A Different Flesh (32 page)

That the trapper lived hardly better than the sims while in the field did not enter into the equation. He deliberately chose those hardships to escape from his fellow men for a time, and to earn the money to live high when he got back to civilization. Until now, he had never imagined staying west of the mountains. Without Sal, he would have had no doubts.

Without Sal, he would have been dead months before, and would not be in this quandary.

She touched his arm. Under their shelf of bone, her brown eyes were troubled. Male sims were not normally quiet and reflective. Sal had accepted that Henry Quick sometimes was, but had also come to know him well enough to tell when his thoughts troubled him.
You good
? she asked. Even after trading signs with him for so long, she could not come closer than that to probing his feelings.

He spread his palms, a gesture that meant neither yes nor no.

She rummaged about, offered him some half-frozen cattail roots she had found.
Eat
, she signed, as if food could ease mental as well as physical distress. He sighed and declined. Sal made another gesture. He acted on that one, but afterward, no matter how sated his body was, his mind would not rest.

How could it be love, he wondered, when he could not even express the idea to Sal? But what else was it? He had no answer, not even for himself. He turned to Sal.
You want me to go
? he asked.

It was her turn to hesitate. Finally she signed,
Do good for you
. He tugged at his beard, frowning; sometimes sims' statements were oracular in their obscurity. At last he decided she was telling him that the most important thing was his own happiness, a curious mirroring of his own feelings toward her. And if that wasn't love, what else was it?

But even if it was, was it worth abandoning the Commonwealths for good? He knew a fair number of men who had given up the lives they had known to stay with a woman with whom they had fallen in love. Once the first flush faded, most came to regret it.

Something else occurred to the trapper. He was the first man to enter this part of the wilderness, but he would not be the last. He did not have to wonder what the newcomers would think of him: just what he would have thought before the bear wrecked his leg. Tales of Quick the sim-lover might get him remembered forever, but not in a way he wanted. What else was he, though?

He did not even think of taking Sal back to the Commonwealths with him. He knew the ostracism that would bring, the more so as she carried his child. She did not deserve to face that. Apart from it, too, he doubted she could adapt to life east of the Rockies. She was a creature of the wilds, no less than the marten or the spearfang. If he chose to live with her, it would have to be here.

He bit down on his lip till he tasted blood, then slowly made himself relax. As Sal had reminded him, winter was a long way from over. Nothing he decided now could be final; he would be rehashing it endlessly for weeks to come. Best to put it aside as well as he could, and wait to see what those weeks would bring.

That sadly indecisive and unoriginal conclusion was enough to grant him rest at last.

Whenever the weather was clear enough and warm enough to let him, Quick kept exercising, working to put strength back in his long-inactive legs. He got to the point where he could stump about on his crutches with Sal lending him strength and balance. Then, a good many days later, he managed to hobble along with but a single stick. Most of the time, though, he spent as he had the beginning of the winter—under cover.

Martin stayed on good terms with the trapper. That was partly because of the bows and arrows Quick kept turning out. By now the sims' products—especially the arrowheads—were as good as anything he could make, but he had more leisure than they in which to make them. Moreover, Martin must have realized that without Quick the band never would have known of bows and arrows in the first place.

The sim kept drawing the trapper out, hoping to pick up more ideas the band could use. Quick racked his brains, but came up with little. No matter how free-ranging a life he lived in the wild, most of what he knew depended in some part on civilized techniques he could not match here, or on domesticated plants and animals that were equally unobtainable.

He had never thought of things as basic as wheat and flax, sheep and cattle, as being elements of civilization until he tried to change a way of life without them.

Most of the other males let Quick alone. That was not so much hostility as uncertainty over where he fit into the band. His status could hardly have been more confusing: he had gone from being a powerful outsider to a helpless cripple. As if that were not bad enough, as a helpless cripple he had come up with a notion none of them could have matched.

Had they been men, he knew he could have expected trouble over Sal. He had already seen, though, that that sort of possessiveness was much weaker among sims. The males, then, did not object when he took his share of the meat they brought in, and let it go at that.

Among themselves, they jockeyed for position as they always had. Quick was just as glad not to be involved in that. The males' squabbles reminded him of nothing so much as small boys squaring off to fight. Even perfectly healthy, he would not have relished the prospect of getting into a face-to-face screaming match with a wild male—not without his pistol handy, at any rate.

Yet for all the shrieks and gestures, for all the fury and bared teeth, few tiffs actually ended with the combatants rolling and punching and kicking and biting on the ground. Like a lot of small-boy fights, most were games of bluff and counterbluff, good for letting off steam but not changing the status of either participant.

Through the winter, Martin stayed atop the hierarchy. Not only was he in his physical prime, but he also enjoyed the added prestige the success of Quick's devices brought him. The band had fared well in what was usually a time of privation, and the sims recognized that and gave credit for it.

Most did, at any rate. Like humans, some were unwilling to accept anything for which they were not responsible themselves. Three or four males, of middling to fairly high status in the hunting party, began hanging around together. They had been the last ones to start using the bow. Their leader, as much as they had one, was the male with the broken tooth who had wanted to kill Quick and eat him when the hunters came on him after the bear broke his leg.

Since then, and especially since he began to recover, it had had even less to do with him than its fellows, though every so often he would catch it watching him out of the corner of its eye. Because of its almost regal aloofness and because, although not old, it was going bald, he finally named the male Caesar; it was one of the last ones to pass from
it
to
he
in his mind.

Caesar and his companions all had that same sidelong way of looking at Martin. Quick was slower to put a motive to it than he would have been with men, but at last he had no doubts: they were studying their leader, looking for weakness.

