The Right to Arm Bears

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Having done this, he saw that the ledge was actually almost as large as the widening of the road had been at Brittle Rock Inn, only they were standing at the very edge of it. At this edge was one end of a suspension bridge that swooped breathtakingly across the open space of the gorge to a landing on a smaller ledge on the far side. Its further end was anchored high on the face of the rock wall behind the further ledge, where the trail took up again.

  At this end there was a small log hut, outside which the Hill Bluffer was now in conversation with a hefty-looking, middle-aged Dilbian.

  "Saw him turn off at the fork myself!" this Dilbian was bellowing. "You questioning the word of a public official? Want me to swear on my winch-cable? Eh?" He laid a heavy, pawlike hand on the great drum on which the cables of the bridge were wound, crank-driven through a series of carved wooden gears by a polished wooden handle.

  "I was just asking!" roared the Bluffer. "A man can ask, can't he?"

  "If he asks politely, all right," said the evident bridgekeeper, stubbornly. "I said I seen him turn off at the fork on this side and go over the bridge there." He pointed along this side of the gorge and John saw where, on this side the trail did split, one way following along the near cliff face, and the other crossing the bridge disappearing through a cleft in the rock. "He headed toward the high country and Ice Dog Glacier."

  "All right. All right, I believe you!" said the Bluffer. He turned toward the bridge.

  "Hey," said the bridgekeeper. "Your toll."

  "Toll!"

  The Bluffer spun about in outrage.

  "Me? A government postman? Toll?"

  "Well," grumbled the other, "after doubting my word like that, I'd think you'd want—"

  "Toll!" snorted the Bluffer, in contempt, and turning about, marched off over the bridge without waiting for the bridgekeeper to finish.

  "Are we going someplace different?" asked John, as they left the far end of the bridge, and headed into the cleft in the rock.

  "Streamside's headed for glacier country," muttered the Bluffer. "Or maybe he plans to double over the mountains the other way at Halfway House, and end up in the Free Forest. Anyway we got to shake a leg to catch him, if that's it. Toll!"

  He snorted again and put on speed.

  Their new road took them steeply up and away from the territory of rivers and deep gorges. After half an hour's climb they began to emerge into an area of wide, stony slopes across which a high-altitude wind blew with the sort of coolness that did not permit sleeping in the saddle.

  It was past noon when they came around a bend in the slope three hours later and approached another inn. This one, situated to take advantage of what little natural shelter there was in this exposed area, was built almost exclusively of stone and earth. They stopped for a midday break, and John got down to stretch his legs gratefully. His brain was still refusing to make itself useful by coming up with any plan to frustrate the ambassador; but the cool, keen winds had blown John into physical wakefulness, so much so that he realized he was tired of the saddle. If it had not been clearly an impractical notion, John would have liked to forego riding and walk for a while.

  But there was no hope of that. If John should try to make it on foot, the Bluffer would be over the horizon and out of sight inside of half an hour. That is, unless he held his pace down to that of his human companion. And, numb-minded as he was at the moment, John had to smile at the thought of the explosive and impatient Bluffer's reaction, if he was asked to do that.

  So, John made the best of it by taking a stroll around the stone inn of Halfway House to take the kinks out of his leg muscles. When he approached the front door of it again, he found the Bluffer on the point of explosion. The cause of this was not John, or anything he had done, but the other visitors at the Halfway House.

  They were laughing at the Bluffer.

  There were half a dozen of them just outside the door of the House, headed by a relatively short and chunky Dilbian carrying a sort of alpenstock.

  "Hor! Hor!" the short Dilbian was bellowing.

  "You want to make something out of it?" the Bluffer was roaring.

  "What is it?" asked John. Nobody even heard him, of course.

  "Fixed you right!" chortled the short Dilbian.

  "Fixed me . . . ! I'll show who fixed me!" The Bluffer shook both fists high over his head. It was an awesome sight. "Swore to me as a public official, he did. Said he'd seen the Terror take the fork this way with his own two eyes!"

