by David Weber
He'd reached the riverbank.
A ghastly sound escaped him, defying translation; but he was clawing and scrabbling at the rocks, digging in with fingers that sank into the soft clay, hauling and scraping himself upward, out of the river's deadly clutch. The rock was hot and wonderful under his belly, driving away some of the icy chill on his bones. Then the ground flattened out under him and Scott collapsed forward onto a sun-warmed ledge above the river, shaking violently. As exhaustion lapped at the edges of his awareness, dragging him down toward oblivion, Scott's last conscious sensation was the touch of tiny, three-fingered hands against his cheek.
When, at last, the two-leg reached the rocky shore and dragged himself, shaking and weak, onto the bank, Swift Striker crooned approvingly and touched his wet face, trying to urge him higher onto the bank, under the safety of the trees. But the struggle with the icy river and the terrible injuries had taken their toll; his two-leg collapsed utterly and slid into unconsciousness, clearly exhausted beyond his ability to keep going. His wonderful, smooth skin, mottled with those beautiful flecks of gold, was chilly to the touch. His two-leg needed a fire to warm him.
Swift Striker swarmed up into the trees, searching for deadwood, using his true-hands and the flint knife and hand-axe tied to his waist belt to break and hack pieces loose, then dropped branches to the ground until he had a respectable pile. It wasn't enough to warm a creature the size of his two-leg for long, but it would help. Tail flicking in agitation, Swift Striker darted to the ground again and piled the rough branches to make what would be the largest fire he'd ever started. He used his knife to scrape bark and wood shavings for tinder, then set about striking his fire flint to shower sparks down into the dry bark and shavings.
He blew gently across the smouldering sparks and fed twigs into the flames—and grew aware of an intense, burningly curious gaze from his two-leg. Swift Striker looked up and found wide, water-blue eyes watching him, the surprise in his mind glow spilling over into delight as the bright fire crackled and licked at the larger branches. The exhausted two-leg made more mouth noises, which Swift Striker determined he would have to set about learning as quickly as possible, since the two-leg could never learn to speak the way the People did. Then the two-leg's mouth opened slightly in a curious gesture, the wide, strangely shaped lips lifting at the corners. The wonder in his mind glow told Swift Striker the odd grimace was an expression of pleasure.
He bleeked happily and fed more wood to the flames.
His two-leg stirred at length, looking around their immediate vicinity, then hunched forward on his side. His hand closed over a branch too large for Swift Striker to drag and pulled it closer to the fire. Swift Striker sat up on his haunches, surprised again by the two-leg's strength. He'd planned to use his hand-axe to chop the limb into more manageable chunks, but the two-leg dragged the whole thing with ease, injured as he was. The two-leg fumbled at a part of his body coverings which circled his hips, then pulled something loose, some sort of tool, by the look of it, although Swift Striker couldn't imagine what it might be for.
A vibrating hum startled him. Then something sprang into existence beyond the two-leg's hand, projecting out of the oddly shaped tool he held. Whatever it was, it sliced through the heavy branch as though passing through empty air. In seconds, a limb nearly as thick as Swift Striker's whole body and three times longer was reduced to kindling. Swift Striker's whiskers twitched and trembled in excitement. He wanted to look at the marvelous tool, yet feared that without knowing how to properly use it, he would do himself a grievous injury. His own flint knife felt clumsy and ridiculous by comparison. The People must learn more of the two-legs!
Once the cut-up branch was blazing brightly, the two-leg did something that caused the tool's hum to stop and replaced the marvelous knife-tool in some kind of holder at his hip. The fire crackled invitingly and the two-leg hunched closer to its blazing heat. He closed his eyes, huddling as close as he could get without igniting his curly red head fur, then lay still for long minutes. Swift Striker fed the fire with more of the big branch, running his true-hands over the perfectly smooth, flat edges, and wondered what other marvels the two-legs possessed. Slowly, the two-leg's dripping hair and skin dried in the warmth of the hot fire. His body coverings remained wet, but they had ceased to drip, now, and the front of his chest-covering was beginning to show dry in patches, as well.
