Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

I wove through the brush and swore to myself. Back at the barren spot where I’d landed, I had been able to see clear to the horizon. But here, farther downslope, the head-high scrub kept me from seeing twenty feet ahead.

That meant I could walk right past significant wreckage. Worse, I couldn’t see trouble, from Slugs to something that might eat me, until it was on top of me.

I had seen no hint of animate life on this planet yet, but I’d picked up a fist-sized rock for a weapon, anyway. In my thigh pocket, next to my Aid pouch, I carried a single-shot.22 caliber toy of a survival pistol that Advisers joked was issued to allow suicide before capture. I decided to save it for signaling. With no rifle, I felt like a Neanderthal with no spear. And with no helmet audio or optics, I felt deaf and blind.

What happened next shows you how much our species traded away as we depended more and more on our tools.

With a climate-controlled helmet, I could see and hear better. But I couldn’t smell much.

Now, without a helmet, I tilted my head back, sniffed the wind, and wished I hadn’t.

TWENTY-ONE

VENTED HEADGEAR OR NOT, an infantryman who has survived combat knows the smell of death.

The stench on the wind wasn’t like any corpse I’d experienced, but this place wasn’t like any battlefield I’d experienced. This stunk like meat that had rotted for a semester.

I followed the scent upwind, no longer snapping twigs or kicking rocks, but my heart pounded so loud that I must have been audible twenty feet away.

I stopped and listened. Close ahead, something buzzed.

I elbowed back a pine bough, and there, in a rock-floored clearing, it was.

Looking left and right, like I was jaywalking through a tennis game, I crept forward until I knelt alongside it.

I’m no hunter, but four years before, I took a course at Ft. Bragg called “Patrol Craft.” We spent a whole morning studying spoor. Spoor is crap.

I knelt beside a turd the size of a bed pillow.

Based on a rudimentary gut-diameter estimate, whatever deposited it was twenty to forty feet long.

The buzz I had heard was a cloud of winged beetles. They hovered over their feast, but hadn’t burrowed in yet. So it was fresh spoor.

I poked the turd with a twig.

The brown mass lacked plant fiber, like horse dung had, and was more like pudding in consistency. A carnivore’s calling card.

Steam curled up from the blob where I had poked it. Very fresh.

Across the clearing, brush rustled.

I backed away from the noise, slowly, clutching my rock, scanning the ground for another, and wondering whether to dig out the little.22 pistol.

Movement flickered beyond the brush, twenty yards from me, and something snorted like a steam engine. The beetle buzz stopped as though cut by a knife.

My eyes on the spot where the brush moved, I backed away until my hand touched brush at the back of the clearing, where I had entered it. My heart hammered. Make my stand here, or run for it?

Behind me, something clamped my arm.

TWENTY-TWO

I BIT OFF A SCREAM as I jumped and pulled away.

I spun, raised the rock in my hand, and saw what had grabbed me.

A man knelt in the brush.

I blinked, looked again. Dirty. Emaciated. But a two-arms-two-legs-one-head man as human as I was.

One gray eye blazed up at me. The other was just a slit in scar tissue. Thin lips were drawn back from clenched, yellowed teeth, and dirty hair tangled down below his ears.

He spun a hand, as thin as mahogany wire, beckoning me toward him, while he hissed something I couldn’t make out.

I glanced back across the clearing, then said, “I don’t understand you.”

He cocked his head, stood and grabbed my hand again, this time with both of his. His clothing was crude-cut hide that covered his torso and legs.

I leaned back away from him.

He took one hand off mine, pointed across the clearing, then clamped and unclamped his fingers and thumb, pantomiming snapping jaws.

Something snarled, across the clearing, and I caught a whiff of animal, in addition to the dung, on the breeze. The only reason we hadn’t been noticed was that whatever predator lurked in the distant brush was upwind from us. If the wind shifted, we’d be snacks.

Glancing over my shoulder, I pointed in the direction the man was backing, nodded, and whispered, “Lead the way.”

He sprang into the brush, hobbling. A rough wood stump replaced his left leg below the knee.

On one whole leg and his stump, he zigzagged silently through the brush as fast as I could sprint.

We ran for five minutes, then he dropped to one knee, panting, and tugged me down beside him. He cupped his hands to his ears, turned his head, then moistened a finger and held it in the air.

We waited another five minutes. There was no sound but the wind and our heavy breathing. Then he stood, grunted, and stumped off into the brush.

Five paces on, he turned back to me and spoke.

I shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

He held up his hand again, this time to his lips, and made chewing motions. Then he patted the slack belly beneath his hide tunic and smiled. He windmilled his hand, then walked on.

My stomach growled, and I stood and followed him.

Twenty minutes later, he began side-crabbing, as we descended a scree slope into a steep valley. Distant rumbling grew.

My one-eyed, one-legged friend made his home alongside rocky rapids through which a creek dropped from the mountains. His home was a shelter woven of brush laid over logs as thick as my arm. It sat on a rock shelf that looked to be above flood stage.

I looked around for a stone pit, or some evidence that he possessed fire, but saw nothing.

He sat me on a flat stone beside the water, scuttled into his hut, then returned with a grainy brown patty as large as a dinner plate. He broke it, and offered me half.

I stared at it.

He broke a bit off his half, chewed it, and smiled.

I said, “Thanks.” I tapped my breastplate. “Jason.”

He tapped his chest, and said, “Bassin.”

I still hadn’t bitten Bassin’s bread.

He frowned, reentered his hut, and returned this time with a stone two feet long, chipped sharp along one edge. He stood in front of me, and raised the dagger in two hands.

I leaned back. “Easy! I’ll try the bread.”

Before I could raise the patty to my lips, he stabbed down.

“Jesus!” I jumped, and threw my armored forearm across my face to deflect his blow.

Bassin’s blade dug into the ground between my boots, then he dropped to his knees, and dug furiously with the knife.

After thirty seconds, he dropped the tool, and dug with his fingers, until he tugged out, and shook dirt from, a shiny, chestnut brown root as round as a grapefruit. He made chopping motions with his hand over the tuber, then pointed at the patty in my hand.

I tore off a piece of the patty with my teeth, then smiled. “I understand. No additives or preservatives. Very tasty.”

It was, if you enjoy hemp rope seasoned with frigid water. My stomach growled.

An hour later, the sun set. Bassin the Assassin beckoned me to share his shelter’s matted grass floor.

By the time I snuggled in, he had unstrapped the stump from his left leg, laid it at his side, and snored like a gasoline-powered motorcycle.

I stared up into the darkness and sighed.

I was destined to live out my days in the distant analog of the Stone Age. But at least I wasn’t alone.

For the next two days, I watched Bassin enjoy life. Morning consisted of a bracing breakfast of brown rope cakes, followed by standing ankle-deep in the muddy midstream bars below the rapids. I supposed the job was easier because his wooden leg didn’t feel water that had been snow forty-eight hours earlier.