No real driving was required; only two reins were used, one to each of the lead pair and running from them back through rings on the collars of the following mules to the seat of the leading wagon, there usually loosely secured rather than held. Although the males were all stallions, these mules did what Buck ordered. Smith had stopped at Separation and lost most of a day to trade a strong brute with good shoulders for a younger, lighter stud because the bigger mule had not been willing to accept Buck’s dominance. Buck was ready to fight it out, but Smith did not let the old mule risk it; he needed Buck’s brain and judgment, and would not risk Buck’s spirit being broken by losing to a younger stallion—or take a chance that Buck might be injured.
In real trouble more reins would not help. If the mules panicked and ran—unlikely but possible—two humans could not hold them, even with a double handful of reins. Smith was ready at any instant to pick off his lead pair, then hope that not too many mules would break legs stumbling over the corpses and pray that the wagons would not overturn.
Smith wanted to reach their destination with all his livestock; he hoped to get there with about 80 percent including a breeding pair of each sort—but if they arrived with enough draft animals to pull the wagons (including at least one breeding pair) plus a pair of goats, he could consider it a conditional victory and they would make their stand, to live or to die.
How many mules were “enough” was a variable. Near the end of the trip it could be as low as four—then go back and get the second wagon. But if the number of mules dropped below twelve before they conquered Hopeless Pass—turn back.
Turn back at once. Abandon one or both wagons, jettison what they could not salvage, slaughter any animals that could not make it without help, travel light with any extra mules trailing along, unwitting walking larders.
If Woodrow Wilson Smith limped back into Separation on foot, his wife riding—miscarried but still alive—it still would not be defeat. He had his hands, he had his brain, he had the strongest of human incentives: a wife to care for and cherish. In a few years they might try Hopeless Pass again—and not make the mistakes he had made the first time.
In the meantime he was happy, with all the wealth any man could hope for.
Smith leaned out of the wagon seat. “Hey, Buck! Suppertime.”
“Shupper dime,” Buck repeated, then called out, “Shupper dime! Shirko nigh! Shirko nigh!” The lead pair turned left, started bringing the train around in a circle.
Dora said, “The Sun is still high.”
“Yes,” her husband agreed, “and that’s why. The Sun is high, it’s very hot, the mules are tired and sweaty and hungry and thirsty. I want them to graze. Tomorrow we’ll be up before dawn and rolling at first light—make as many kilometers as possible before it gets too bloody hot. Then another early stop.”
“I wasn’t questioning it, dear; I simply wanted to know why. I’m finding that being a schoolmarm hasn’t taught me all I need to know to be a pioneer wife.”
“I understood; that’s why I explaind. Dora, always ask me if I do anything you don’t understand; you do have to know . . because if something happens to me, then it’ll be up to you. Just hold your questions until later if I seem to be in a hurry.”
“I’ll try, Woodrow—I am trying. I’m hot and thirsty myself; those poor dears must be feeling it dreadfully. If you can spare me, I’ll water them while you unharness.”
“No, Dora.”
“But—Sorry.”
“Damn it, I said always to ask why. But I was about to explain. First we let them graze an hour. That will cool them down some in spite of the Sun, and, being thirsty, they’ll look for short green stuff under this tall dry stuff. They will get a little moisture out of that. Meantime I’m going to measure the water barrels . . but I know that we’re going on short water rations. Should’ve yesterday. Dorable, you see that patch of dark green way up there below the pass? I think there is water there, dry as it’s been . . and pray hard that there is, because I don’t expect to find water between here and there. We may have no water at all the last day or so. It doesn’t take a mule long to die without water and not much longer for a man.”
“Woodrow . . is it as bad as that?”
“It is, dear. That’s why I’ve been studying the photomaps. The clearest ones Andy and I made a long time ago, when we surveyed this planet—but in early spring for this hemisphere. The shots Zack took for me aren’t much; the ‘Andy J.’ isn’t equipped as a survey ship. As may be, I took this route because it looked faster. But every wash we’ve crossed the past ten days has been bone-dry. My mistake and it may be my last one.”
