A Different Flesh

by Harry Turtledove

  He was thinking of offering it what was left of his venison when another sim touched him on the knee. He turned round to see the female he had met the day before. The female held out its left hand in a begging gesture, Meat? with the right.

  He cut off a piece and gave it to the sim. Two youngsters begging from the male next to him, which gave them some scraps. A little one that could hardly toddle came up one of the children with its hand out, and in turn recieived a few tiny fragments of meat. It stared at the trapper as it ate.

  The male turned to Quick. More, it signed, getting up walking over to pluck a handful of whortleberries off a branch heavy with the large, purple-blue fruit. The trapper ate a few himself; their tart sweetness cut through the greasy film coating the inside of his mouth.

  Both males and females freely took the berries; no begging was involved. Only dearly won meat required that. Though they usually shared their prey, the males who hunted had some prior claim on it.

  With a burst of pride that made him feel foolish a moment later, Quick realized the female sim had treated him as if he were a hunter himself, a dominant member of the band.

  Despite that acceptance, he remained an object of curiosity.

  That, he knew, was natural enough, he was probably the first live creature ever to share the band's campsite. If they changed their minds about him, he might not stay that way, either. Sims sometimes ate sims from other bands and, when they could catch them, people too.

  A good many such grisly episodes punctuated man's westward expansion across America.

  But this group found him only interesting. The grizzled elder that tended the meat ran its hands over his clothes, as fascinated by the soft suede as the youngster had been. Make, it signed, and then, after obvious painful groping for the sign, How?

  Skins cut to arms, legs, chest. Not stink, rub tree bark-not any tree, right tree. As a trapper, he knew how to tan hides; what he could not do was put it in terms the sim understood. Show one day, he promised. If a sim saw something done, it could copy as well as a human. But sims would not improve on a process, as humans might.

  Show, the old sim agreed. It pointed to Quick's fancy silver belt buckle. Show?

  Regretfully, he shook his head. He knew nothing of metalworking, save that it was too complex for the subhumans to fathom.

  His person fascinated the sims as much as his gear. They pointed at his gray eyes, then at their own, which were uniformly dark. He had to rol up his sleeve several times, and take off his boots to show that under them his feet were like theirs, if less battered and cal used. His forehead, though, intrigued the sims most. They kept patting at it to compare it to their own heads, which sloped sharply.

  He shuddered even when he thought of doing so through the winters bouts.

  On the face of it, it seemed impossible. The sim to whom he had given the fox carcass was close by.

  He signed, How live, when snow come?

  the sim signed, repeating for emphasis. Hard. Cold. Hungry. Many die in cold.

  A shiver il ustrated the idea. Far more fluent with her signs than the elder had been, the female went on, Dens like bears', brush, branches. Stil . Make fire.

  Still cold.

  Cold. Cold. Cold. The sims eyes tried with dread. Winter was a worse enemy than spearfang or bear. With their bel ies full, though, the sims, never renective the first place, did not care to look ahead.

  The youngsters through the clearing, wrestled with one another, and bred their elders, for al the world like so many unruly hen back in Cairo or Portsmouth or Philadelphia.

  Many of the adults made beds of branches and leaves, curled and went to sleep, ignoring the youngsters' squawks shouts. A mother nursed a baby.

  The old sim and a young adult male squatted by the fire, chipping stones. The young adult absently swatted at a youngster that disturbed him.

  When it came back to watch what they were doing, the male let it stay.

  Other adults had a different idea for passing the time.

  Three or four couples paired off and mated. The rest of the sims paid them no particular attention, nor did they seem to feel the lack of privacy.

  When a running youngster was about to crash into one pair, the male reached out from its , position on its knees behind the female to fend off the little one.

  Henry Quick found the rutting sims no more interesting than did the rest of the band. He had been away from men a long time, but not long enough to think of a sim as a partner.

  He would as soon have coupled with a pack of dogs! Some trappers, he knew, did that. Some mated with sims, too. He knew what he thought of them: the same as most a people thought. "You son of a sim" would start a fights anywhere in the Commonwealths.

  He was taken by surprise when the female sim he had given the fox meat touched him on the leg again, this time much higher up than before. Want, ? the female signed. The last gesture it used was not a standard part of hand-talk, but not easy to get wrong, either.

  To remove any possible misunderstanding, the female was on hands and knees, looking back over its shoulder at him. Neither that nor the sight of its cleft between hairy and rather boyish buttocks did anything to rouse his ardor.

  No, he signed; hand-talk was not made for tact. He I softened his refusal as much as he could: You, I not same. The sim, luckily, seemed more curious than angry. Not fit? it asked, eyeing his crotch as if to gauge what his trousers concealed. He left that unanswered. He had seen enough sims to know their masculinity was hardly so if rampant as jokes and stories made it out to be, but he was no I more than average that way himself.

  Not want, ? the female signed after a moment, and used a that gesture of its own invention again.

  Full, Quick temporized. He patted his stomach.

  Apparently that impeded performance among sims too because the female gave a small, regretful hoot. Later? it signed.

