In a sudden spurt of action, the pied sprinted from his hidden crouch, bolting through the rocky grasses in a streak of patchy color. All but invisible in the overcast night, he employed the only offense a single lightweight pied had at his command. He struck like calico lightning, slashing an equine hindquarter, a human leg, a soft whiskered muzzle. A horse grunted in pain; a man cried out in surprise. Someone lost control of his panicked mount and crashed away into the night, cursing until the crash of a branch silenced him.
The pied circled tightly for another run, darting and biting and slashing. What he saw clearly, the men seemed unable to perceive in the darkness; their fake lights strobed wildly through the night, hunting him. The ponies were another thing; a hind hoof flashed and the pied dodged—not fast enough. The impact knocked the wind from him and sent him flying to the side.
But it was enough. The men spoke sharply to one another, listened momentarily to the surging cry of the pieds closing across the river, and wheeled their ponies around, leaving in a hasty clatter of even-stepping hooves.
Panting with nerves, cold with the rain, the pied could not move right away. His breath steamed the air, offering up precious body heat. Moments passed; the men did not return. They were not night creatures . . . the daylight would bring them back. But the pied had done his job. Protect the territory. Eventually he dragged his bruised body upright. The disturbed sheep slowly huddled back together again, seeking the familiar, but they left a gap around the body of the long-necked one.
The pied went to it, snuffling and inspecting and finding it truly dead. With a furtive glance toward the man, the pied lapped at the blood of the llama’s woolly neck, drinking stolen sustenance.
Then, mustering all its courage, it crept back to the man and nosed its way under the tarp to share the shelter and the warmth of their battered bodies.
Sunshine. Steamy warmth. The most excruciating pain.
At first Neil wasn’t sure just what hurt. His whole body reverberated with it, making his world tilt and swoop. Or was it just that he had to—
Neil managed to roll over on the rocks before he retched up the meager contents of his stomach. For a long while after that he just lay there, head reeling, stomach roiling, his arm making it perfectly clear just what hurt the most. After a time, he recalled a sense of danger, regained a vague impression of the night’s stampede. Remembered the stark biting shock of being shot, but not how he’d ended up on the ground. Not how he’d come to be under the tarp.
With an awkward curl of his good arm, he flipped the tarp away, looking down at himself. Formerly wet, now drying. Except for a patch along his belly and side, where his duster had come open and the layers between had all dried. And the ground beside him . . . a small warm hollow of dried grass, directly adjoining that spot he himself had kept dry. A tuft of white and black hair.
He frowned, didn’t try to make sense of it. Spent a few precious moments ripping tarp with his hunting knife, binding his arm to his side in the most awkward of ways. Sweat poured off his face and sprang up on his chest; he took a timely lurch to the side and heaved over the rocks. Finally, carefully, he sat up.
Zip grazed to the south, saddle slightly askew, reins looped just behind his ears and under one hoof. As Neil watched, the pony deliberately lifted that foot, moved his head aside, and grazed on. Wise creature. No doubt the tolter had saved his life several times over during the night.
The other tolter, her light packs in place, grazed at the other side of the spreading herd. Ben was nowhere to be seen. Not far from Neil’s uncomfortable resting spot, the river roared, full of rain and fury. They wouldn’t cross it today. Maybe not tomorrow. A full-sized horse could make it, but not the sheep. Not the tolters.
He couldn’t go back. The station was compromised. And he needed help, before this arm became infected and he lost it—or it killed him. He was lucky enough he hadn’t bled out.
In his packs, the radio sat useless. Drained.
Abandon the sheep? Take a tolter back upstream along the canyon, where a footbridge over the narrows let a man cross?
Say good-bye to his career with that. The ranchers might nod, might understand and might offer sympathy for his plight, but they wouldn’t hire him. Never mind the college degree, the two years of proving himself as a partido herder. He’d spend his time as an itinerant shearer who did catch-work the rest of the year.
