saying, a bunch of men with guns—”

I caught it then, out of the corner of my eye; just a flicker of movement. Suddenly, I saw what was happening, and why Marie had been standing there, chattering and bouncing about to hold their attention.

While she had been putting on her little show, the dogs had been about their own business. Apparently she had trained them well. As long as the eyes of the man it watched were upon it, the dog guarding him stood tensely still, at point. But the moment that attention moved elsewhere for even a fraction of a second, the dog stole forward—one step, two steps, even half a step, as if it was stalking a rabbit lying still and hidden in a cornfield. To begin with, the dogs had been almost as far away from the men as Marie and I were. Now, they had halved the distance between them and our welcoming committee.

Now, it was no longer a case of the men being able to kill all the dogs before the dogs could reach them. They might kill a good half of the dogs, but the other half stood an almost equal chance of reaching them while they were doing that.

In the same moment that I saw the flicker of movement, the man with the gun, at which the movement had been directed, saw it too. Evidently the dog had gotten too far inside our fields of vision to move without being noticed.

“Tek—” shouted the man. “The dogs! Look!” The young leader jerked his eyes from Marie and swept them around the semicircle of half-crouching canines. At the same time the others started to jerk their guns up. But I had already taken advantage of the fact that their attention was off me to sweep up the rifle off the raft into my own hands.

“Hold it!” I shouted.

I had the rifle to my shoulder, aimed at Tek’s belt. The dogs were ready.

“Hold it—just like he says!” barked Tek—if that was the young leader’s full name. He himself stood perfectly still.

His men froze.

“That’s better,” he said, in a calmer voice. He looked once more at Marie and me and smiled; but I could see a little shininess of sweat on his face. A 30.06 slug through the intestines is not a happy prospect; and I was close enough so that even if I was a poor shot, I shouldn’t miss. “That’s much better. You don’t want to waste any of these good dogs, now do you, ma’am? We’ll just back out of here and let you folks go your own way, since that’s what you seem to want. If we can’t be friends”—and he was smiling at Marie alone, now—“then that’s just how it’ll have to be. Sorry, though. It’d have been nice to know you. Now, we’ll just start backing up....”

And he did start backing up. His men imitated him. The dogs immediately followed, step for step, as if invisible threads connected each of them to the man on which the dog focused.

“Hold!” said Marie. The dogs stopped; and the men kept backing, each holding his rifle now in one hand, down by his side and out of the way. I kept my own rifle steady at my shoulder.

The men reached the edge of the trees and slipped back into their shadow, all but Tek, who stopped briefly.

“Keep going,” said Marie.

“Sure. See you sometime,” called Tek.

“Only if we don’t see you first!” answered Marie, grimly.

Tek waved. He paused for a second and looked directly at me. He made a little gesture like tipping a non-existent hat.

“You’re a lucky man!” he called to me. “Don’t anyone ever tell you you’re not!”

There was no sneer in his voice. There did not have to be. His message was clear enough. I was negligible—it was Marie and her dogs who were driving him off. For a second I flared into a rage— and for a second I almost charged out of the water after him, to call him a liar to his face—then that answer-seeking reflex in the back of my mind pounced on his clear intent like Sunday pouncing on a scuttling fieldmouse. He was trying to get me to charge after him in just that fashion. The dogs were not dangerous from a distance without my rifle covering them from behind. If I got out in front they could shoot me, then kill the dogs safely from a distance they had now regained between themselves and the canines.

So I did not rush out, after all. Instead, I laughed. I laughed loudly, hoping he would hear me—but he was already gone into the shadows of the trees, and I could not tell if he was still within earshot or not.

I came out of the water then, but slowly, and handed the rifle to Marie.

“Watch the woods,” I said.

I turned back to haul the raft, safely, far enough out of the water so that the river current could not pull it away until we had unloaded it. Then I took the rifle back from Marie while she rubbed some life back into my body and toweled herself dry. Meanwhile, there had been no further sign of Tek and his men. Marie posted a couple of dogs at the very edge of the woods, on watch; and we turned to unloading the raft.

Once we were unloaded, I built a fire to warm us up. It was only after the fire was going well and Marie had some soup heating on its flames, that I thought to look back across the river to see if the girl and Sunday had witnessed our encounter with Tek and his men. But a glance showed me that we had drifted so far down river in our crossing, that the beach where I had left girl and leopard was now around the bend of the further shoreline, out of sight.

I turned back to the soup, grateful for its filling heat, but feeling a little empty inside all the same.

After I dressed, I scouted with Marie and a few of the dogs to see if the neighborhood was really clear of Tek and his companeros. We found that the woods into which they had gone was actually only a narrow fringe of trees, perhaps a couple of hundred yards in width, paralleling the river. The woods were clear of human life and beyond them rose a small slope to a sort of shallow river bluff, from which we could see over a fairly wide, open, grassy area. There was no sign of Tek and company there, either, and no sign of mistwalls, or anything else, moving. We went back and made camp by the river, where we had landed. Marie and I both figured we deserved a little holiday.

The next day we pushed on east, with me scouting well ahead. A few of the dogs were beginning to take to me, finally—perhaps the water had washed off enough of Sunday’s smell to make me socially acceptable to them—and there were a couple I could trust to obey a few simple commands. Marie drilled them with me; and they responded well. One was a bitch—a sort of large cocker spaniel mix and the more intelligent of the two. The other was a lean, nervous, German shepherd type, male and looking half-starved. The bitch was called Merry and the German shepherd was Cox. They would heel, stand, guard and scout for me in a circle, at a sweep of my arm—and that was pretty good, considering our limited acquaintance.