Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Not want, ? the female signed after a moment, and used a that gesture of its own invention again.

Full, Quick temporized. He patted his stomach.

Apparently that impeded performance among sims too because the female gave a small, regretful hoot. Later? it signed.

The trapper shrugged and spread his hands. You, I not same, he repeated. The female shrugged too, and went off to get a few more whortleberries. To Henry Quick's relief, it did not come back to him. He'd meant to imply that men and sims were so different no offspring could come from a mating. He did not know whether the sim was bright enough to follow that. He did know it was a lie.

He had never seen a crossbreed. The repugnance almost everyone felt for coupling with the subhumans had a lot to do with that few of mixed blood were born. Fewer still lived.

The human parent did that, to save themselves from disgrace.

The ones that did survive were good for driving lawyers to distraction, and for host of tales whose truth the trapper was in no position to judge.

He yawned. Back by his own campfire, he would have een asleep hours ago. Here he had neither his own blanket lor the nests sims made for themselves. He stretched out on he ground. The big blaze the sims had going was plenty to seep him warm. He was tired enough not to worry about sleeping soft. He rolled over, threw aside a twig that was Raking his cheek, and knew nothing more til the sun rose.

He woke with a crick in his neck and a bladder ful to bursting.

He walked into the bushes at the edge of the clearing to relieve himself. By the smel , and by the way his shoes squelched once or twice on the short journey, the sims were not so fastidious.

They had already begun their endless daily round of foraging.

Henry Quick was glad to see that the importunate female was gone from the campsite. Otherwise, he thought with wry amusement, it might have wanted to go into the bushes with him to see just what sort of apparatus he had.

The males, who hunted in a group rather than scattering one by one, were still by the fire. The trapper went up to the male that had guided him here. Good food, he signed.

He had a spare bootlace in one of the pouches that hung from his belt. He dug it out. Yes, it was long enough for him to cut a couple of lengths from the end and stil do what he wanted with it.

He cut off the extra pieces, tied them to the main length at one end, and made loops at the other end of each. Then he tied the makeshift belt round the sims middle to Carry knife, axe, he signed. Have them to use. Have hands free. The sim did not seem to understand. It rubbed its chinless jaw, staring at Quick, but made no move to put the tools in the loops.

The old grizzled male looked from the trapper's belt to the leather lace he had given the other sim. Its eyes lit. It let out a soft hiss making the very same noise when, as a boy, he had seen his first steam railroad engine. The grizzled sim stepped forward, took the knife from the younger male's hand, and thrust it through one loop.

Then it pointed, first at the hatchet, then at the second loop.

I'll It gave an imperative barking call, pointed again. It might never have learned hand-talk well, Henry Quick thought but its years had given it a wisdom of its own.

After it repeated its gestures a third time, the younger sim finally got the idea. It pushed the hatchet handle into the vacant loop; the head kept the hatchet from falling through. The sim looked at its empty hands, at the tools it still had with it. Suddenly it grinned an enormous grin.

Good, it signed at Quick. Good. Good. Good.

Have more another male asked. Sorry No more. Henry Quick apologetically spread his hands.

He suggested, Make from plants, from skins. The old sim could follow hand-talk, no matter how It much trouble it had using the gestures.

Make, it signed, and I pointed to itself. Before long, Quick suspected, every sim in the band, or at least every hunting male, would be sporting a belt. Some would be made of vines and would break, others of green hides that would stink and get hard and wear out quickly.

They would be better than no belts at al , he supposed.

He was pleased to have found something to give in exchange for the feast of the night before. Sims had so little that he was surprised they had offered to share, in spite of his earlier gift. Now they were less likely to resent him for accepting.

In daylight, the journey back to his trap line took less than half as long as it had by night. When he returned to the clearing where his latest camp was, he checked his pack.

No sims had been near it, though they never would have had a better chance to steal. On the other hand, he thought, smiling, they'd had plenty just as good.

He went the round of the traps near the clearing, reset the traps that needed it.

He should have had one more; a trap still held the bloody hind leg of a ringtail. That was all that was left of disc black-masked beast, though. When he first saw the tracks around the trap, he thought the sims had robbed him of her al .

Then he noticed the claw marks in front of the toes. A bear had taken the chance to seize prey that could not flee.

He swore, but resignedly; that sort of thing had happened to him many times before, and would again. Bears could be as big a nuisance as sims. Some bands of sims, like the one whose territory he was now, could be made to see that working with him got them more than robbing him did. The only thing a bear understood was a bullet.

A grouse boomed, somewhere off among the spruces. Henry Quick forgot about the bear, at least with the front part of his mind. He sidled toward the noise. The grouse's dull-brown feathers concealed it on its perch, but not well enough. He got almost close enough to knock it down with a club before he shot it.

He bled and gutted the bird, handling the gall bladder with care so it would not break and spil its noxious contents into the body cavity. He wished he were back at his base camp; the grouse would be better eating after hanging for several days. But he was on the move, and had no time for such refinements. The dark, rich meat would be plenty, good enough tonight.

So it proved, though he roasted it a couple of minutes too long; grouse was best rare. He would have liked to flavor it with some bacon instead of crumbs from his salt beef, but the rashers he'd brought were long gone; he'd eaten them as soon as they began to go rancid.

Picking his teeth with the point of his knife, he laughed at himself.

All this fretting about fancy cooking was a sure sign he'd been in the wilderness too long. That night he dreamt of eating pastry full of fruit and cream until he had to cut a new notch in his belt, in its own way as sensual a dream as his more usual imaginings of sweet-scented girls reaching up to him from featherbeds thick enough to smother in.

Waking hungry to a blanket in the middle of a forest clearing was hard.

Even eating what was left of the grouse was not help much, though it would have been an expensive luxury if ordered in a cafe east of the mountains. Too much of what he did involved things that were expensive luxuries east of the mountains.

What he craved were the luxuries he could only get back there.

The intensity of that craving ended up undoing him.

The next clearing around which he had a set of traps was over on the west side of the one the sims used. The trail he had blazed to it swung a lot farther north than it had to, so he could give the sims clearing a wide berth. Now that the subhumans had shown how friendly they were, he decided to take the direct route. If he did that the rest of the time he was there, he thought, he could save several days' travel and set out for the fleshpots of the east that much sooner.