by Gene Wolfe
Can I call the trees my first surprise? Until I saw them, I had been surprised by nothing, being so stunned at finding myself among these people, with no memory of how I came here, that I was dazed by everything. But although I remember nothing, I find that I have in my mind certain fixed, though imperfect, ideas concerning the uses of objects and the appearances of the things whose names I find ready on my tongue—even though I cannot recall ever having seen them.
I do not know how trees are supposed to look, and I cannot put my finger on what is wrong with these. They are green or greenish-brown, and grow from the soil in a single trunk, mostly, although they are sometimes found in clumps of stems, or with multiple trunks joining in a single top. The tops are of branches which are divisions of the parent trunk, and may be straight, curved, or angled, according to the species. Eventually—the larger the branch, the greater the length—these branches reunite in nodes, only to split again into further branchings, and at last into bristling twigs. Some trees have small leaves, singly or in rosettes; others have none. Some are supple and bend readily under the weight of the snow, springing up if it is knocked away; but there are also tougher kinds which stiffly resist it.
The spot the women sought was a long, gentle, southward-facing slope dotted with stones. Here in many spots the snow was only a few centimeters deep, and the women spread out, brushing it aside with their hands and picking small, low-growing plants that seemed to thrive beneath it. At first I tried to help them, but I did not know which varieties were edible, and in any event had brought no bag to fill; and their laughter soon drove me away to practice with the clubbow.
It is an interesting weapon, and one—I found—that does not require much skill, since the springs are bent in advance, and the whirling clubs give the shooter a fairly wide band over which to hit the target. I used stones at first, which Red Kluy showed me how to fit into the sling; then, when I remembered that besides this recorder I had a folding knife (as well as a firemaker and several other things) in my pocket, graduated to a club I cut myself. (The nicely smoothed and carved ones in the quiver seemed obviously to be too good to use for practice, and the bone and stone points would surely break.)
Nothing eventful happened until the sun was almost directly overhead; then we heard a succession of piercing cries coming, as it seemed, from the trees at the bottom of the slope. At once, the women straightened up and turned in the direction of the sound, standing as motionless as so many tree stumps. The clubbow was cocked for a practice shot, as it happened, and I stood frozen too, holding it almost in firing position.
While we listened, the cries grew louder; and at last. a slender figure broke from the fringe of the trees. My first impression was that it was a girl; my second, as it bounded up the slope toward us, using its front limbs freely to assist its speed, that it was an animal; my third, as I heard its high-pitched shrieks at close range and saw the length of its neck and the protruding formation of its lower face, that it was a bird. The women remained unmoving until it was almost among them, saw them, and veered away.
Then they broke into frantic action, sprinting after it—I was astounded to see how fast even the oldest of them could run—screaming and hurling stones. Red Kluy shouted to me to shoot, and after a moment’s hesitation—the creature still looked oddly human—I did. Unfortunately, the clubbow was loaded only with my light practice club. It struck the running figure near the waist and staggered it, but did not bring it down. I reloaded as quickly as I could with a heavy club from the quiver and ran after the women.
I said I ran—I should have said I bounded. I meant to run; but every step turned into a five-meter jump, and in the space of a few heartbeats I had covered several hundred meters. Immediately I had another surprise—the women themselves, though they ran in ordinary strides, did so on the surface of the snow (as did our quarry), even where it was clearly a meter deep.
When I was so close there seemed to be little chance of missing, I ended one of my bounds atop a boulder and from that vantage point discharged the heavy, spiked club with which I had loaded the bow. I aimed for the head, but the unaccustomed angle deceived me, and the club caught the long-necked creature at the knees, breaking both her legs. I say “her” because it became obvious as soon as she had fallen that she was a woman. Her body had scarcely struck the snow when Red Kluy and the others were upon her. I saw her turn her face to the sun as she died; her lips moved—it was a beautiful and delicate face, however strange—then her eyes lost their focus and rolled backward in their sockets. Red Kluy had lanced one of the arteries in her neck, and the scarlet blood, freezing even as it gushed, had taken her life with it.
“Who is she?” I said, jumping from the boulder.
“A Lenizee. A Lenizee doe. A young one.” Flashing Aa, one of the women, reached down and squeezed the girl’s buttocks with her hand. “The men won’t get anything this good, I think. She has run far—her flesh will he so soft it will fall from the roasting sticks.”
“You’re going to eat her?”
She misunderstood me. “After you take choice.”
“Yes,” Red Kluy said. “It was Cutthroat’s shot that brought her down.”
“We are the hunting party, Red Kluy,” one of the others called.
Red Kluy touched her chin, a gesture that I have learned means “yes”; at that moment there was a roar from the edge of the wood from which the dead girl had emerged. There, at the very border of the trees, stood a strange woman—so tall and powerfully built as to be almost a giantess—who shouted at us unintelligibly. The women began to yell at her at once, flourishing the black stone daggers they had drawn during the pursuit of the girl. The big woman continued to shout in a voice deeper than that of any man I could imagine, walking nervously back and forth at the edge of the trees. She had a great, tangled shock of tow-colored hair that hung down her back nearly to her waist, and a square, powerful face that was noble and brutal enough for a barbarian queen. I tried to ask some of the women who she was, but they were making so much noise they could not understand me, and in the end I settled for loading the clubbow with the most menacing-looking missile I could find in the quiver, and sitting down to wait for the giantess’s advance, if it ever came.