Neil ran a hand over his face, rubbing gritty eyes and bringing his hand away bloody. He stared, puzzled, and began to understand that somewhere along the way—most likely right in this spot—he’d fallen from the pony and hit his head.
From staring at his hand, dirty and scratched and now bloody in all its work-worn creases, he focused outward. For the first time he found the dead Churra not far from him, its legs stiff in a parody of death, a grimace lifting its muzzle so its teeth showed, its dull eyes only half closed. No blood. Just driven to exhaustion in the pouring cold rain and stressed beyond its endurance.
Neil knew just how it felt.
Over the tumbling sound of water against rock, a high, sharp whistle hit Neil’s ears. He turned—not too fast, but with the creaky bones of a man much older than his twenty-seven years—and caught the broad wave of a man on horseback, standing on the other side of the river.
The camp boss.
Relief washed over Neil, relief so great it caught his breath and came out in a short, sharp sob. He waved back, glad there was no opportunity for shouted conversation over the river noise. He couldn’t have trusted his voice.
The man rode a tall, rawboned bay. He’d make it over the river and then back; he’d have food and he’d be able to radio for help. And most of all, the sheep were here. Not all of them; even in his blurry state Neil could see he’d lost more than a few. But it was the boss’s job to keep the stations secure. As long as Neil hadn’t abandoned the flock. . . .
He’d come out of this okay.
He took stock of things. There was his rifle; he caught it up, checked it. A round waited, chambered sometime during the night. He tried to remember; couldn’t. Dammit.
Movement caught his eye: the pied. Gangly yearling pied with its sweep of a tail held low, its absurdly large ears canted back. Not laughing, as so many of them seemed to be. Worried. Focused on Neil, as if waiting to see what happened next. As if it mattered.
Neil looked again to the dry hollow beside his own resting spot, reached out to catch the clump of hair and rub it between his fingers. Soft. Undercoat. Surely not . . .
No matter. The pied would run when Neil climbed, so painfully, to his feet.
It didn’t.
From his new vantage point Neil could see the ravages of the night. Three more sheep down, stiff and dead. The others scattered enough to make half a day’s work in gathering them up again, some even straying uncharacteristically into the lowland willows, cottonwoods and hackberries that sprang up fifty yards back from the water’s edge.
In the middle of it all he found Ben, a lump of llama fur somehow too small to have fit the animal’s bold personality. Dried dark blood smeared Ben’s throat, splashing down his chest with the powerful spurt of a cut throat.
He gave the pied a sharp, narrow-eyed look, seeing for the first time the way blood smeared across its face and, diluted by rain, pinked across the white fur of its chest. But no single pied could bring down a llama. No pied could even get close without taking damage.
The pied took a hesitant step. Limping. Stiff and sore, and newly bolted from the warmth of his place by the man’s side. But he couldn’t read the man’s body words, so mixed up as they were with injuries and unsteady posture. Even as he watched, the man sank slowly down to his knees next to the dead sheep.
The pied gave a tentative wag of his tail, low between his hocks. Flattened his ears, tipped his lowered head slightly.
The man sank down lower behind the sheep. An invitation.
The pied took another step. He thought of companionship and warmth and the sheep
this man might offer, feeding his pack members as he should. He thought of the strange satisfaction of a night at this man’s side.
Another step.
No pied could bring down a llama . . .
But Ben hadn’t been wary of this one. And here it came, covered in blood, limping and hurt. Kicked, as likely as not. But no pied could . . . He closed his eyes, trying to connect the unusually scattered sheep, the dead llama, and the wounded pied into some logical summation of this tortured night.
Behind Neil came the splash of the rawboned bay entering the water, its repeated snorts of disgust and protest. He shoved away the whisper of a thought that something wasn’t quite right. That something more had happened than the seemingly obvious.
Because no boss would understand how Neil had let the pied live this long, never mind that it had been no threat. No boss would see the blood, look at the llama, and fail to mark Neil down as the most remarkably foolish partido herder ever to handle a flock of sheep.