  "He did! Sure he did!" put in somebody else. "Tell him, Snowshoe!"

  "Why," said the chunky Dilbian, "he saw the Terror take the right fork, all right. But after that he closed his eyes for a bit there, just like she'd arranged."

  "She?" bellowed the Bluffer. "Boy Is She Built?"

  "Why, who else, postman? The Terror was waiting for her to catch up with him there.

  " `That long-legged postman's right behind me,' she says.

  " `Don't, now,' she says. `You can't fight the government mail,' she says. `I got a better idea.' And she fixed it up with old Winchrope to close his eyes while they come back out of one fork and took the other to the Hollows with the female Shorty they had along." The chunky Dilbian named Snowshoes stopped to laugh again. "Passing by myself at the time. Saw the whole thing. Laugh! Thought I'd split a gut!"

  The Bluffer bellowed to the mountain sky. His eyes fell on John and he snatched John up like the package John was officially supposed to be.

  The next thing they knew, they were fifteen yards back along the trail they had just come, and gaining speed.

  "Hey!" said John. "At least let me get in the saddle."

  "What? Oh!" snarled the Bluffer. He checked and waited a few impatient seconds, while John crawled over his shoulder into the saddle. Then he took off again.

  * * *

  Two hours later they were back at the wrong end of the bridge. The word wrong was, thought John, used advisedly. For the bridge was now out of their reach.

  What had been done was simple enough. Their end of the bridge had its cables fastened to the sheer cliff face some twenty feet back and another twenty feet above their heads. What had been done was to tighten these cables by means of the winch to which they were attached at their other end. The sag of the span had straightened out, lifting the bridge up and out of their reach.

  The Hill Bluffer bellowed across the gap. His first forty words were a description of Winchrope's person and morals, his last four an order to put the bridge back down where he and John could reach it, and cross.

  There was no answer at the far end. The windlass to which the cables were attached showed no inclination to comply with the order by itself and no one emerged from the bridgekeeper's hut.

  "What's happened?" asked John.

  "He's in there!" raged the Bluffer. "That bridge isn't supposed to be cranked up until night—and then only to keep people from sneaking across and not paying their toll. He's in there, all right. He just won't come out and let it down, because he knows what I'll do to him the minute I get over there." He thundered across the gorge again. "Get out here and let down this unmentionable, indescribable bridge, so I can get over it at you and tear your head off!"

  The bridgekeeper still showed no eagerness to take the Bluffer up on this invitation. Small wonder, thought John privately, standing prudently back out of arms reach of the wrought-up postman.

  The Bluffer stopped shouting and looked up at the bridge overhead. He made a half-hearted motion as if to try reaching for it; but it was obviously many feet beyond even the stretch of his long arms. He dropped them, defeatedly.

  "All right!" he roared once more, shaking his fist across the gorge. "I'll climb up the gorge. I'll go along the cliff. I don't need a trail. I'll get to the Hollows before Streamside does! And then I'm coming back for you!"

  John stirred suddenly, pricked for the first time out of his mental lethargy.

  "Go up the gorge?" he said.

  "You heard me!" growled the Bluffe
r. "Who needs a trail? It's the shortest route. We'll get there in half the time."

  John glanced over the Bluffer's shoulder at the sheer walls of the gorge on the edge of which they were standing. There were footholds along it, all right, but even for someone of the Bluffer's skill. And then there was that business of catching up with Streamside faster than expected. John came fully awake.

  "Lift me up," he said to the postman. "If I can reach, and climb across and let the winch out—"

  The Bluffer's eyes lit up.

  "Sure," he said, enthusiastically. He picked up John and they tried it. John, upheld by the ankles and holding his body stiff, stretched upward toward the bare cable near the end of the bridge's flooring slats, but was rewarded only by a throat-squeezing view of the Knobby River, nine hundred feet below.

  "Put me down," he said at last. The Hill Bluffer put him down.