When, eventually, the wood ran out and the fire began to die back, the two-leg stirred, opening his eyes once more. Fingers capable of such enormous power touched Swift Striker's fur, trembling and weak as a newborn kitten. Water spilled from the bright blue eyes and dripped down gold-speckled cheeks and his breaths shortened as his emotional distress deepened, coming in short, ragged gasps. The agony of fear and loneliness in his two-leg's mind was unbearable.
Swift Striker huddled close again, wrapping his tail around the two-leg's arm, stroking his head against the two-leg's cheek, focusing all his own energy on quieting the deep currents of fear and despair he could taste so strongly in the two-leg's broken mind. It seemed to help. His breaths deepened and water ceased to flow from his eyes. A few soft mouth noises came, gusting across Swift Striker's fur with his breath, then his two-leg struggled to sit up. Swift Striker crooned and pushed gently against his two-leg's shoulder, lending what little strength he could. His two-leg sat panting for a moment, then touched Swift Striker's fur and stroked gently down his back once again. He arched and purred ecstatically, reveling in the caress, so unlike anything he'd ever experienced.
His two-leg made low mouth noises, then pointed away under the trees, down river. The gesture was unmistakable. His two-leg wanted to go down the riverbank, for some unknown but imperative reason. The urgency Swift Striker felt from his mind glow was a bright furnace, impossible to ignore. There was something in that direction which his two-leg needed, desperately. And his two-leg was peering through the brush, as well, clearly hunting for something closer at hand. Swift Striker sat up on his rear-most limbs, looking—had he known—something like a Terran ferret with one pair too many feet and a head far more feline than weaselish. Swift Striker peered intently into the deep shadows beneath the trees and spotted what his two-leg must be searching for. A heavy-looking sack of some not-leather substance lay at the foot of a tree. A long, tube-like, not-wood rod, thicker than the pole he'd used for fishing, leaned against the tree trunk beside it.
Swift Striker had never seen one of the thunder-bark tools, but Song Crooner had sung the oldest of the memory songs, from Blue Mountain Dancing Clan and Fire Runs Fast Clan, which showed clear images of such tools being used to kill a charging death fang when the two-legs had first been sighted in the world. Clearly, this was what his two-leg searched for. Swift Striker bleeked excitedly and pointed toward the alien tools. The two-leg's lips quivered upward again and a wave of pleasure rolled across him, leaving Swift Striker burbling with happiness. His two-leg crawled toward the tools, moving with pained shakiness, and finally gained the tree where he'd left them. He ignored the long tube and dug into the not-leather sack, instead, bringing out another oddly shaped tool whose function Swift Striker could not fathom.
His two-leg made mouth noises at it, then fell silent. The tool sputtered strangely—then two-leg voices came from inside it! Swift Striker uttered a sharp sound of amazement and crept forward, staring. The tool spoke again, with a voice that was clearly a two-leg, yet Swift Striker knew that no two-leg could possibly fit inside that tiny little box, nor could he taste the mind glow or catch the scent of another two-leg anywhere nearby.
His own two-leg made the pleasure grimace at him, then made more mouth noises into the tool. But his two-leg's glow of pleasure was short-lived. Swift Striker felt a rising tide of worry from him as the tool spoke again and his two-leg listened in growing agitation. Then he peered toward the sky, clearly trying to see upward through the trees. Swift Striker could taste his frustration and sense of helplessness as he sat huddled at the base of the tree, l
istening to the bodiless voice from the tool. What could his two-leg want to see in the sky? Swift Striker scented the wind for clues. He could smell nothing out of the ordinary, although the wind was heavy with the scent of approaching rain.
—Rain?
"Bleek!"
Swift Striker swarmed up the tree trunk, racing through the tangle of branches until he clung to the thin twigs at the very canopy of the forest. Wind fingers ruffled through his fur as he peered up toward the distant mountain peaks. Dark storm clouds gathered on the mountain above them, thick with the promise of driving rain and lightning. Such storms were so common in the spring season, Swift Striker hadn't really paid much attention to the signs of the coming deluge. He didn't have far to travel to his clan's central nesting place, after all, and could easily outrun any storm to reach the snug, woven shelter waiting for him.
