Coyote

by Allen Steele

  The trout line, though, was a success; when he pulled it out of the stream, he found two large redfish dangling from its hooks. He cooked one for breakfast, then cleaned the other and laid it out on a rack on the beach to dry. Yet he knew he couldn’t get by on a diet of fish alone; although there were plenty of creek crab to be found in the stream’s shallows, he had never developed a fondness for them. Like it or not, he’d have to go hunting.

  So Carlos slung his rifle over his shoulder and set out on foot across the rolling meadows north of camp (which he had already marked on his map as “Carlos’s Pizza”). Midland wasn’t as flat as New Florida; not far away were a line of low hills, and he set out toward them, following an animal trail he’d discovered earlier while scavenging firewood. He found clusters of ball plants along the way, which he carefully avoided lest he be swarmed by the pseudowasps that nested around them; now and then he came upon ropy brown turds he recognized as belonging to creek cats. Their flesh was barely edible, but their hide was perfect for clothing; if he tracked their scat, he might have a chance of bagging one.

  By early afternoon, he’d climbed to the top of the highest hill, where he found a small clearing among the faux birch. The sky was clear, the sun warm; in the far distance, he could make out a range of green mountains, their summits still frosted with snow. Between where he stood and there were miles upon miles of grassland and forest, with streams and tributaries cutting through them like the seamwork of an intricately woven carpet.

  Forgetting for the moment the purpose of his long hike, Carlos sat down on a fallen tree, pulling the rifle off his shoulders and leaning it against the trunk next to him. It wasn’t just the aching beauty of the land that caught his attention; there was also an eerie sense of déjà vu, for it seemed as if the place was familiar, even though he was consciously aware that he was the first human ever to set foot there. Then why would…?

  No. He had seen the place before. Not on Earth, though, but elsewhere. Aboard the Alabama. The mural in the ring corridor, painted by Leslie Gillis, depicting an imaginary scene from his Prince Rupurt book.

  In that instant, a fragment of a half-forgotten dream: When you’re done, let me know how it turns out…

  Carlos suddenly became aware that the clearing around him had become very quiet. The grasshoarders had stopped chirping, the swoops had gone silent. Now there was a stillness, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

  Something stirred behind him.

  Carlos turned his head, peered over his shoulder.

  The boid was only a couple of dozen yards away. It wasn’t very large—barely five feet tall, perhaps a young adult—but its enormous head lowered upon its thick neck, and it froze in midstep, suddenly aware that its intended prey had spotted it. In that instant, Carlos realized that, just as he had been stalking creek cat, so the boid had been stalking him, patiently keeping its distance while remaining downwind, waiting for the moment when he’d drop his guard.

  For a few seconds, the two hunters regarded each other, neither daring to move first. Standoff. The boid opened its beak and shrieked, then it charged.

  Snatching up the rifle, Carlos threw himself belly down behind the tree trunk. A snap of the left forefinger and the safety was disengaged; the holographic sight appeared above the barrel, but already the boid was too close for it to be of much use. Cradling the stock against his shoulder, bracing his arms against the log, he aimed straight at the boid and fired.

  The rifle trembled in his hands; spent shells rattled off the wood. Bullets ripped across the boid; blood and feathers spewed from its chest. Howling in outraged agony, its head thrashing back and forth, the creature staggered on its backward-jointed legs, its clawed forearms briefly rising as if in a vain attempt to deflect the fusillade.

  Yet it kept coming. Now it was only a dozen feet away. Carlos took a bead on its left eye, squeezed the trigger once more, and was rewarded by the sight of bone and brains exploding from the back of its skull just below the cranial tuft.

  Even though it was dead the moment it hit the ground, the boid’s limbs twitched spasmodically, as if the creature was still trying to run. Carlos stood up, waited silently behind the tree until the boid had gone still. In the far distance, he could hear gunfire reverberating off the hills.

