Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Charles knelt and took out his tinderbox. The scout heard him strike flint and steel together several times, saw him bend further to blow to life the sparks that had fallen on his tinder.

Then, with a satisfied snort, Charles stepped away.

Because he had no dry fuel close by, he had made a pile of all the powdered bark and lint in the tinderbox. The little fire crackled briskly.

The wild sims stood transfixed, as if turned to stone. Then one of the old males hooted softly, the most nearly awed sound Kenton had ever heard from a sims throat. The old male scrabbled through the remains of the dead fire for wood dry enough to burn. Having found a couple of sticks, it approached the blaze Charles had set, glancing at him as though for permission. When he did not object, it set the sticks on the fire. After a while, they caught.

Half a dozen wild sims dashed off after more fuel. The rest crowded toward the blaze, drawn to the flames like moths.

Not even the clever sim was immune to the fascination. This time it did not object when Charles stooped and began cutting Kentons bonds.

The scout grimaced at the sting of returning circulation he had imagined a few minutes before. He clenched and unclenched his fingers and toes, trying to work feeling back into them. All the same, it was some minutes before he could stand. When he finally did, he had to clutch undignifiedly at his trousers; their sueded leather had stretched from the soaking it had taken.

He did not think he could get his knife back from the clever sim, but did go over to where the other male had discarded his musket. With his powder spilled and bul ets scattered, he had only the one shot till he got back to his pack, but that was better than nothing. And the wild sim had been right, in its way, at need, the rifle would make a good club.

Kenton also gathered up the spearfang canines, although to his annoyance one had disappeared in the mud. He had come by them through hard, dangerous hunting, and they represented wealth too great and too easily portable for him to abandon.

Though the scout hurried, Charles waited with barely concealed impatience. We go? he signed, adding the emphatic gesture to the questioning one.

"Indeed we do!"" Kenton wanted to be as far from the encampment as he could when the hunting party returned.

The clever sim watched them withdraw. Its massive jaw muscles worked.

The scout could all but taste its frustration. It had met beings and found tools and skil s beyond any it could have imagined, and here, afoer only a brief moment, they were vanishing from its life again.

That proved more than it could bear. With a harsh cry, it rushed Kenton and Charles. The scout flung his musket to his shoulder, but hesitated with his finger still on the first trigger. The males in the hunting party had heard gunfire before; the sound of a shot would surely bring them on the run.

Charles had no such worries. His arm went back, then forward.

The hatchet spun through the air. It buried itself deep in the clever sims chest.

The clever sim shrieked. It wrenched the hatchet out, heedless of the blood that gushed from the wound. The clever sim flung the hatchet back at Charles, but its throw was wild. It staggered on rubbery legs, sat heavily. Kenton could hear how its breath bubbled in its throat.

The rest of the wild sims came out of their trance round the fire.

They shouted and hooted. Hands groped for stones to throw. Saving his single bullet against desperate need, Kenton ran. Charles fled with him, stopping only to get the hatchet from where it lay on the ground. Red streaked the gray steel blade.

Kenton never found out whether the clever sim lived or died. He was everlastingly grateful it was the only robust male at the encampment. He and Charles outdistanced the gray-hairs and youngsters that tried to pursue them. They might not have had such good fortune if tested against the members of the hunting band, the more so as the scout's abused limbs could not carry him at full speed.

Kenton knew the troop's hunters would be expert trackers. They would have to be, living as they did from what they could run down.

And so, no matter how urgently he wanted to put distance between himself and the camp, he and Charles did not neglect muddling their trail, doubling back on their tracks and splashing down streams so they would not leave footprints.

A large bullfrog sat on a half-submerged log, staring stupidly as Kenton and Charles drew near. Too late, it decided to leap away. The scout grabbed it and broke its neck.

A bit farther on, they came upon clumps of freshwater mussels growing on some rocks. Charles used his knife and Kenton borrowed his hatchet to sever the foot by which the shellfish moored themselves.

By then it was nearly dark. Neither of them knew the countryside well enough to head back toward the camp by night. They would have to shift camp anyway, Kenton realized, it was too close to the salt lick.

The wild sims would surely scour that whole area in search of them.

The scout hoped he could recover his pistols from the spot where he had kil ed the spearfang.

All that, though, could wait. Finding a hiding place for the night came first. A hollow with a rock pile down one side proved suitable, after Kenton stoned to death a fat rattling-snake that had been nesting among the rocks.

Fire Charles signed.

The scout considered the lay of the land. "Yes," he said, "a small one." If the wild sims came close enough to spot a tiny blaze by night, they would be on top of him anyway.

And while he did not mind eating raw shellfish, even hungry as he was he wanted to roast the frog and snake.

His stomach stil growled when he was done with his share, but he felt better for it. He licked his fingers clean of grease and looked across the fire at Charles, who was still worrying tiny fragments of meat from a frogleg with his tongue.

In the dim, flickering red light, the sims eyes were sunk in pits of shadow, unreadable. "Charles," Kenton began, and then stopped, unsure how, or if, to go on.

Charles tossed the bones, by now quite naked, to one side. He gave a low-voiced, questioning hoot.

"I thank you," the scout said.

Charles grunted, a noncommittal sound.

Kenton almost let it rest there. His curiosity, though, was too great.

People had been trying to understand sims, and to see how close sims could come to understanding them, for close to two centuries.

And so the scout asked, "Why did you decide to rescue me."

The skin moved on Charles's brow-ridges; a man would have been wrinkling his forehead in concentration. You, I come here together, he signed. We go back together.

The scout wondered if that indeed was the whole answer. Because they were less imaginative than men, sims rigidly fol owed plans.

Kenton had often talked about the return trip; perhaps Charles had simply been unable to conceive of anything else happening, and had acted as he did more for the picture of the future the scout had outlined than for Kenton's sake.

Kenton's lips twisted wryly; there was a thought to put him in his place. He persisted, "It would have been easier and less risky for you to join the wild sims."

He knew he was treading on dangerous ground. Back in Virginia, many sims fled to the wild troops that still lurked in the backwoods.

There was always the risk of putting ideas in Charles's head that had not been there before.

The sim surprised him with an immediate gesture of rejection. Not leave you, Charles signed. You, me, together, good. Years and years, not want end.

"I thank you," Kenton said again. Had he followed the course of some colonists, who treated their sims as much like beasts as possible, he was sure he would have been shared among the wild sims in raw gobbets, with Charles likely joining the feast.