Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Last of all, the sims pulled his knife from its sheath. The only sharp edges they knew were the ones they laboriously chipped and flaked onto stone. They did not recognize the gleaming steel blade as something familiar until one of them closed her hand round it. She shrieked at the unexpected pain, gaped to see blood streaming down her fingers.

One of the males seized the knife then, by the hilt, more through luck than design. The sim brandished the weapon wildly, then suddenly stopped, realizing what it was for. Again Kenton fought panic; men likely would have tested the blade on his flesh.

But sims had minds more strictly utilitarian. The male squatted in front of one of the joints of meat the hunting party had brought back.

It screeched in pleasure at the ease with which the knife slid through the flesh. Another sim stuck the carved-off gobbet on a stick and held it over the fire.

The first smel of roasting meat made most of the sims forget about Kenton. They armed themselves with sticks and dashed over to the butcher, who, grinning, was cutting chunk afKr chunk from the doe's hindquarters. The males jostled round the fire; such a feast did not often come their way. Females and youngsters beseechingly held out their hands. With so much food, the males were generous in sharing.

The wind had shifted til it came out of the west, fil ing the sky with clouds and blowing smoke from the fire straight into Kenton's face. It made him cough and his eyes water. Mixed with it, though, was enough of the aroma of cookery to drive him nearly wild. He could hear his stomach growling above the racket the sims were making.

He loudly smacked his lips, a signal sims gave one another when they were hungry. The sims who heard him sent him the same curious look they had when he imitated their greeting-cal . But they did not feed him.

Taking a captive was so unusual for them that they had no idea how to treat one. Any being outside their troop was not one of them, and so was entitled to nothing.

Things might have been worse, Kenton decided. Instead of begging for food, he could have been food. That the sims showed no signs of moving in that direction was mildly heartening, enough at any rate to help him resist his hunger pangs.

He wondered what Charles was doing. By now the sim should long since have returned to their camp, and it was - late enough for him to be wondering what had happened to Kenton.

He might, the scout decided, be clever enough to visit the salt lick, Kenton went there most often. The scout could not guess what Charles would do after that. He was used to the company of humans, maybe he would try to go back to Virginia. Kenton wondered if the men at Portsmouth would believe his explanations, or kil him for doing away with his master. He hoped they would believe him; Charles deserved a better fate than disbelief would get him.

The sim might have a better chance here west of the mountains. He was an able hunter; he would have no trouble feeding himself.

Eventually he should be able to find a home among the wild sims here, suspicious though they were of al strangers.

Charles would be able to show them so much that he could prove himself too valuable to exclude. Apart from the knife and hatchet he carried, he had learned a great deal in Virginia that wild sims were ignorant of.

Even something as simple as the art of tying knots was unknown here.

These sims, if they were like the ones along the Atlantic, would not know how to set snares. Charles might even be able to show them how to tan leather, which would give them footwear and many new tools.

All that would make the wild sims harder to push aside when English settlers began coming over the mountains. Kenton found he did not much care. He and Charles had been a team for years now; he could not find it in his heart to wish the sim anything but good, no matter what resulted afterwards.

The wind was blowing harder now, bringing with it cool, moist air.

It must have felt wonderful to the sims, who because of their thick hair suffered worse than humans from the usual run of summer weather. That dislike of heat, though, did not keep them from feeding the fire with branches and dry shrubs whenever it began to get low. - The amount the sims could eat was astonishing. Because they spent so much time hungry, they were extravagantly able to make up for it when the chance came. They also let nothing go to waste, eating eyes, tongues, and lungs from carcasses, smashing big bones and sucking smaller ones to get every scrap of marrow.

At last, a sort of happy torpor came to the encampment.

females nursed their infants. Youngsters gradual y lost -intrest in throwing Kenton's musket balls at each other and bedded down in nests of dry grass and leaves. Most of the atults followed them before long, singly or in pairs.

A few males stayed awake. One kept the fire going. Three more went to the edge of the clearing as sentries. One of those carried a club, another a couple of chipped stones. The third, a large, hulking sim, bore Kenton's rifle. It carried the gun by the muzzle end of the barrel and swung it menacingly every minute or so, as if daring anything dangerous to come close.

The clever sim sat cross-legged by the fire not far from the scout. It stared down at the dagger it held in its lap.

From time to time it would run a hand along its chinless jaw, the very image of studious concentration.

Kenton felt a touch of sympathy; the sim could study the knife till doomsday without learning how it was made. At that moment the sim looked his way. It shook its head, exactly as a frustrated man might: it was full of questions, and had no way to ask them.

Some of the wild Virginia sims had learned sign-speech from runaways and used it among themselves, but it had not come over the mountains.

The wild troops had so little contact with one another that ideas spread very slowly among them.

The sim picked up a stone chopper, took it in its left hand and the knife in its right. The crudeness of its own product next to the other must have infuriated it, for it suddenly

scrambled to its feet and hurled the stone far into the night.

All three of the males standing watch whirled at the sound of the rejected tool landing in the bushes. The clever sim let out an apologetic hoot. The others relaxed.

The clever sim came over to glare at Kenton. The scout thought what a man would be feeling, confronted with skil s and knowledge so far ahead of anything he possessed, and confronted with a being like and yet unlike himself. Sims were less imaginative than humans, but surely some of that combination of anger, fear, and awe was on the subhuman's face.

Anger quickly came to predominaoe. Kenton uselessly tightened his muscles against the knife thrust he expected.

He hardly noticed the first raindrop that landed on his cheek, or the second. Even when a drop hit him in the eye, it distracted him only briefly from his fearful focus on the blade in the sims hairy hand.

The sim shook its head in annoyance as the rain began. To it, too, the early sprinkles were but an irritation. As the rain kept up, though, it forgot Kenton, forgot the knife it held. Its cry of alarm brought the rest of the troop bounding from their rest.

For a moment, Kenton wondered if the clever sim had gone mad. But soon he understood its concern, for the rain grew harder. The fire began to hiss as water poured down on it, and no wild sim could start a fire once it went out.

Because that was so, the sims had had to learn to keep their flames alive even in the face of rain. Some of the males held hides above the fire to shield it from the storm. Females dug ditches and built little dams of mud so the water on the ground would not get the fuel wet.

Their efforts worked for a time. The sims with the hide shield coughed and choked on the smoke it trapped, but they did not leave their post.