  “That…that…” he whispered. He couldn’t finish what he wanted to say—that’s for my mother and father—for somehow it didn’t seem right. This hadn’t been for them. It was for himself. So he let it go.

  Carlos sat down on the log and stared at the dead boid for a long time. At last, he put aside the gun and pulled out his knife.

  He would eat well tonight. Yet that wasn’t the only thing he wanted.

  He had just finished dinner when the satphone chirped.

  Again, he considered ignoring it. It was the perfect end of a perfect day; twilight tinted the high clouds above the river in shades of gold and purple as the evening tide gently lapped at the beach. He didn’t want to risk spoiling it by having another conversation with Captain Lee, yet he knew that he had to maintain contact with the colony; otherwise, they might get seriously concerned and send out a shuttle to find him.

  Water boiled in the cook pot he had suspended above the fire. Walking over to where he had placed the satphone on top of his pack, he briefly raised the pot lid to check the contents. Satisfied by what he saw, he put the lid back in place, then picked up the satphone.

  “Carlos’s Pizza. May I help you?”

  “Umm…yeah, I’d like a twelve-inch sausage and mushroom, please.”

  Wendy.

  “I’m sorry, but our only toppings are creek crab and redfish.” He grinned. “And boid, too, but that’ll cost you extra.”

  A quiet chuckle. “I don’t think a boid pizza would be very good. It’d probably eat you before…” A sharp intake of breath. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” His parents had been killed by a boid; she’d forgotten that for a moment, but he was not offended. Captain Lee must have urged her to call him; that was the only way she could have anticipated the pizza joke. Whatever the reason, he was glad to hear from her. “Actually, boid isn’t all that bad. A little stringy, but it tastes sort of like…”

  “Let me guess. Chicken.” Now there was surprise in her voice. “You killed a boid?”

  “Uh-huh. Took one down this afternoon.” As he sat down on a driftwood branch, his gaze wandered to the skillet and cookware resting near the fireplace. When he was done, the next chore would be to scrub everything he’d used that night. At the moment, though, he couldn’t resist the urge to brag. “Wasn’t much of a fight. I don’t think it was full-grown. Didn’t quite know how to sneak up on me.” He chuckled. “And no, it doesn’t taste like chicken. More like…I dunno. Corned beef, maybe.”

  “Carlos…” She hesitated. “Look, I’m glad you…y’know, that you got it, but you shouldn’t be walking around out there on your own.”

  “Like I’ve got a choice?”

  “Of course you do.” Another pause. “Carlos, you don’t have to do this. No one’s being punished for what we did. Chris and Barry aren’t in the stockade, and Kuniko told everyone that what happened to David was an accident.”

  He closed his eyes, said nothing. Memories. Stealing the canoes from the boathouse. Escaping from Liberty. Crossing the Eastern Divide. The long journey down East Channel to the Great Equatorial River. The encounter with the catwhale. Losing David, and almost losing Wendy as well. Getting shipwrecked on the southern coast of New Florida. Leaving Wendy and the others behind to go off on his own, taking the only remaining canoe and what few supplies they had left. Errors of judgment leading to fatal mistakes, one on top of the next, with everything leading up to the death of a friend. Perhaps others might be willing to forgive him, yet it would be a long time before he’d be able to forgive himself.

  “Carlos? You still there?”

  “Sorry. Just thinking.” His eyes felt moist as
he opened them again. “I’m fine. Like I told you, there’s a lot of stuff I’ve got to work out.” He took a breath. “What about you? I mean, y’know…the other thing.”

  “The other thing. Right.” Now there was chill quality to her voice. “I’m so glad to hear that you’re concerned about the other thing.”

  “C’mon, I didn’t mean…”

  “The other thing is fine. Kuniko examined me after we got back and said that we’re both in good shape. And since the Town Council decided to let me make my own choice, I don’t need to have an abortion. So the other thing will be born right on schedule. Not that this is any of your concern…”

  He stood up. “Wendy, I didn’t mean to…”

  “You want to know something else? Kuni performed a blood test on Chris and matched it against a uterine sample from the…the thing, as you call it. Guess what she found out?”