  John, not in the most cheerful mood in the universe after his scenic view of the gorge, went over and examined the cliff face leading up to the anchor points of the bridge cables. He possessed a fair amount of rock climbing experience and the granite face before him was not too bad, although no one of the bulk and necessary clumsiness of a Dilbian could have made it. It was not that, so much, that was giving him cold shivers, as the fact that once he had reached an anchor point, he would have to work out along the bare cable some twenty-odd feet before he came to the bridge proper.

  Oh, well, he thought.

  "Hey! Where're you going?" shouted the Bluffer.

  John did not answer. He needed his breath and anyway his destination was obvious. After a little time, he reached the near anchor point, and got his arms over the rough, three-inch cable. He rested for a moment and surveyed the situation. The Bluffer was just below him, staring up and looking foreshortened by the angle of John's vision. So was the ledge. John did not look down into the gorge.

  After a while, he got his breath back and he climbed up with both arms and legs wrapped around the cable, himself on top, and began to inch his way toward the bridge end, floating in an absurdly large amount of space at a remarkable distance from him. It occurred to him, after he had covered about six or eight feet in this fashion, that a real hero in this situation would undoubtedly have got to his feet and tightrope-walked the really rather broad cable to the end of the bridge proper. This, in addition to impressing the watching Hill Bluffer, would have shortened the time of personal suspense considerably.

  John concluded that evidently he was just not the stuff out of which real heroes are made, and continued to inch along.

  Eventually, he reached the bridge, crawled out on it and lay panting for a while, then got up and crossed to the far side of the gorge. The far ledge of the gorge was still the home of somebody dodging a process server. John walked over to the winch, and utilizing a handy rock, managed to knock loose the lock-ratchet.

  The winch roared loose, the cables boomed like gigantic bowstrings; and the far end of the bridge slammed down, raising a temporary cloud of dust through which the Hill Bluffer was shortly to be seen advancing with a look of grim purpose. He stalked past John and entered the bridgekeeper's abode. Without knocking.

  There was a moment of silence; and then sound erupted like a bomb exploding inside the hut.

  John looked hastily around for something to climb up on or inside of, where he would be out of harm's way. He had never seen a pair of Dilbians fight; but it was remarkable how accurately his ears interpreted what was going on inside the hut right now.

  After a little while, abruptly, there was peace. The Hill Bluffer emerged, dabbing with one big hand at a torn ear, but otherwise looking not unsatisfied.

  "What happened?" asked John.

  The Bluffer went over and washed off his ear in a large stone trough that ran along side the shack.

  "Said it was his bridge. Hah!" replied the Bluffer. "Nobody stops the mail. I fixed him." He paused, water dripping from one side of his big head and looked at John. "You did all right, too, Half-Pint."

  "Me?" said John.

  "Climbing up and out across that cable to the bridge. Never thought I'd see a Shorty, even a good one, doing something like that. Actually took a little guts, I'd say. All right. Climb up and let's get going."

  John complied.

  "You didn't kill him?" he asked as they headed off up their original fork of the trail toward the Hollows.

  "Who? Old Winchrope? Just knocked a little sense into him. Hell, there's got to be somebody around here keep the bridge up and in repair. Hang on. It's all downhill from here, and we're late. But it'll be twilight in two hours and I think we can just make Sour Ford by then."

  And the Hill Bluffer, swinging once again into his six-foot, ground-devouring stride, was once more hot on the trail of the Terror.

  CHAPTER 9

  They made good time.

  As the Bluffer had said, from there on it was all downhill. They descended almost immediately into the treed sections of the mountains, the forest part. The trees among which they now traveled were lofty and thick-topped. All underbrush between them had been killed off by the lack of sunlight and they traveled, through what seemed to be an endlessly, sloping, pillared land, dimly lit by no particular source of illumination.

  Sound was less where they were, too. There were no insects to feed on the nonexistent small vegetation; and no birds to live off the insects. Occasionally, from high overhead, eighty to a hundred and twenty feet up in the loftily remote crowns of the trees, there would float down a distant chitter or chirp of some unseen animal or winged creature. Otherwise, there was only the trail, an occasional boulder, looking lost here in the wooded dimness, and the unending carpet of dead leaf forms from the trees.