  The trapper shrugged and spread his hands. You, I not same, he repeated. The female shrugged too, and went off to get a few more whortleberries. To Henry Quick's relief, it did not come back to him. He'd meant to imply that men and sims were so different no offspring could come from a mating. He did not know whether the sim was bright enough to follow that. He did know it was a lie.

  He had never seen a crossbreed. The repugnance almost everyone felt for coupling with the subhumans had a lot to do with that few of mixed blood were born. Fewer still lived.

  The human parent did that, to save themselves from disgrace.

  The ones that did survive were good for driving lawyers to distraction, and for host of tales whose truth the trapper was in no position to judge.

  He yawned. Back by his own campfire, he would have een asleep hours ago. Here he had neither his own blanket lor the nests sims made for themselves. He stretched out on he ground. The big blaze the sims had going was plenty to seep him warm. He was tired enough not to worry about sleeping soft. He rolled over, threw aside a twig that was Raking his cheek, and knew nothing more til the sun rose.

  He woke with a crick in his neck and a bladder ful to bursting.

  He walked into the bushes at the edge of the clearing to relieve himself. By the smel , and by the way his shoes squelched once or twice on the short journey, the sims were not so fastidious.

  They had already begun their endless daily round of foraging.

  Henry Quick was glad to see that the importunate female was gone from the campsite. Otherwise, he thought with wry amusement, it might have wanted to go into the bushes with him to see just what sort of apparatus he had.

  The males, who hunted in a group rather than scattering one by one, were still by the fire. The trapper went up to the male that had guided him here. Good food, he signed.

  He had a spare bootlace in one of the pouches that hung from his belt. He dug it out. Yes, it was long enough for him to cut a couple of lengths from the end and stil do what he wanted with it.

  He cut off the extra pieces, tied them to the main length at one end, and ma
de loops at the other end of each. Then he tied the makeshift belt round the sims middle to Carry knife, axe, he signed. Have them to use. Have hands free. The sim did not seem to understand. It rubbed its chinless jaw, staring at Quick, but made no move to put the tools in the loops.

  The old grizzled male looked from the trapper's belt to the leather lace he had given the other sim. Its eyes lit. It let out a soft hiss making the very same noise when, as a boy, he had seen his first steam railroad engine. The grizzled sim stepped forward, took the knife from the younger male's hand, and thrust it through one loop.

  Then it pointed, first at the hatchet, then at the second loop.

  I'll It gave an imperative barking call, pointed again. It might never have learned hand-talk well, Henry Quick thought but its years had given it a wisdom of its own.

  After it repeated its gestures a third time, the younger sim finally got the idea. It pushed the hatchet handle into the vacant loop; the head kept the hatchet from falling through. The sim looked at its empty hands, at the tools it still had with it. Suddenly it grinned an enormous grin.

  Good, it signed at Quick. Good. Good. Good.

  Have more another male asked. Sorry No more. Henry Quick apologetically spread his hands.

  He suggested, Make from plants, from skins. The old sim could follow hand-talk, no matter how It much trouble it had using the gestures.

  Make, it signed, and I pointed to itself. Before long, Quick suspected, every sim in the band, or at least every hunting male, would be sporting a belt. Some would be made of vines and would break, others of green hides that would stink and get hard and wear out quickly.

  They would be better than no belts at al , he supposed.

  He was pleased to have found something to give in exchange for the feast of the night before. Sims had so little that he was surprised they had offered to share, in spite of his earlier gift. Now they were less likely to resent him for accepting.

  In daylight, the journey back to his trap line took less than half as long as it had by night. When he returned to the clearing where his latest camp was, he checked his pack.

  No sims had been near it, though they never would have had a better chance to steal. On the other hand, he thought, smiling, they'd had plenty just as good.

  He went the round of the traps near the clearing, reset the traps that needed it.

  He should have had one more; a trap still held the bloody hind leg of a ringtail. That was all that was left of disc black-masked beast, though. When he first saw the tracks around the trap, he thought the sims had robbed him of her al .

  Then he noticed the claw marks in front of the toes. A bear had taken the chance to seize prey that could not flee.

  He swore, but resignedly; that sort of thing had happened to him many times before, and would again. Bears could be as big a nuisance as sims. Some bands of sims, like the one whose territory he was now, could be made to see that working with him got them more than robbing him did. The only thing a bear understood was a bullet.

  A grouse boomed, somewhere off among the spruces. Henry Quick forgot about the bear, at least with the front part of his mind. He sidled toward the noise. The grouse's dull-brown feathers concealed it on its perch, but not well enough. He got almost close enough to knock it down with a club before he shot it.

  He bled and gutted the bird, handling the gall bladder with care so it would not break and spil its noxious contents into the body cavity. He wished he were back at his base camp; the grouse would be better eating after hanging for several days. But he was on the move, and had no time for such refinements. The dark, rich meat would be plenty, good enough tonight.

  So it proved, though he roasted it a couple of minutes too long; grouse was best rare. He would have liked to flavor it with some bacon instead of crumbs from his salt beef, but the rashers he'd brought were long gone; he'd eaten them as soon as they began to go rancid.

  Picking his teeth with the point of his knife, he laughed at himself.