  A chill ran down his back. “What did she…?”

  “Sorry, pizza boy. I’m not going to tell you. If you’re really interested, you can call me sometime. Right now, though…well, you’ve pissed me off.” A breath rattled against his ear like a winter wind. “God, this was a mistake. Shouldn’t have let them make me call you, but I was worried.”

  “Wendy, please…!”

  “I’m glad you’re alive, and that you’ve killed your first boid. Hope you finally got it out of your system.”

  “I didn’t…!”

  “Goodbye.” A pause. “Take care of yourself.”

  The satphone went dead.

  He had a sudden impulse to chuck it into the surf, but he’d done that once already: Kuniko’s unit, the day they left Liberty. And he needed it to keep in touch with the colony, didn’t he?

  Carlos considered the question for a minute or so before he folded the antenna and carefully put the satphone back in his pack. Then he walked over to the fire pit.

  Bear was beginning to rise above the horizon, its rings shrouded by clouds. It looked as if it might rain later that evening, and he had never gotten a chance to build a roof for his tree house. He’d have to rig the tarp above his platform before he went to bed.

  But not just yet. He lifted the top of the pot; hot rancid steam rose from the churning, fat-soaked water. He picked up a stick, stuck it into pot, fished around in its foul contents until he skewered the object he had been cooking all evening. He raised it from the pot, closely inspected it by firelight.

  The boid skull was flensed clean to the bone, its flesh and feathers stripped away by boiling salt water. A trophy for the hunter.

  Carlos remained on the southwestern shore of Midland for another three weeks, longer than he had originally intended. He finished building his tree house, adding a ceiling and finally four walls, and hung the boid skull from the above the narrow door; it looked good there, and it also had the unexpected effect of scaring away the swoops who’d nested in the upper limbs. Within a few days, the birds ceded the blackwood to him, and he slept undisturbed. Although he continued to hear boids at night, for some reason he never saw any within a couple of miles of camp. Like the swoops, they seemed to be keeping their distance from Carlos’s Pizza.

  As a side project, he cut down a long, green branch of faux birch, and at night while squatting by the fire on the beach, he carved a hunting bow from it. He was running low on ammo, and he needed to conserve what few rounds he had left to defend himself should the boids return. A couple of days earlier, he had shot a creek cat; once he skinned its hide and used its flesh for fishing bait, he boiled its upper intestines, allowed it to cure, then cut a long, slender bowstring from it. Once he’d fashioned a dozen slender shafts from faux birch, he gathered some flinty stones and sharpened them into arrowheads; some swoop feathers he found on the ground beneath his tree made good fletches. When he wasn’t doing anything else, he practiced archery, shooting at a small target he’d made of a piece of catskin lashed to the side of a tree. After a time, he became proficient enough to take down a swamper he discovered scavenging in the garbage pit he’d dug near the beach.

  He kept the satphone turned off. He didn’t want to hear from Wendy, and after a while there were days when he seldom thought of her at all. Every now and then he’d switch on the unit, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d hear it chirp, like a neglected pet trying to get his attention. Yet he never spoke to whoever was attempting to contact him; he’d pick up the satphone, click the RECEIVE switch a couple of times—yes, I’m still alive, thanks for asking, goodbye—then turn it off and put it away. Let ’em eat static: Carlos’s Pizza was no longer accepting orders.

  He stopped keeping track of the days. He knew that it was sometime in or early Hamaliel, by the LeMarean calendar, but whether it was Rap or Anna, Kaf or Sam, or any of the other nine days in the week, he hadn’t the foggiest notion, nor really cared. Yet although Coyote’s seasons were almost as long as a year back on Earth, the summer solstice was long past; already, he was beginning to notice that the days were getting a little shorter, and Bear was rising a bit earlier each evening. And he was getting restless. If he still wanted to continue his exploration of the Equatorial, he’d have to leave soon.