  The Bluffer said nothing; and the steady rocking of his body as he swung along over the trail, now soft with earth, swayed John into a dreaminess in which nothing about him seemed real. Not the present scene, and not the whole business in which he had become engaged, seemed to have anything to do with reality. What was he doing here, strapped up on the back of an alien individual as large as a horse and headed for a duel to the death with another horse-sized individual of the same race? Such things did not happen to ordinary people.

  But, come to think of it, were there any ordinary people? When you got right down to it, thought John sleepily, nobody was ordinary.

  John dozed. An indeterminate, grey time went past; and then he was awakened by the jerk of the Hill Bluffer stopping. He straightened up, blinking, and looked about him.

  He saw that it was already dusk. In the fading light, they stood in a large grassy clearing semi-encircled by the forest trees. Directly before him was a long, low log building at least double the size of anything he had seen yet, outside of Humrog. At some short distance behind it, a broad, smooth-surfaced river gurgled, swiftly flowing around a chin of stones that led across it to be lost in the twilight and the tree shadow on the far side of the stream.

  "Light down, Half-Pint," said the Bluffer.

  Stiffly, John climbed down from the harness. His scrapes and bruises of the night before, had found time to set during his long hours in the saddle. The soft turf felt odd under his bootsoles and his calves were wooden with a mild cramp. He stamped about, restoring his circulation; and then followed the Hill Bluffer's great back as, for an instant, it blocked out the yellow light of an open doorway, in passing into the building's interior.

  Inside he found himself in a common room both much larger and much cleaner than he had been in before. The customers here at Sour Ford Inn also seemed to be quieter and less drunk than those he had encountered in other Dilbian inns, Brittle Rock for example. Gazing around for some explanation of the reason behind this difference, John caught sight of a raised dais at the far end of the room, where in a huge chair was seated a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat.

  Staring at this Dilbian as he walked behind the Bluffer, John ran into a table, recovered himself, and was admonished by the Hill Bluffer.
>
  "Don't go starting any trouble now, Half-Pint."

  "Me?" said John, so overwhelmed at the suggestion that someone his size could start trouble with lumbering Dilbians—even if he was crazy enough to want to—that he found himself at a loss for words to protest properly that he had no such intention.

  "That's right," said the Bluffer, some moments later, after they had been seated and ordered beer and food (beer only, still, for John). "This here's treaty ground, belonging to a clanless man. Nobody starts trouble here."

  "Treaty ground?"

  "Yep," said the Hill Bluffer. "One Man, he—" the food, arriving just then, put a cork in the postman's flow of words. He devoted himself to bread, cheese and beer, merely grunting when John tried to continue the conversation.

  John sat back, and sipped on his beer. He was cautious with it, this evening. He tried to catch a glimpse of the big Dilbian at the room's end, through the shifting bodies passing in and about the tables in the room, but the way was never clear long enough for him to get a good look.

  Suddenly, however, John dropped his mug with a bang on the table and sat bolt upright.

  "Hey!" he said, punching the Bluffer.

  The Bluffer took another large bite of meat.

  "Hey!" said John, punching harder.

  The Bluffer growled something unintelligible with his mouth full.

  "Look up!" said John. "Look over there! Quick!"

  The Hill Bluffer looked up, in the direction John was pointing. He did not seem disturbed to see a Hemnoid accompanied by a relatively short, plump Dilbian female, threading their way between the tables toward the enormous patriarch in the chair on the dais.

  The Bluffer swallowed.

  "Sure," he said casually. "That's that Fatty, Tark-ay. The one I was telling you about claims to be quite a scrapper back on his home world?" The Bluffer discovered he needed to dispose of one more swallow, and did so. He pointed with a large finger, while picking up a large chunk of bread with his other hand. "That's Boy Is She Built with him."