“Woodrow! Don’t talk that way!”
“Sorry, dear. But there is always a last mistake. I’ll do my damnedest to see that this is not my last mistake—because it must not happen to you. I’m simply trying to impress you with how carefully we must conserve water.”
“You’ve impressed me. I’ll be most careful with cleaning up and so forth.”
“I still haven’t made it clear. There will be no washing at all—not a face wash, not even a hand wash. Pans and such you’ll scour with dirt and grass and put them in the sunshine and hope they sterilize. Water is only for drinking. The mules go on half water rations at once, and you and I, instead of the liter and a half of liquid each day a human is supposed to need, will each try to get by on a half liter. Uh, Mrs. Whiskers will get a full ration of water; she has to make milk for her kids. If it gets too tough, we slaughter the kids and let her dry up.”
“Oh, dear!”
“We may not have to. But, Dora, we aren’t even close to last extremities. If the going gets really tough, we kill a mule and drink its blood.”
“What! Why, they’re our friends!”
“Dora, listen to your old man. I promise you that we will never kill Buck, or Beulah, or Betty. If I must, it will be a mule we bought in New Pittsburgh. But if one of our three old friends die—we eat him. Her.”
“I don’t think I could.”
“You will when you’re hungry enough. If you think about the baby inside you, you’ll eat without hesitation and bless your dead friend for helping to keep your baby alive. Don’t talk about what you can’t do when the chips are down, dear—because you can. Did Helen ever tell you stories about the first winter here?”
“No. She said I didn’t need to know.”
“Could be she was mistaken. I’ll tell you one of the less grisly ones. We placed—I placed—a heel-and-toe watch over the seed grain, with orders to shoot to kill. And one guard did. A drumhead court-martial exonerated the guard; the man he killed was clearly stealing seed grain—his corpse had halfchewed grain in its mouth. Not Helen’s husband, by the way; he died like a gentleman—malnutrition and some fever I never identified.”
Smith added, “Buck’s got us hauled around. Let’s get busy.” He jumped down, reached up to help her. “And smile, baby, smile!—this show is being transmitted back to Earth to show those poor crowded people how easy it is to take a new planet—courtesy of DuBarry’s Delicious Deodorants, of which I need a bucketful.”
She smiled. “I stink worse than you do, my love.”
“That’s better, darling; we’ll make it. It’s just the first step that’s a dilly. Oh, yes! No cooking fire.”
“ ‘No f—’ Yes, sir.”
“Nor any until we get out of this dry stuff. Don’t strike a light for any reason—even if you’ve dropped your rubies and can’t find them.”
“ ‘Rubies—’ Woodrow, it was wonderful of you to give me rubies. But right now I would swap them for another barrel of water.”
“No, you wouldn’t, dearest, because rubies don’t weigh anything and I took every barrel the mules could haul. I was delighted that Zack had those rubies along and I could give them to you. A bride should be cherished. Let’s take care of these tired mules.”
After they turned the mules loose, Dora tried to figure out what she could feed her husband without the use of fi
re while Smith got busy on the fence. The fence was not much, but having only two wagons, they could not form a proper defensive circle; the best that could be done was to angle the wagons as far as the front axle of the second wagon permitted, then surround the bivouac with a fence of sorts—sharpened stakes of brasswood, each two meters long, and held together and spaced by what passed for rope in New Pittsburgh. The result, when held up on two sides by wagons and braced to the ground along the hypotenuse, constituted a high and fairly nasty picket fence. It would not slow up a dragon, but this was not dragon country. Lopers did not like it.
