Harry Turtledove: A Different Flesh

Moving slowly and steadily, hardly breathing, he raised the crossbow to his shoulder, aimed down the bolt. Once the rabbit looked toward him.

He stopped moving again until it turned its head away.

He pressed the trigger. The bolt darted and slammed into a treetrunk a finger's breadth above the rabbit's ear. The beast bounded away.

"Hellfire!" Wingfield dashed after it, yanking out one of his pistols.

He almost tripped over the outflung branch of a grapevine. The vine's main stock was as big around as his calf. Virginia grapes, and the rough wine the colonists made from them, were among the few things that helped keep Jamestown bearable.

The panic-stricken rabbit, instead of diving into the bushes for cover and losing itself there, burst past a screen of brush into a clearing.

"Your last mistake, beastly" Wingfield cried in triumph. He crashed through the brush himself, swinging up the gun as he did so.

Then the rabbit was almost to the other side of the clearing.

He saw it thrashing in the grass there. Wingfiel paused, puzzled: had a ferret torn out it’s throat as it scampered along, oblivious to everything but its pursuer?

Then his grip tightened on the trigger, for a sim emerged from a thicket and ran toward the rabbit.

It had not seen him. It bent down by the writhing beast if smashed in the rabbit's head with a rock. Undoubtedly it had used another to bring the animal down; sims were deadly accurate throwing sharpened stones.

Wingfield stepped into the clearing. The colony was too hungry to let food go.

The sim heard him. It rose, clutching the bloody rock in a large, knobby-knuclcled hand. It was about as tall as the Englishman, and naked but for its own abundant hair. Its long, chinless jaw opened to let out a hoot of dismay Wingfield gestured with the pistol. Sims had no fore heads to speak of above their bone-ridged brows, but they had learned the colonists' weapons slew at a distance greater than they could cast their rocks. Usually, these days they retreated instead of proving the lesson over again.

This one, though, stood its ground, baring broad, yellow teeth in a threatening grimace. Wingfield gestured again, more sharply, and hoped he seemed more confident than he felt. If his first shot missed, or even wounded but failed to kill, he would have to grab for his other gun while the sim charged, and pistol-range was not that much more than a stone's throw.

Then the bushes quivered on the far side of the clearing, and a second sim came out to stand behind its fel ow. This one carried a large, sharp-edged rock ready to hurl. It shook its other fist at Wingfield, and shouted angrily.

It was the Englishmans turn to grind his teeth. If both sims rushed him, he would never have the chance to reload either a pistol or his crossbow. The odds of stopping them with Just two shots were not worth betting his life on, not for a rabbit. And if they did kil him, they would not content themselves with the game he carried. They would eat him too. Raising the pistol in a final warning, he drew back into the woods. The sims mocking cries followed him. He hated the filthy animals . . . if they were animals. Close to a century had passed since the Spaniards brought the first pair back to Cadiz from their coastal fortress of Veracruz. Churchmen and scholars were still arguing furiously over whether sims were mere brute beasts or human beings.

At the moment, Wingfield was ready to hate them no matter what they were.

He found the tree where he had shot at the rabbit the sims were now doubtless gulping down raw. He managed to cut himself while he was digging out the crossbow bolt with his knife. That did nothing to improve his temper. Had he shot straight in the first place, he would not have put himself in the humiliating position of backing down from sims.

Thinking such dark thoughts, Wingfield turned back toward Jamestown. He scratched at his nose as he walked along, and felt skin peel under his nails. One more annoyance, he was too fair not to burn in this climate, but found wearing a hat equal y intolerable.

On his way home, he knocked over a couple of quail and one of the native beasts that looked like giant, wide-faced rats but tasted much better.

That improved his mood, a little. He was still grumbling when Allan Cooper hailed him from the edge of the cleared ground.

Thinking of the guard's misery made him ashamed of his own bad temper.

Cooper wore a gleaming back-and breast with thick padding beneath; a heavy, plumed morion sat on his head. In that armor, he had to be steaming like a lobsoer boiled in its own shel . Yet he managed a cheery brave for Wingfield. "Good bag you have there," he called.

"It should be better, by one hare," Wingfield replied, pique flaring again. He explained how he had lost the beast to the sims.

"Aye, well, no help for such things sometimes, not two on one," Cooper sighed, and Wingfield felt relief at having his judgment sustained by a professional soldier. The guard went on, "The thieving devils are robbing us again, too. Henry Dale came in empty-handed this afternoon, swearing foul enough to damn himself on the spot."

"If swearing damns a man, Henry was smelling brimstone long years ere this," Wingfield observed.

Cooper laughed. "You speak naught but the truth there, though I don't blame him for his fury this time. Sims are worse than foxes ever were, foxes have no hands." He hefted his matchlock musket. "Without guns, we'd never keep them from our own animals. And how often have they raided the henhouse?"

"Too many times." Wingfield turned to a less goomy subject.

"How is Cecil?"

"Doing splendidly," Cooper said, his voice ful of pride. "The lad will be three months tomorrow." Cecil Cooper was Jamestown's oldest child; the first ship carrying women had reached Virginia only a year before.

Wingfield had a daughter, Joanna, only a few weeks younger than the guard's son.

He left Cooper and walked down the muddy path through the fields.

Several rows of thatch-roofed cabins stood by the log stockade that mounted cannon. On the other side of the fortress were longer rows, of graves. More than half of the orginal three shiploads of colonists had died from starvation or disease. A couple of the newest burials were pathetically smal : even back in England, so many infants did not live to grow up, and life was far harsher here.

But the marker that grieved Wingfield most was one of the oldest, the one showing where Captain John Smith lay. Always eager to explore, he had set about learning the countryside from the day the English landed, until the sims killed him, three months later. Without him, the settlement seemed to have a lesser sense of drive, of purpose.

Still, it went on, as people and their works do. Several colonists swung the gates of the fortress open, so others could drive in the pigs, goats, and oxen for the night to protect them from the sims and other predators. The pigs and goats, which ate anything they came across, throve in this new land. The oxen had the same gaunt look as most of the colonists.

Wingfield's cabin was in the outer row, closest to the forest.

Smoke rose from the chimney as he approached. The door stood open, to let in what air would come.

Hearing her husband's step, Anne Wingfield came out to greet him.

He hugged her close, so glad she had chosen to spend her life with him.

She had had her pick of suitors, as was true of all the women in Virginia; men outnumbered them four to one.

She exclaimed in pleasure at how much game he had brought home.

Back in London, she would have been nothing special to look at: a rather husky, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, with strong features, if anything, handsome rather than pretty. On this side of the Atlantic, though, she was by definition a beauty.