It never did. After an hour or more of shouting at us, she turned and vanished among the trees, leaving the women to bear the body of the dead girl back to the camp in triumph. On the return march I asked Red Kluy who the big woman had been.
“Ketincha.”
“But who is she?” I staid.
“She is Ketincha—you saw her. We’re lucky her husband wasn’t around.”
“Where do they live?”
“In the wood—close to the smaller waterfall. Do you know where that is?”
I admitted that I did not, and asked if theirs was a large tribe. Red Kluy laughed. “No tribe. There isn’t enough meat around for that---you should see Ketin. They used to have a son, but he’s gone away.”
I felt sick at the thought of eating the girl’s flesh, no matter how inhuman she looked. But by the time the men returned (almost empty-handed, as it happened), it was clear that I would precipitate a social crisis if I refused; so I accepted a gobbet of the tender meat and swallowed it as best I could. The truth is that I was very hungry, and the meat, though it was so soft—as Flashing Aa had predicted—that it seemed to fall to bits in my mouth, was nearly tasteless. (Perhaps this was because these people seem to have no salt, and use no spices.) Besides the Lenizee doe, we ate some small game the men had brought—tougher but more flavorful, I found—and the herbs and roots the women had gathered.
As we sat about the fire, I noticed several of the men staring at me, but it was an hour or more before I realized what it was they were looking at. My beard had begun to show; none of them had facial hair beyond a halfdozen bristles on the upper lip. When I understood what was wrong, I excused myself and went to the “sanitary” area I had been shown that morning. One of the objects I have found in my pockets is
a shaver, and I ran it over my face until I felt certain it was completely smooth, then rejoined the group at the fire. Several people seemed puzzled by the change in my appearance; but I believe they soon decided that what they had seen earlier was only a trick of the firelight. At least, I hope so.
The third day. Should I tell the most important things first each day, or recount the day’s events in sequence? I was thinking over this question before I turned on the recorder, and to tell the truth, at one time I decided that the best approach might be to begin with a summary of the most important happenings. But when I tried to make one—just about such a simple thing as what I saw today—I found myself trapped in a web of explanations that anticipated much of the news I had to tell.
I went hunting with the men today. Red Kluy had boasted to them of how fast I could run and said that I could bend her son’s clubbow without effort. So they were watchful and a trifle hostile.
Their hunting seems to me to involve no great skill. We made our way through the woods for half a day or more, finding nothing better than a few small animals of the sort the men had brought back yesterday. These resemble monkeys and are very agile. They had long, bushy tails; and though there seem to be several kinds, they are so similar in general appearance and habits—from what I could see—that it takes close examination to tell them apart. The men shot at these snow monkeys whenever they saw them, using the smooth clubs; and when they hit them, they buried their bodies in the snow, marking the spot with a knotted twig.
After four or five hours of tramping through freezing cold, we crossed the trail of what appeared to be an extremely large man, walking with long strides. I remembered what Red Kluy had told me about Ketin, Ketincha’s husband, who sounded like no one I wanted to meet in a snow-filled forest. The men with me did not hesitate. At once they began to sing, a rising and falling wail, and broke into a jogging trot that kept them on the surface of the snow. After a few trials that were too fast or too slow, I was able to master the technique myself; it was probably easier for me, since I was somewhat smaller than the smallest of them. The headman, Red Kluy’s son Longknife, told me (I suppose because he had seen that I had trouble in the beginning) that the snow was not always so difficult to run on as this.
I asked if that was because it was deeper now than usual.
“No,” he said. “Often it is much deeper than this. But when it has lain for a few days, and no fresh snow has fallen, the top will be harder, like ice across a lake. We will be able to walk on the top then, and hunting will be easier. Sometimes when the snow is new-fallen, it is so soft we cannot even run on it. Then we stay in camp until it hardens.”
A wind was rising and was beginning to blow the snow into fresh drifts; I asked him if that would make it harder to travel.
“No, it will be firmer for that in the end. But it is poor shooting in the wind.”
“No more snow monkeys then?”
He laughed. “Not when we are on the trail of Nashhwonk. But it is a good thing for us that he is such a big target; we will get in close and shoot down the wind. Then we will not miss.”
The wind was so cold that it seemed to freeze my lungs with every breath I took. I continued to run alongside Longknife for what might have been another two or three kilometers—we were in front of all the others—before he said, “Do you not run on top of the snow in your country?”
I said that I did not remember my country.
“You are under an enchantment. That is well for you.”
“Why is that?”
“No one will kill you. When an enchanted animal dies, the spell runs up the weapon, seeking a new home.”
“I am not an animal.”
He chuckled as he ran. “All the animals say that. Nashhwonk will say it—watch.”
“Won’t he hear us coming? All the singing?”