But his wounded two-leg could barely sit up, unaided.
The coming storm would slash down across them with unbridled fury. Nor was there any shelter his two-leg could reach that would protect him from the coming wind and rain and—if he tasted the scent of that wind right—hailstones, as well. Swift Striker had no idea how the two-leg had known the storm was coming, but clearly he had, or at least, the two-leg voice from the tool had known, for the voice had spoken and his own two-leg had tried to see the sky, worry suddenly thick in his mind glow. And he was right to worry, Swift Striker realized bleakly, watching the clouds boil down from the mountain peaks. There was no guessing how far away the nearest two-legs must be, so Swift Striker couldn't even begin to guess how soon others of his kind might be able to rescue him. It couldn't be soon enough, not even if they came in one of the flying tools like the one that had carried away the injured Climbs Quickly and his youngling—
Flying tools!
Of course! Swift Striker's two-leg must have used one to come this far from the nearest two-leg nesting places. That meant he must have left it somewhere close by. If his two-leg could reach it before the storm broke, it would provide shelter from the slashing hail storm on its way down the mountainside. From his vantage at the top of the trees, Swift Striker scanned the forest canopy, wondering where the two-leg might have left his machine. He knew what two-leg flying machines looked like, from the Bright Water Clan memory songs and those of clans which lived closer to two-leg habitations. And his two-leg had pointed down river, wanting to go that direction.
The wind was whipping through the treetops, swinging his perch in dizzy arcs, when Swift Striker finally spotted the clearing at the river's bend. Floods from melting snow had come roaring down the riverbed earlier in the season, smashing into that bend and gouging out whole trees. He had seen it happen before, other spring seasons, both here and along other twists of the river where it raged and tore its way down the mountainside. There was a flat, treeless stretch of ground there, more than large enough to hold a two-leg flying machine. And when the wind whipped the trees in just the right direction, Swift Striker saw a flash of alien, bright color, yellow as the sun, shiny and strange, and quite large enough to be a curved section of his two-leg's flying tool. Feeling a sense of triumph the circumstances probably didn't warrant, Swift Striker scrambled for safer footing in the lower branches, where the rising wind didn't reach with quite so fierce a strength, and raced for the ground and his injured friend.
" . . . no way we can get an air car up there in time, Scott," Gifford Bede's voice broke the bad news from Scott's backup com-link unit. "That's a force-two thunderstorm brewing up there. Even if we set out now, that storm would drive us back to town inside thirty minutes. It's going to break over you in about ten. Can you get to your air car?"
"Yeah, sure," he lied, knowing he couldn't possibly crawl over terrain that rough in only ten minutes. It had taken him more than twice that long just to crawl a few meters out of the river. One glance at the chronometer in his backup com unit told him more than thirty minutes had passed since he'd landed that huge fish, so he'd been out cold for nearly ten minutes with his face suspended in his little friend's net. If he hadn't fallen with his arms and torso draped over a boulder, keeping much of his body mass out of the icy water, hypothermia would've killed him, making it physically impossible for him to crawl to relative safety on the riverbank. And now Scott had only ten minutes in which to drag his battered self several dozen meters down a forested, boulder-strewn riverbank to the safety of his air car before a force-two Sphinxian thunderstorm burst over him.
The treecat listened to his exchange with Gifford Bede, then uttered a curiously sharp, "Bleek!" and took off straight up the tree trunk at top speed. It vanished into the branches, a cream-and-grey blur streaking toward the treetops. A stab of abandonment crushed through Scott, watching the treecat leave. He leaned against the picket wood's rough-barked trunk and bit his lower lip and wondered what the hell to do next. He needed to fashion a walking stick of some kind, because he needed to make better time than he could simply crawling all the way to the air car from here, and he needed to wrap his throbbing ankle to brace the sprain under his flexible boot, and if he sat here much longer, that storm was going to come howling down across him like a shrieking banshee and God alone knew if he'd survive, exposed to the wind, the rain, and the hail.