Smith did not like it much, either, but it was made on New Beginnings of all-native materials, could be repaired by a man who was handy, did not weigh much, could be abandoned with no great loss—and contained no metal. Smith had been able to buy two sturdy, boat-bodied, Conestoga-type wagons in New Pittsburgh only by offering in part payment complete hardware for two other wagons—hardware imported across the light-years in the Andy J. New Pittsburgh was far more “New” than “Pittsburgh”; there was iron ore there and coal, but its metals industry was still primitive.
The chickens, the sow, the goats, and even the humans were tasty temptations to wild lopers, but with the goats and kids shooed inside the kraal, two alert watchdogs, and sixteen mules grazing on all sides, Smith felt reasonably secure at night. True, a loper might get a mule, but it was much more likely that the mule would get the loper—especially as other mules would close in and help stomp the carnivore. These mules did not run from a loper; they struck out at him. Smith thought that, in time, mules might clean out the varmints even more than men did, make them as scarce as mountain lions had been in his youth.
A mule-stomped loper was readily converted into loper steak, loper stew, loper jerky—and dog and cat food, and Mrs. Porky the sow enjoyed the offal—all at no loss to the mules. Smith did not care much for loper in any form; the meat was too strongly flavored for his taste—but it was better than nothing and kept them from digging too deeply into food they had hauled along. Dora did not share her husband’s distaste for loper meat; born there and having eaten it now and then since earliest childhood, it seemed to her a normal food.
But Smith wished that he had time to hunt one of the herbivores that were the loper’s natural prey—six-legged like the loper but otherwise resembling a misshapen okapi—their meat was much milder. They were called “prairie goats,” which they were not, but systematic taxonomy of fauna and flora on New Beginnings had not gone far; there had been as yet no time for such intellectual luxuries. Smith had shot a prairie goat from the seat of the wagon a week earlier (now only a memory, bittersweet, of tasty tender meat). Smith did not feel justified in taking a day off to hunt until they had conquered Hopeless Pass. But he kept hoping for another chance shot.
Maybe now—“Fritz! Lady Macbeth! Here!” The dogs trotted up and waited. “High sentry. Loper! Prairie goat! Up!” The dogs immediately got on the very top of the lead wagon, making it in two jumps and a scramble, step, seat, and curved top. There they split the duty, nigh side and off side—and there they would stay until told to get down. Smith had paid a stiff price for the pair, but he had known they were good dogs; he had picked their ancestors on Earth and had fetched them with the first wave. Smith was not a “doggie” man in any fanatic sense; he simply believed that a partnership that had lasted so long on Earth would serve men equally well on strange planets.
Dora was sobered by her husband’s words, but once she got busy working, she cheered up. Shortly, while trying to plan a menu from little choice and without a cooking fire, she came across something that vexed her—good for her as it displaced her worrisome thoughts. Besides, she did not really believe that her husband could fail at anything.
She came around the end of the second wagon, crossed the little kraal to where her husband was making sure that his fence was tight. “Oh, that pesky little rooster!”
Woodrow looked around. “Hon, you look cute in just a sunbonnet.”
“Not just a sunbonnet, I’m wearing boots, too. Don’t you want to hear what that nasty little rooster did?”
“I would rather discuss how you look. Adorable, that is. Nevertheless, I’m not pleased with the way you are dressed.”
“What? But it’s so hot, dear. Since I can’t wash, I thought an air bath might make me smell better.”
“You smell good to me. But an air bath is a good idea; I’ll peel down, too. Your gun, dear—where’s your belt with your knife and gun?” He started shucking his overalls.
“You want me to wear my gun belt now? Inside the fence? With you here to protect me?”
“As self-discipline and a standard precaution, my lovely one.” He hitched his own gun-and-knife belt back into place as he stepped out of his overalls, then pulled off boots and shirt and got bare save for the belt and three other weapons that did not show when he was dressed. “In more years than I like to think about I have never been unarmed except when locked in somewhere safe. I want you to acquire the habit. Not just sometimes. Always.”
“All right. I left my belt on the seat; I’ll get it. But, Woodrow, I’m not much of a fighter at best.”