  Carlos spent the next few days repairing the sail and waterproofing the canoe’s seams with boiled fat from a creek cat he’d killed with his bow, then early one morning he packed up his belongings, took them down from his tree house, and loaded them aboard the Orion. He tied the boid skull to the bow as a sort of figurehead—if it frightened away the swoops and boids, maybe it would do the same for any catwhales he happened to encounter—and he made sure the tree house door was bolted shut, just in case he happened to come that way again. For all intents and purposes, though, Carlos’s Pizza was closed for good.

  By midday he was back on the river. Head west, with no particular destination in mind, no objective except to see how far he could go.

  Day in and day out, over the course of the next four weeks, he paddled along the southern coast of Midland, always keeping within sight of the shore.

  Since he was below Coyote’s equator, the prevailing winds were almost always coming from the east; seldom was he able to raise his sails, so the progress was slow, which suited him well. Occasionally a rainstorm would come upon him; usually he’d just ride it out, although if he heard thunder, he’d head for land as quickly as possible. When the sun was at his back, that meant the day was coming to an end, and he’d guide his canoe to the nearest available beach. He’d pull up his canoe, pitch his tarp, gather some wood for a fire, then cook whatever he’d managed to shoot with his bow or catch with his rod. Coyote was generous, though; he rarely went to bed hungry.

  With each passing day, Coyote revealed a little more of itself; he marveled at how much the world changed the farther he traveled from New Florida, which he now realized was a rather mundane island, a flat and innocuous bayou. The mountains he’d seen from the hilltop where he’d killed the boid gradually grew closer until he could make out flat-topped mesas only a few miles from the river. He marked them on his map as the Gillis Range. The faux birch growing in abundance along the shore gradually gave way to what first appeared to be gigantic mushrooms, until he paddled closer and saw that they were actually tall, slender trees whose willowlike branches grew so close together that they formed an almost-solid canopy. He called them parasol trees. Now and then, he spotted herds of large animals roaming through swamps along the river edge, great shaggy beasts that faintly resembled bison save for their sloping heads and long, tusked snouts. He decided that shags was an appropriate name.

  He also observed a different species of swoop. Unlike the ones that lived in the blackwoods on New Florida and on the western side of Midland, these swoops were aquatic. They cruised high above the river until they spotted their prey, at which point they’d fold their narrow wings against their bodies and dive headfirst into the water, emerging moments later with a channelmouth or weirdling wiggling from their elongated bills. The river swoops traveled in flocks, yet he could never figure out w
here they nested; when the sun started to go down, he’d see them turn and head not for the nearby coastline, but instead toward the eastern horizon.

  Wendy would have been fascinated. But she wasn’t with him.

  He awoke alone and he traveled alone; there was no one to share his campfire at the end of the day, and when he went to bed he had only the stars for company. After a time, he caught himself talking to absent friends, as if they were riding in the canoe with him. Wendy was usually his invisible passenger, but sometimes it would be Chris whom he’d imagine sitting in the bow…Chris when he was still his best friend, always ready to share a laugh. At night, gazing up at Bear as he sat on some lonely beach, he’d hear Barry playing his guitar on the other side of his campfire, picking out an old blues song from the twentieth century.

  Now and then, David would show up, too. He never spoke, but simply sat and stared at him, a silent ghost whose brief appearances Carlos dreaded.

  This wasn’t the only specter who paid him a visit. One night, while he was cooking the channelhead he’d hooked earlier that day, his father came to sit with him.

  What do you think you’re doing? Papa asked.

  “Making dinner.” Carlos stared at the filet he was spit-roasting over the fire he’d built. “I’ve got another plate if you want some.”

  He was perfectly aware that his father was dead, along with his mother. Mama never visited him, but Papa sometimes did, although usually in his dreams. He felt a certain chillness against his back, which wasn’t caused by the evening breeze.

  That’s not what I mean, Papa said. As always, he was stern but not unkind. You’re only sixteen. What are you trying to prove? That you’re now a man?