  All this fretting about fancy cooking was a sure sign he'd been in the wilderness too long. That night he dreamt of eating pastry full of fruit and cream until he had to cut a new notch in his belt, in its own way as sensual a dream as his more usual imaginings of sweet-scented girls reaching up to him from featherbeds thick enough to smother in.

  Waking hungry to a blanket in the middle of a forest clearing was hard.

  Even eating what was left of the grouse was not help much, though it would have been an expensive luxury if ordered in a cafe east of the mountains. Too much of what he did involved things that were expensive luxuries east of the mountains.

  What he craved were the luxuries he could only get back there.

  The intensity of that craving ended up undoing him.

  The next clearing around which he had a set of traps was over on the west side of the one the sims used. The trail he had blazed to it swung a lot farther north than it had to, so he could give the sims clearing a wide berth. Now that the subhumans had shown how friendly they were, he decided to take the direct route. If he did that the rest of the time he was there, he thought, he could save several days' travel and set out for the fleshpots of the east that much sooner.

  The sims, he told himself, would not mind.

  Nor did they. He happened on a party of hunting males not long after he set out. Several saw him, and nodded his l way as they might have to one of their own band. But he had I not reckoned on the bear.

  For all his woodscraft, the first he knew of it was when it loomed up on its hind legs like some ancient, brooding god, not fifty feet from him. In that moment he had a good shot at its chest and belly, but he held his fire. Bears, even silvered bears like this one, rarely attacked without being provoked.

  But it did not do to count on a bear, either. This one peered his way.

  He was close enough to see its nostrils flare as it took his scent. It gave an oddly pig like grunt, dropped to al fours, and barreled toward him.

  He threw his rifle to his shoulder, fired, and ran. The bear screamed. He heard its thunderous stride falter. But it stil came on, roaring its pain to the world and crashing through bushes and firs like a runaway railroad engine.

  And in a sprint a bear, even a wounded bear, is faster than a man.

  He had heard before he set out on this trapping run, they had most of the kinks out of a repeating rifle. He would have given five years' worth of furs to have one now. He threw away the gun he did have so he could run faster. If he lived, he'd come back for it.

  He never remembered feeling the blow that shattered his right leg. Al he knew at the time was that, instead of sprinting in one direction, he was suddenly spinning and Sling through the undergrowth in a very different one.

  That saved his life. The bear had to change directions too, and it was also hurt.

  In the second or two its hobbling charge gave him, he jerked out his pistol, cocked it, and squeezed the trigger. He seemed to have forever to shoot. His hand was steady, with he eerie steadiness the shock of a bad injury can bring. The bear's mouth gaped in a horrible snarl; the pistol bal shattered a fang before burying itself in the beast's brain. The bear sighed and fell over, dead.

  "God, that was close," the trapper said in a calm, conversational voice.

  He started to pull himself to his feet and the instant he tried to put any weight on his leg, all the pain his nervous system had denied till then flooded over m. He fainted before he could shriek.

  The sun had moved a fair distance across the sky when he came back to himself. The moment he did, he wished he but escape to unconsciousness again. He tasted blood, and realized he had bitten his lip. He had not noticed. That pain was a trickle, set against the all-consuming torrent in his leg.

  Tears were streaming down his face by the time he managed to sit up; the world had threatened to gray out several times in the process. His trouser leg was wet too, not only from where he'd pissed himself while unconscious but also farther down, where the bear had s
truck him. Blood was soaking through the suede.

  He held himself steady with one hand in a thorn bush while he walked the other down his leg to the injury.

  Something hard and sharp was pressing against the inside of his trousers. He groaned, this time not just from the pain. With a compound fracture, and heaven only knew how much other damage in there, he would soon be as dead as if the bear had killed him cleanly.

  He wished it had. This way hurt worse.

  His hands shook so badly that he took a quarter of an hour to reload his pistol. A lead ball would end his misery no less than the bear's. But after the weapon was ready, he did not raise it to his head. If he had been able to charge it with powder and wadding and bullet, how could pain's grip on him be absolute?

  He began to drag himself toward the bear. That took no longer than loading the gun had, though the body was only a handful of paces from him: he passed out several times on the way. At last he reached the carcass. If he was going to try to live, he would need to eat.

  The bear was food, for as long as it stayed fresh.

  The pistol ball left no visible wound, now that the bear's mouth was closed in death. Quick's first shot, with the rifle, had torn along the left side of the beast's neck and lodged in its shoulder. It might have been a mortal wound, but not quickly enough to do the trapper any good He tried to push the point of his broken shinbone back into his flesh, and failed repeatedly: the pain was too much to stand. He did drag himself to a sapling close by the bear's carcass and cut it down with his knife. Then, using the lace from his left boot, he tied the sapling to his leg. It was not much of a splint, but it was a little better than nothing. With it on, the broken pieces did not grind together quite so agonizingly.

  He set out to make a fire, against the coming chill of night and the chill of his damaged body and for cooking a bloody gobbet he had worried off the bear's shoulder. He was still crumbling dry leaves for tinder when the hunting party of male sims came upon him.

  He did not realize they were there until they were almost on top of him.