No boss would give him a second chance.
Neil’s rifle rested on the back of the dead sheep, the glint of its barrel hidden in wool, the muzzle aimed at the pied. Oh, God, it was all sly, all submissive, slinking up to him with blood on its lips. He glanced back at his former resting spot. Where there’d been two of them.
No one ever has to know . . .
His finger squeezed the trigger.
Revision Point
People have domesticated many animals, from companion species to the great variety of food-and fiber-producing creatures to working animals. None of these is more beloved—or bred to cover a greater spectrum of humanity’s needs—than the dog. According to recent research, domesticated dogs came on the scene about 15,000 years ago, aided by deliberate breeding efforts in East Asia. But . . . what if our ancestors thought they had reason to reject rather than embrace an animal we now take for granted (and some of us can’t imagine living without)?
D.D
AXIAL AXIOMS
by James Alan Gardner
The Axial Age (approx. 600 to 400 BCE): PERIOD of intense intellectual innovation in Europe and Asia, including the births of Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, and modern Hinduism, as well as work by the great Greek philosophers and the later Jewish prophets; a renaissance two thousand years before the Renaissance, wherein older, more staid modes of thought were questioned and replaced.
Thus Spake Zarathustra (music by Richard Strauss1)
Light. Dark. Light. Then fire . . .
(Light is the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda. Dark is the Enemy, Ahriman. All persons, whether they know it or not, choose one or the other: life or not life.)
Light. Dark. Light. And fire . . .
(Those who choose light—they add to the world. Those who choose dark—they subtract. All people are marked by the lord they have chosen: a sign invisible to earthly eyes, yet shining forth after death when all must pass over the Bridge of Judgment.)
Light. Dark. Light. Ahh, fire!
(The true signs of light and dark cannot be written by human hands. Yet, my followers, if you wish to carve symbols, use these: a simple cross for good, a horizontal stroke for evil. The cross points in all four directions, showing how the Wise Lord reaches over all the lands. The horizontal stroke suggests a corpse lying dead on the ground. The signs are unambiguous . . . are they not?)
Fire is light. And fire, it burns. Burns the dark.
Fan the flames!
The Zero’th Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
(Thus have I heard from the Buddha, the Enlightened One.)
My disciples, all is emptiness! All that lives, all that dies, the stones of the field, the waters of the stream, all, all is emptiness.
What is emptiness? Emptiness is the quality of a thing being nothing in and of itself, but being composed of smaller parts and having no existence except in relation to other things.
What is an example of emptiness? A cart. It is made of components: the wheels, the axle, the box, the hitch. Point to a cart, then look where your finger is truly directed. Behold, you are not pointing to something you would call a cart; your finger points only to a wheel or the box or the hitch. You cannot point to the cart itself—there is no cart, there are only pieces. The cart is a mental concept we impose upon an aggregation of components. At most, it is a sum of fractions.
Yet the fractions, too, are emptiness. The hitch, for example, is made of wood pieces and leather bindings. The wood (when viewed closely) is made of smaller strands we might call slivers. Slivers can be split into smaller slivers . . . and who is to say how small one can go, components breaking into components, fractions breaking into fractions, emptiness into emptiness? An infinite regress of smaller and smaller fragments.
What does it mean, to have no existence except in relation to other things? A cart is useless unless it is drawn by an ox or by some other being; and a cart has no purpose except insofar as it may carry loads in its box. A cart makes no sense without an ox and a load. A cart also makes no sense except when a people’s way of life requires heavy burdens to be borne from one place to another. Yet again, the cart makes no sense unless there are roads that connect starting points to destinations. Is there not a dependence between the cart’s existence and the existence of many other things? Indeed, is a cart’s function not a dependency on many variable aspects of the world?
So, my disciples, meditate on these truths: aggregation, fractions, functional dependencies. All these things are what is meant by “emptiness.”
And what is the symbol of emptiness? Visualize a hole . . . an unfilled circle . . . a mark one can use instead of blankness, but a mark that means blankness.