“We wish that he hear us. Nashhwonk fears us, and he will run. We will catch him, and he will be too tired to fight well. He is too big to run on top of the snow.”
“Is Ketin too big?”
Longknife’s expression showed me that it would have been more polite not to mention Ketin. He said, “Ketin is very light of foot,” and then put on speed until he was ten meters or so ahead of me.
This was so childish that I am afraid I became childish in turn. I increased my own speed and found, as I had suspected, that I could run a good deal faster than he. I caught up with him, bounding along but keeping my jumps short and flat enough that I did not sink into the snow. Then with another burst of speed I passed him; and to show my superiority, I continued to keep up the same pace until I was out of sight and nearly out of sound of the whole group.
The trees grew thicker; soon I was spending half my effort in dodging the trunks and jumping over fallen logs. Then, abruptly, I pushed through a thicket and found myself in open country. The wind was blowing hard by now; but despite the flying snow, I noticed that a kilometer or more away from the spot where I stood, there was a huge, flattened track in the snow, a band, now somewhat obscured by drifts, but still clearly visible where it topped a low hill, at least a hundred meters wide: as though some incredible force had propelled a burden of tons across the empty terrain.
Forgetting Nashhwonk, whose immense and trudging footprints I had been following until then, I sprinted ahead to examine this great flattened path in the snow. The part nearest me was hidden behind rising ground. When I reached the crest, I saw something that made me put aside for the moment all thoughts of the track itself. Sitting in the very center of it, in a massive, high-backed chair of dark wood, was a man bigger than I had ever conceived that a man could be. He was facing me, as though he had been waiting for me to appear, though something in his broad face made me think that my sudden arrival might have surprised him. “Are you one of them?” he said, and by a slight movement of his head made me understand that he meant the men of the tribe, whose wailing song came to us faintly over the snow.
“No,” I said, “I am their guest.”
“But you hunt with them.” He rose and, somewhat clumsily, I thought, walked around his chair until he could stand behind it, leaning on the back. Tall and massive as he was, his legs seemed disproportionately long.
“I don’t hunt you,” I said.
“You are wise.”
“I’m not afraid of you.” (This was a lie, and I suspect it sounded like one.) “I don’t hunt people; I thought we were after an animal.” (Another lie—I had seen his footprints, but the thing had seemed less culpable before I heard him speak.) “You are Nashhwonk?”
“Mankiller, I am called. Do you see this?” He picked up the chair as though it were a feather and thrust it toward me, and I saw that the ends of the legs were pointed, and that the points were darker than the rest of the wood. They looked almost like metal.
Nashhwonk tapped the joint between a leg and a rung with a forefinger as big as my wrist. “The sinews that bind this marriage of wood were cut from a man’s leg. And as for your friends’ kind, I’ve killed dozens of them. Now they think to catch me in deep snow, where they can skip like fleas. But here in the track of the Great Sleigh the snow is crushed to ice, and they can run no better than I—indeed, not as well. Here I will kill them all. Is Longknife their leader? Ask him what befell his father.”
“Here he is,” I said. “You can ask him yourself.”
Longknife came loping up beside me. “I see you’ve found him,” he panted. “I thought he’d make his stand here. Sometimes he pounds down the snow in a clearing to make a pen for himself. But this is better. We’ll take him just the same.”
“If you couldn’t take him before, what makes you so sure you can now?”
Nashhwonk had grown silent, staring at Longknife with angry bloodshot eyes. Now, still holding his chair, he began walking away from us, west along the flattened track. Longknife and I trotted to keep up with him, staying just at the margin of the deep snow. I could hear the rest of Longknife’s tribe in the woods nearby.
&nb
sp; “We will kill him, never fear,” Longknife said. “There will be plenty of meat tonight. We have killed him often before.”
“Then how can he be here?”
“Nashhwonk is Nashhwonk. This one or another” The wind was blowing in our faces, driving the blinding snow; and as he spoke, Longknife put on a burst of speed and ran into the smoothed track, about fifty meters ahead of Nashhwonk. His clubbow was cocked, and I could see that he hoped to get a downwind shot at the giant’s head. But Nashhwonk immediately bent nearly double and, thrusting his chair in front of him so that the seat protected his face and the upper half of his body, rushed toward Longknife. There was no point in shooting, and Longknife dashed back to the deep snow. The rest of the tribe was straggling toward us now.
“How about you?” Longknife said. “You’re going to eat the meat, aren’t you?”
I said that I supposed I was.
“Then you could give us a little help. Get over on the far side, and we’ll take quartering shots.”
I ran behind Nashhwonk and almost came too close. He turned and charged me with his chair, looking as big as a tree. I was just able to leap out of the way before one of those cruel points impaled me; even so he swung the thing like a flail as he passed, missing me by no more than a few centimeters. One of Longknife’s clubs struck his forearm and fell to the snow, but it did him no harm that I could see. Nashhwonk turned and came after me then. His legs were longer than I am tall; they made him astonishingly fast here where the snow was level and hard; but I was faster, and could have turned more quickly if I had had to. As it was, I knew that I could get away, provided I did not slip and fall; still, I had a very vivid mental picture of what would happen if I did.