Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

"Aye, so they are."

How do marks talk? the sim asked, punctuating the question with a pleading whimper. Kenton could only spread his hands regretfully.

Several times he had tried to teach Charles the ABCs, but the sim could not grasp that a sign on paper reprented a sound. No sim had ever learned to read or write.

Then the scout had an idea, maybe his map would be easier than letters for Charles to understand. "Recall the creek we walked along this morning, how it bent north and then southwest?"

The sim nodded. Kenton pointed to his representation. "Here is a line that moves the same way the creek did."

Charles looked reproachful y at the scout. Line not move. Line there.

"No; I mean the line shows the direction of the creek. D'you see?

First it goes up, then down and over, like the stream did."

So? In their deep, shadowed sockets beneath his brow ridges, Charles's eyes were full of pained incomprehension. Line not like stream. How can line be like stream?

"The line is a picture of the stream," the scout said.

Line not picture. Charles's signs were quick and firm. Picture like thing to eyes. Line not like stream.

Kenton shrugged and gave up. That had been his last, best try at getting the idea across. Sims recognized paintings, even pen-and-ink drawings. Abstract symbols, though, remained beyond their capacity.

The scout sighed, got out his blanket, and slept.

Instead of returning to the clearing, Kenton decided to parallel the game track down which the buffalo had fled. Mockingbirds yammered in the treetops high overhead, while red squirrels and gray frisked along the branches, pausing now and then to peer suspiciously down at the man and the sim.

"An Englishman I met at Portsmouth told me there are no gray squirrels in England, only red ones," Kenton remarked.

No grays? Who ate them?

Kenton smiled, then sobered. There was more to the question than Charles, in his innocent ignorance, had meant. People on both sides of the Atlantic were still hotly debating the notion someone had put forward a generation before: that the struggle of predator against prey determined which forms of life would prosper and which would fail.

The scout liked the idea. To his mind, it explained why such beasts as spearfangs and hairy elephants lived in America but not in Europe, though their ancient bones had been found there. Humans, even savages, were better hunters than sims. Already, after less than a century, spearfangs were scarce in Virginia. No doubt they had been exterminated east of the ocean so long ago that even the memory of them was gone.

The thought of life changing through time horrified folk who took their Scripture literal y. Kenton could not fathom their cries of protest.

America had shown so many wonders the Bible did not speak of, sims not the least, that using Scripture to account for them struck him as foolish. Like most colonists, he preferred to judge truth for himself, not receive it from a preacher. A little past noon, the scout began hearing the low rumble of many buffalo hooves again. He found a herd gathered at a salt lick, pushing and shoving each other to get at the salt like so many townswomen elbowing their way to a peddler's cart. He took out his journal and noted the lick. When settlers eventual y came, they could use the salt to preserve their meat.

He had not intended to hunt that day, not when he and Charles were still carrying some of the buffalo hump. But a tawny blur exploded from the far side of the clearing and darted toward a yearling cow at the edge of the herd. The spearfang's roar sent the buffalo scattering in terror and made ice walk up Kenton's back.

The spearfang's powerful forelimbs wrapped round the buffalo's neck.

Despite the beast's panic-stricken thrashing and bucking, the spearfang wrestled it to the ground. Excitement made the big cat's short, stumpy tail quiver absurdly.

The struggle went on for several minutes, the buffalo trying desperately to break free and the spearfang to hold it in place with front legs and claws. At last the spearfang found the grip it wanted.

Its jaws gaped hugely. It see its fangs slashing across the buffalo's throat. Blood fountained. The buffalo gave a final convulsive shiver and was still. The spearfang began to feed, tearing great hunks of dripping meat from the buffalo's flank.

Kenton swung up his musket, glad he had a double charge in the gun.

Luckily, the spearfang was exposing its left side to him. He released the set trigger, took a deep breath and held it to steady his aim, touched the second trigger.

His flint and gunpowder were French, and of the best quality; only a farmer would use Virginia-made powder. Along with the twin triggers, they ensured that the musket would not misfire or hang fire.

The spearfang screamed. It whirled and snapped at its flank. But the wound was not mortal, for the spearfang bounded into the woods the way it had come.

"Oh, a pox," Kenton said; the shot had struck too far forward to pierce the heart. He paused to reload before pursuing the big cat. He was not mad enough to follow a wounded spearfang armed only with a brace of pistols.

As he had been trained, Charles trotted ahead to find the trail.

Kenton soon waved him back to a position of safety; the spearfang had left a blood-spattered spoor any fool could follow.

That over-confidence almost cost the scout his life. Once in the forest, the spearfang doubled back on its trail. Kenton did not suspect it was there till it burst from the under growth a bare ten yards to his left.

Those yawning jaws seemed a yard wide, big enough to gulp him down at a single bite. He had not time to turn and shoot; afterwards, he thought himself lucky to have got off a shot across his body, his musket cradled in the crook of his elbow.

With a lighter gun, he probably would have broken his arm. But one of the reasons he carried a five-foot, eleven pound rifle was to let him take such snap shots at need.

Because of its weight, it had less kick.

The spearfang pitched sideways as the ball, which weighed almost a third of an ounce, slammed into its face just below a glaring eye. An instant later, Charles's hatchet clove the beast's skull. Kenton thought his bullet had already killed it, but was honest enough to admit he was never quite sure. His narrow escape made his hands shake so much he spilled powder as he reloaded, something he had not done since he was a boy.

Charles had to set a foot on the spearfang's carcass to tug his hatchet free. He used it and his knife to worry the fangs from the cat's upper jaw, handed Kenton the bloody trophies.

"Thanks." The scout wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with the back of his hand. "That, by God, is 5 pounds earned."

The sim shrugged. With his simple wants, money meant little to him.

Ever practical, he signed, Good meat back there.

Here in this unexplored territory, 5 pounds was of no more immediaoe use to Kenton than to Charles. The scout nodded, made his wits return to the business at hand. "So there is. Let's get at it." He and the sim walked back toward the buffalo the spearfang had kil ed.

Kenton made a semi-permanent camp near the salt lick, building a lean-to of branches and leaves for protection against the warm summer rain. He went back to the lick for both deer and buffalo, and added three more sets of spearfang teeth in less hair raising fashion than he had col ected the first.

The hunting was so easy it required only a small part of his time.

He ranged widely over the countryside, adding to his map and journal.

The more he traveled, the richer he judged the land. Not only was it full of game, but the rich soil and abundant water were made for farming.

Sometimes Charles accompanied him on his journeys, sometimes he went alone. The sim traveled too, though not as widely as Kenton.