"Keep talking to me, Giff," Scott said in a choked voice. "I'm all by myself out here."
"Roger. Hang on, Scott. Just get to your air car and you'll make it through fine. What's the rest of you look like?"
He explained the wrenched ankle and the need for a splint and walking stick.
"Okay, Scott, we'll talk you through this. You've got a vibro-knife with you, right?"
"Yes, I do. I . . ." He hesitated, looking across to the dying fire. "I used it to cut up a big limb the treecat hacked out of the picket wood I'm under."
The backup com unit crackled with silence for a long moment. "Come again, Scott? Did you say treecat?" He could hear the uncertainty in Giff's voice, even through the storm static which interfered with his com unit's signal to the orbital communications system it accessed. At this juncture, it had been only a couple of T-months since little Stephanie Harrington had first been adopted by a treecat and any human contact with the native sentients of Sphinx sent ripples of shock, excitement, and uncertainty through the planet's newest sentients.
"The treecat," he said slowly. "There's a treecat with me. Or there was. He just ran up the picket wood I'm leaning against and disappeared. He was with me out in the river when I woke up." Scott found it surprisingly difficult to say the words, because the implications, the depth of concern shown by one sentient race for another impacted him so deeply and closed up his throat. "He dragged a net around my head. Pulled my face up out of the water, looped the damned net over a tree limb. Kept me from drowning while I was unconscious. And when I dragged myself out of the river, he used some kind of stone tool to chop deadwood out of this big picket wood I'm under, then he started a fire going, I watched him use a flint to strike the sparks with."
"Good God!" Gifford Bede's disembodied voice echoed the same naked shock Scott still felt, having witnessed the astonishing things his little arboreal friend had done on his behalf. "You said the treecat's been with you since you woke up?"
"Yeah."
"And he wasn't there before you fell and struck your head?"
"No. At least, not where I could see him, because I've been looking for signs of treecats all day. When I woke up, I was sprawled across a boulder with my face hanging in a net. And he'd cut off part of my sleeve, wrapped compresses around the gashes in my skull. Kept me from bleeding to death, probably."
A rustle overhead drew Scott's attention. He gripped his backup com tighter and started to reach for his rifle. Then hope and a pleasure so intense it astonished him surged as a familiar cream-and-grey shape hurtled down through the branches. The treecat swarmed down the picket wood trunk and dropped lightly beside him. It rested one hand against his and lifted another to point urgently downriver.
"Bleek!"
"It's the treecat," Scott whispered, awestruck. "He's come back. And he's pointing toward my air car. My God, I think he climbed the tree and saw it!"
"Well, if he's telling you to shag your butt out of there, you'd better pay attention. That storm is a mean monster and it's on collision course with your transponder. We're picking up high winds and big hailstones and more lightning than you'll ever want to meet up close and personal."
Given the amount of static shrieking through the com unit's pickup, that didn't come as a surprise. "Roger. I'll do my best, Giff."
"Okay. First, wrap up that ankle, splint it with anything you've got."
Scott rummaged through his haversack, pulling out plastiglass-filament tape and several sections of disassembled fishing rod, the spare he always carried. With his head swimming from the pain in his skull, Scott dragged his knee up until he could reach the throbbing ankle, then tried to hold the fishing-rod sections in place and wrap the plastiglass-filament tape around them. He quickly discovered he needed about four more hands than he currently possessed—and the only ones he had were shaking so violently, they were nearly useless. The treecat tipped his head to one side, ears pricked forward, studying the stiff pieces of fiberglass rod that kept toppling over, then bleeked softly.
With deft, three-fingered hands and strong, opposable thumbs, the treecat snatched up the disassembled sections and held them firmly against Scott's ankle, using all four of his upper limbs to hold them in place. Sudden salt stung Scott's eyelids. "Thanks, little buddy," he mumbled, pulling a length of tape loose and winding it around his ankle with shaking hands.