That mark, the empty circle, is the beginning of all wisdom.
The Book of the Way and its Powers
The road that looks like a road is not the true road.
The truth put into words is not true enough.
The numbers known to be numbers are not the fullness of numbers.
For though the sage of Persia taught of positive and negative . . . though the sage of the Dharma taught the Noble Truth of Zero and of fractions beyond fractions, even unto degrees deemed irrational . . . despite such wisdom, their teachings fell short of completion. They had no answers for the greatest mystery of all: what number multiplied by itself yields -1?
That number is the Tao.
And from the Tao has sprung the ten thousand things.
The arrogant man says the Tao is imaginary. Scholars say the Tao is complex.
I say the Tao exists and is simple. Like water, it flows where it wills. It also commutes.
The ten thousand things of this world . . . what are they?
Each has a worldly part—call it A.
Each has a part that is Tao—call it B Tao.
So each of the ten thousand things is A + B Tao.
When summed, the worldly adds to the worldly, the Tao to the Tao. Therefore A + B Tao plus C + D Tao equals (A+C) + (B+D) Tao. Again, there is a worldly part and a part that is Tao. As the worldly adds, so does the Tao. The one is not without the other.
So, too, with the ten thousand things as they couple together and multiply:
(A + B Tao)(C + D Tao) = (AC-BD) + (AD+BC) Tao
A worldly part and a part that is Tao. Thus will it be for all ten thousand things.
Subtraction and division are left as exercises for the acolyte.
How can one picture the Tao?
As a grassy field. As an open plain. As an arrow that points to the truth beyond words. As a map that is into and onto.
You can’t hold the Tao in your hand.
You can’t close it up in a jar.
Yet the Tao encompasses all the roots of unity.
Those who know don’t talk.
Those who talk don’t know.
The Pitcher and the Stones
A crow nearly dying with thirst saw a pitcher. But the pitcher contained so little water, the crow couldn’t get at it. He tried everythi
ng he could think of to reach the water, but all in vain. At last he collected as many stones as he could and dropped them one by one into the pitcher, until he brought the water within his reach and thus saved his life.
Moral: Necessity is the mother of invention.
A crane watched the crow fill the pitcher with stones. She noticed that some of the stones were black while others were white. The crane had three children who liked pretty things, so she decided to bring them each a stone. To avoid quarrels, the crane knew all three children should get the same color of stone, though it didn’t matter whether the three stones were black or white. When the crane stuck her beak into the pitcher, she could not see what color of stone she was picking up . . . so how many stones did she have to remove to ensure she got three of the same color?
Moral: In order to be certain, one must
plan for all contingencies.
A stork watched the crane and decided his three children would also like stones. However, because storks are white, the stork-children would want white stones. The stork asked the crane how many stones he would have to remove from the pitcher to ensure the procurement of three white stones. The crane replied that if the stork was unlucky, he might have to remove all the black stones first before getting any white stones. The stork decided that would be too much work and flew away without trying . . . but the crane knew the stork was foolish. If the stork had been clever, he would have looked into the pitcher and determined the proportions of white to black to see how likely it was to pick three white stones at random in a small number of tries.
Moral: Do not give up before you have
assessed the facts.
When the stork got home, his children wept because their father had brought no gifts. The stork was forced to go back to the pitcher, where he found a monkey at play. The monkey had agile hands and excellent vision; she could easily pluck three white stones from the pitcher. But the monkey was also mischievous. She got two white stones and gave them to the stork, but when she seized a third white stone, she said she would not give it away unless the stork played a game. The monkey would hide the stone under one of three walnut shells, and the stork would have to guess where the stone was hidden. If the stork guessed correctly, he would get the stone; but if the stork guessed wrong, he must fly to the forest and bring back a ripe banana for the monkey to eat. The foolish stork agreed to this wager . . . and ended up flying to the forest many times until the monkey had eaten her fill.
ReVISIONS Page 10