Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

did better getting across the idea of rarity. Begging for Ed was a simple kind of bargaining, and the sims had Od he would give them his strange and wonderful I tools in exchange for furs. In my band, he signed, many tools, few furs. Here many furs, few tools. You want nodded Why few furs there? she asked. Her hand-talk far more fluid than it had been when he first met her. She, and to a lesser extent the rest of the band, had learned from Quick a number of signs they had not people, he answered. Much hunting. I understood that. A band of sims that grew too large for the territory to support soon shrank again from starvation.

me parts of life in the

Commonwealths, railroads, boats, Quick did not even try to explain.

Getting as the idea of a house, a permanent place to live, was enough, as was describing domesticated plants and animals. To Sol, it al seemed a vision of unparalleled abundance. Warm place to sleep? she signed. Plenty to eat?

The trapper nodded, admitting it.

Why come here? Sol asked.

get furs, was the only answer Quick could put across.

wonderlust meant nothing to the sim; Sol's band knew perhaps twenty miles square as intimately as if; could, but nothing of the world beyond it. Explain that he often found the company of his fellow men exsessive was also next to impossible.

but, they fight? Sol asked.

he signed, but then, after thinking about it, had to ri staff with other men long time, maybe fight. He knew how impatient he could get with peoples foolishness He really did not have that problem with the band of sims.

they were not smart enough to make idiots of themselves on purpose; what brains they had, they had to use. He wanted to do something for Sol, to show his gratitude in a more permanent, more substantial way than coupling After the first few times, he had stopped worrying about whether those matings constituted bestiality. That was more because he thought of himself as a member of the sim band than because he suddenly reckoned her human but the effect was the same: he concentrated on the similarities rather than their differences. The problem was that the sims lived at the bared subsistence level. Things that would have been approprate back in the Commonwealths were incomprehensible and valueless here.

Before he ful y realized that, Quick spent a good deal of time whittling a piece of pine into the shape of a spearfang. Sol looked at it when he proudly presented it to her. she was interested; she had never seen an image belfore, but she was not really pleased.

Inspiration struck when the trapper saw how the hunting party of males behaved when they came into the clearing on a day after the snow had begun to fal . The sims threw down the carcasses they had brought into the clearing, then, as one, rushed to put their feet as close to the fIre in as they could.

Quick smelled singeing hair, but did not blame the sim’s a bit.

For him, even healthy, going out into the snow barefoot would have meant at the very least losing toes to frostbite. The sims' feet were hairy above and had thickly - cal used soles, so that risk was less for them. Nothin however, could make such shoeless travel anything but it pain. The females, Sol among them, also had to brave the winter to forage and to cut firewood. Henry Quick suddenly realized that, while his boots did not have laces anymore they were much better than nothing.

Before Sol went out the next time, he showed her how to put them on her feet.

She did not like them; they must have felt strange and confining. But when she came back, her broad grin gleamed like the snow that still clung to the load of fir branches she was carrying.

Warm, she signed unbelievingly, pointing down. feet.Warm. She went to Quick to hug him and plant exuberant kisses on his nd shoulders. Warm, she signed again. Feet warm. Quick felt warm himself, no easy trick that winter.

He had found a gift that made her happy. The boots also made the other sims jealous. Quick tried that as fast as he could; he did not want Sol to suffer he'd only meant to help. The only solution he came with involved sacrificing his trousers, which he could not wear anyhow. They made several pairs of improvised shoes, not as good as real boots but far superior to bare yet hairy, leathery bare feet. makeshift cordwainery let Sol keep the boots that had been his.

That relieved him a great deal.

Once he as convinced they did some good, he signed, All hunters sther gone, Quick answered. Martin gave a dissatisfied grunt. The trapper hoped the sim would not demand the shirt off his back. He needed it.

Also fearing the big male would take his boots away from Sol, the trapper suggested, foot things from skins of animals you kil . Skins stink fast, Martin signed. Quick remembered promising to show the grizzled sim to snake leather. Now, in a way, he could keep that promise. Rub skins with bark from spruce, he signed. Then slow, maybe not stink. Martin grunted again. Do, he signed. Before long, Quick doing as much skinning, scraping, and curing as he had working the trap line. He had been a lot of things before, but never a cobbler for sims. cold, wet weather made his leg hurt worse, but with Brent kind of pain, one he suspected would be with the rest of his life: he knew several men with healed in bones who were the best prophets of rain for miles. Now at last he felt himself definitely on the mend.

successive triumphs were small but satisfying: he treasured the day he sat up by himself, the day he rol ed over,the day he coupled with Sol with him on top.

The sticks were stil awkward, and so was she. That was not a posture sims often used.

Neither, come to that, was female atop male; most often they mated from behind, like any other beasts, Quick realized he would have thought before his enforced sojourn here. yet they treat far more than beasts.

That applied to other things seeing the utility of boots.

Every so often, around the camp the trapper would notice the subhumans joining as he Sol did. He smiled every time. That was not one of the things he had intended to teach them.

Still Without the fire and the windbreak, the band of sims could not have survived. In the worst storms none of them went out, except to gather more wood. They huddled in their bedding close by the fire, hugging one another for extra warmth. Often they went a couple of days without food. They were used to going hungry.

Quick was not. His bel y began to preoccupy him more than his leg. Whenever the hunting party came back with game, his stomach heralded their arrival with growl a wolf would have been proud of.

Thanks in no small part to his hatchets, the fire the never went out, nor did the sims have to sacrifice the windbreak or rob it so it became threadbare. Indeed, the females a youngsters cut so much more wood than they had before that the band often used the piles of of branches to thicken and restore their beds before using it to feed the fire. Quick had done that himself on the trapping line; fir branches made a fine mattress on which to lay a blanket.

Being now without a blanket, the trapper happily join the sims in burrowing among the branches and using the group to hold his body warmth.

His nose grew so used to the thick, resinous smell of fir that he had to make a conscious effort to notice it. He found that the sap that oozed from the branches was easier to clean from his relatively smooth skin than to get out of the sims' hair.

The sims spent a fair amount of time grooming one another under any circumstances; it was as much a part of social lives as back-fence chatter was back in the Commonwealths. Quick did not mind taking part.

Getting lair smooth and neat pleased him. He made an absent note to carve out a comb when he had the chance.

as he cleaned from her hair left his hands constantly and spit did not take it off.