If Martin noticed, he gave no sign. When the trapper did his best to warn him, the sim's only response was to tap himself on the chest as if to say, I can deal with any of them.

The days were growing longer more quickly now; Sal's belly grew more quickly too. Snow turned to icy rain. Quick found that worse than the blizzards that had gone before. The windbreak and the nest of branches had done a fair job of shielding the band—and the trapper—from the snow, which piled up in drifts and lay on top of the nest.

The rain, by contrast, trickled through and made everyone shiveringly miserable. It also threatened to put out the fire. That was not quite the catastrophe it would have been for sims before the days of flint and steel, but it would not have been pleasant. Not only would the blaze have been hard to get going again with everything soaked, but the sims would have suffered from the cold, blustery weather while it was out.

A couple of males held hides over the fire. Others, at Quick's urging, dug channels to guide the rainwater on the ground away from the burning branches and sticks. A small chorus of “
Hoo
”s went up as the sims saw the water being turned aside. Sal squeezed the trapper in delight.

They were coupling less often now; her interest waned as her pregnancy advanced. Quick had wondered, with a cold-bloodedness that disturbed him, whether he would stop fancying her once he had to resort to his hand again. He found it was not so. As he had before they first joined in body, he cared for her for herself, not for her anatomy.

Nor did she grow aloof from him in any way but mating. The embrace she gave him after the storm was but one example of that. She stayed by him most of the time when she was not out foraging; brought him tidbits from her trips (by now he seldom worried about eating them, whatever they were); and helped him get about, though he was more and more mobile on his own.

She also spent a good deal of time, as was only natural, preoccupied with the child growing within her.
Baby soon
, she would sign, patting her belly or her breasts, which had also swollen some in anticipation of nursing.

Once Quick signed,
Baby look like you and like me
. He touched his forehead, ran his hand along the relatively hairless skin of his arm. Ever since he realized Sal was pregnant, he had wondered which of them the child would more closely resemble. He did not know. He had never seen any crossbreeds, and the wild stories whispered about them varied enough that he could not tell where truth lay. Some claimed crosses could pass as humans, others that they were brutes unable to speak.

The whole concept of fatherhood was alien to Sal.
Baby from me, baby like me
, she insisted, and kept repeating her gestures until Quick gave up. He did not press her for long. Sims had been giving birth to sims for as long as there had been sims; no wonder Sal could not look forward to anything different.

Martin remained the dominant male in the band. Perhaps in reaction to Quick's warning, perhaps on his own, he began to be more touchy around Caesar and what the trapper could not help thinking of as his clique. For their part, they placated him, bending their heads and holding out their hands, palms up, when he shouted at them or brandished a weapon. As with most confrontations among sims, that was plenty to settle things. Martin would turn his back and swagger away, satisfied he was still cock o' the walk.

Henry Quick shared the big male's exuberance, but only to a point. He could not help noticing that the members of the hunting party who backed Martin were nowhere near so closely knit as Caesar's followers. Caesar by himself was no match for Martin; Caesar and several comrades probably were.

Rain came more and more often. Black patches of dirt began to appear. The evergreens lost their white mantles, while buds grew on branches bare for months. Quick heard geese crying far overhead, and on clear days saw
V
's of black specks flying north against the blue sky.

He wondered, as he had once in a while through the winter, if anyone missed him back in the Commonwealths. Trapping was a risky business, and every year many who tried it never came back. If he did return to civilization, he would be a nine days' wonder. Was that reason enough to make the trip? He doubted it. He also doubted whether he could finish his life among the sims, even loving one. For better or worse, he and they were different.

Unable to decide what to do, he let day follow day, hoping events would solve his problem for him. He got stronger; with his stick, he was not much slower or more awkward than an old man. He could even hobble a couple of steps without it, though his left leg had to take almost all of his weight.

With that success, he began thinking hard about what travel would mean. The idea of depending on archery to feed himself was appalling. His powderhorn was still half full. He had done his best to keep rifle and pistol dry through the winter, greased them with animal fat, and used dirt and gravel to scour away the rust that did appear. He began substituting the rifle for his stick. The extra weight tired him, but he managed.

He hated to burn powder and waste bullets on test shots, but he would sooner find out whether his guns worked in a setting where his life did not depend on the answer. One morning he loaded them, pointed the pistol into the air, lowered it again.
Big noise
, he signed, warning the females and youngsters in the clearing.

Noise-stick
, Sal amplified. The sims had learned the year before that Quick carried noisy weapons that could slay at a distance. Few except the hunting males, though, had heard them. Of course, the trapper thought as he squeezed the trigger, they might not hear one now.

He felt like cheering when the gun went off. The recoil was easier to take than he'd expected, easier even than he remembered; his arms had become very strong from bearing so much of his weight through his crutches.

The sims shrieked. Some clapped hands to ears. Youngsters ran to their mothers. “Big noise” was easier to say than to experience. Even Sal jumped, though she recovered quickly.
Noise-stick good
? she signed.

Good
, Quick answered. He fired the rifle. It also worked; its kick almost knocked him over. The report was louder than the pistol shot had been, but the sims did not make quite such a fuss over it—this time they knew what he was warning them about.

He reloaded both guns. If he did decide to leave, they would make all the difference in the world.

The females and youngsters had a great deal to tell the males when the hunting party returned. Hands fluttered, and in their excitement the sims hooted and yelled to add emphasis to their gestures.

After the commotion died down, Martin came over to Henry Quick. He asked the same question Sal had:
Noise-sticks good
?

The trapper agreed they were.

Hunt with us
? the sim asked.

Too slow, not keep up
.

Martin rubbed his jaw. He could not disagree with that. At length he signed,
Give me noise-stick
.