“You’re fairly accurate with that needle gun up to fifty meters. And you’re going to get better and better the longer you live with me. Not just with it but with anything that shoots, cuts, burns, or even makes nasty bruises, from your bare hands to a blaster. See over there, Dorable?” He pointed to nothing but flatness. “In just seven seconds a horde of hairy savages will come pouring over the top of that rise and attack. I get a spear through my thigh and go down . . then you have to fight them off for both of us. What are you going to do, you poor little girl, with your gun clear over there on the seat of that wagon?”
“Why”—she set her feet apart, put her hands back of her head, and gave a wiggle that was invented in the Garden of Eden, or perhaps just outside—“I’ll go this way at ’em!”
“Yes,” Lazarus agreed thoughtfully, “that should work. If they were human. But they aren’t. Their only interest in tall, beautiful, brown-eyed girls is to eat them. Bones and all. Silly of them, but that’s how they are.”
“Yes, dear,” she said docilely. “I’ll go put on my gun belt. Then I’ll kill the one who speared you. Then I’ll see how many more I can get before they eat me.”
“That’s right, durable Dorable. Always take an honor guard with you. If you have to go, go down fighting. The size of your guard of honor determines your status in hell.”
“Yes, dear. I’m sure I’ll enjoy hell if you’re there, too.” She turned to fetch her weapons.
“Oh, I’ll be there! They wouldn’t take me anywhere else. Dora! When you put on your gun belt, take off your sunbonnet and boots—and put on your rubies, all of them.”
She paused with a foot on the step of the wagon. “My rubies, dear? Out here on the prairie?”
“Rangy Lil, I bought those rubies for you to wear and for me to admire you wearing them.”
She flashed a smile that turned her normally serious expression into sunshine, swung on up into the wagon and disappeared. She was back quickly wearing weapons belt and rubies, but had taken a few seconds to comb her hair, long and chestnut brown and shining. That she had not been able to bathe for more than two weeks did not show, did not detract from her enchanting, youthful beauty. She paused on the step and smiled at him.
“Hold it!” he said. “Perfect! Dora, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in all my born days.”
She flashed him another smile. “I don’t believe that, my husband—but I hope you will go on saying it.”
“Madam, I cannot tell a lie. I say it only because it is the simple truth. Now what were you saying about the little rooster?”
“Oh! That perverted little monster! I said he had been breaking eggs on purpose! This time I caught him. Pecking them. Two freshly laid broken eggs!”
“Royal prerogative, dear. Afraid one of them would hatch out a rooster.�
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“I’ll wring his neck! If we had a fire, I’d do it right now. Darling, I was trying to see what we could eat cold without opening anything not already open, and it occurred to me that salt crackers crumbled into raw eggs would almost make a meal. But there were only three eggs today and he broke the two laid by his hens. I’d put plenty of grass in both cages; the one egg on the other side wasn’t even cracked. Damn him. Woodrow, why do we have to have two roosters?”
“For the same reason I carry two throwing knives. Sweetheart, after we arrive and hatch our first chicks, once they’re big enough that I’m certain of a spare rooster, we can have rooster and dumplings with him as guest of honor. Not before.”
“But we can’t have him breaking eggs. Tonight’s supper will be mostly cheese and hardtack—unless you want me to open something.”
“Let’s not rush it. Fritz and Lady Mac are trying to spot game right now. Prairie goat, I hope. Loper if not.”
“But I can’t cook meat. You said. You did say.”
“Raw, my dear. Haunch of prairie goat, chopped fine and spread on hard crackers. Beef Tartare à la New Beginnings. Tasty. Tastes almost as good as girl.” He smacked his lips.
“Well . . if you can eat it, I can eat it. But half the time, Woodrow, I don’t know whether you are joking or not.”
“I never joke about food or women, Dorable; those are sacred subjects.” He looked her up and down again. “Speaking of women, woman, dressing you in rubies is just right. But why a bracelet around your ankle?”
Time Enough for Love Page 36