"But it hasn't all been disaster. We finally made some arrows that wouldn't actually fly in a circle and hit the archer. And it turned out that nearly every man has been carrying a bunch of useless keys around in his pockets, so we've been grinding them down for arrow-points. Most of the women have nail-files, too, but they insist that they need them. Anyway, we've made about a dozen good points.
"One thing that went wrong was when the girls were practicing shooting about sundown, and another of those big bats flew down the river. They'd fired off nine good arrows at it before I could stop them. None of them came anywhere near the bat, of course, and I doubt that they'd have eaten the thing if they had killed it. Anyway, Charley and I waded and swam half a mile downstream to fish out five. We never did find the rest.
"Well, gentlemen, that's the story. If you want to go back to the way we were before, you won't find me hard to persuade. You might even call it a mandate of the people. After this you stick to the jobs that you're good at, and I'll tend to those I'm fitted for."
Not much of an apology, Bridger thought, but I suppose that for a lawyer to admit he's wrong is harder than faking experimental data would be for me. I'm glad he made the first move, before someone organized an indignation committee; it ought to keep things smoother.
There was no difficulty about the change in government. No opposing nominations were made. Mortimer Wilson said, "If friend Julius wants to spend his time worrying about what happened to Miss Hansen's hairbrush, I won't object. I wouldn't have the commissariat job back as a gift. I wonder where I ever got the idea that a mess sergeant has things easy? I'll stick to brain-work after this. How about a speech, Henley?"
There were echoing cries of "Speech! Speech!" from the women's circle. Bridger stood up and cleared his throat. "Thanks a lot, folks. I think we'll get along better this time. At least, I'm willing to try, and I hope you are too. We can't afford any more accidents. That means discipline, and everyone keeping his pet foibles in line for the good of the rest of us. That goes for me too. I'm not talking this way because I think I'm Jehovah, but because we can't survive any other way.
"There's still a chance that we may come on some kind of civilization, but I'm afraid it's growing slimmer every day. That means that one of these days we're going to have to put an end to this glorified camping trip and settle down for good—for the rest of our lives, in fact. If you folks won't discipline yourselves and each other, no amount of my talking is going to do any good. We'll simply die of starvation and disease or be eaten by wild animals.
"One more thing. It's come to my attention that Sex has raised its ugly head among us at last. Now, I've nothing against Sex under the proper circumstances. But please remember that none of us is an obstetrician, unless Abner had some experience with livestock when he was a boy on the farm. I'm not preaching morals; I'm just pointing out one practical little fact. A word to the wise ought to be sufficient."
Packard and the professors talked late that night. "So you think we ought to cut cross-country to this lake of yours, eh?" the lawyer said doubtfully. "Ummm—I see your point, all right, though the gang isn't going to like having to pack fish for two or three days. Still, a little variety might do them good."
"There's more grass there and fewer trees, so the fauna ought to be richer," Scherer pointed out. "We could do some real hunting in that kind of country. There's no real nourishment in these damn fish—with all apologies to your specialty, Nelson, which I admit has probably kept us alive so far. You can see for yourself that the gang are looking pretty scraggly and peaked. They need meat."
"Yes," added Bridger, "and another thing we want is to learn all the local geography we can. I've been making notes, and I have the beginnings of a map."
"What?" Barnes came out of his silence. "Let me see it—shucks, Henley, that'll have to be done over. Don't want to hurt your feelings, but I've been making maps for years."
"Well, anyway," said Packard, "we can't start for a few days, until the sick ones get well and we've accumulated enough surplus food to last us. This trip won't be any picnic."
The days passed and all worked doggedly to keep the food coming in. So far had their civilized inhibitions been dissipated that, when Mary Wilkins, egged on by Barnes, produced a cicada stew one evening, nobody even gagged, though there were remarks about, "The American Association of Bug Eaters."
At last the cross-country trek began. They were ready none too soon, for that section of the river had been largely depleted of fish and the birds and small mammals had begun to disappear from the vicinity of the camp as a result of being persistently, if not very effectively, hunted. Lord, thought Bridger, how am I ever going to get them through a winter if we can't get a bigger margin of food ahead than we've been doing? That means big game, and plenty of it. I hope Emil is right about the open country around the lake . . .
It was slow going with the crowd to herd along, though they were making better time than they had at first. Bridger, warned by what had happened on their trip of exploration, kept scouts well ahead of the main party. He didn't expect trouble from anything that saw them first, but he didn't want to blunder on anything that might decide it was being attacked and proceed to work off the chip on its shoulder.
On the third day Wilson, who was in the lead, suddenly came upon a great feline beast somewhere between a leopard and a tiger in size, with the familiar grey-and-black striping of an ordinary alley cat.
He yelled, "Hey, c'mere quick, help, murder!" and stood his ground, dropping his bundle and gripping his inadequate spear in shaking fists.
Kitty was as surprised as Wilson for a moment, but hunger soon made up its mind—or rather, its instincts—for it. Its upper lip twitched, showing a formidable array of tusks, and it lowered its body almost to the ground and slid snakelike toward its intended luncheon.
Wilson had done publicity once for a lecture by a man—a Lithuanian or something—who hunted jaguars with a spear in South America. The idea was to get them to spring at you, then impale themselves on your spear. The idea seemed silly, but he could think of nothing else to do, so he drove the butt of his weapon into the soft ground at his feet and aimed the point in the general direction of the approaching cat.
Sure enough, kitty sprang—but not on the spear-point. It landed short, and with one sweep of a large paw sent the spear gyrating into the treetops.
As it did so there were shouts from behind. An arrow swished harmlessly through the foliage, and something sharp and heavy drove into the seat of Wilson's pants. He jumped three feet straight up with a screech that sent the startled catoid back on its haunches.
By now the rescue party was within range. Spears ripped through the branches. One struck in a tree-trunk a scant six inches from Wilson's head; two more went wide of the mark and slithered off into the brush; but the fourth caught the crouching animal where its neck joined its body and stuck there.
Kitty gave a yowl even louder than Wilson's, and danced round and round on three legs, clawing frantically at the thrashing shaft of the spear. It finally came out, and the beast, dismayed by the arrival of such overwhelming reinforcements, trotted off into the forest, stopping every few steps to roar back defiance.
Wilson had meanwhile extracted the spear from his own person and was waving the bloody weapon over his head, demanding at the top of his voice to know what unprintable God-damned canine-descended imbecile had tried to murder him. Macdonald finally cleared his throat apologetically. "Geez, Mort," he said, "I'm real sorry, but I couldn't see only a little of that damn beast between you and that there tree, and I figured unless I did something quick it'd all be over. Anyway, if you hadn't let out such a swell yell the brute might have jumped you."
Wilson sputtered a little, but the unusual spectacle of the ex-policeman being conciliatory was so surprising that he soon calmed down enough to accept Macdonald's apology. The spear he kept, since his own had disappeared into the trees.
"I've got a sort of personal interest in it, an
yway," he pointed out with a grin.
"Well, Emil," said Packard, "I suppose you've got this latest animal all classified and catalogued. What are you going to christen it?"
Scherer was standing with a bunch of leaves in his hand, rubbing them thoughtfully between fingers and thumb. He had long since run out of pipe tobacco, and had been experimenting with assorted weeds. Barnes had tried unsuccessfully, to get him to try various kinds of bark, claiming that most Indians used it under the high-sounding name of kinnikinick. The principal result of his experiments had been a brew which Miss Hansen pronounced an excellent substitute for tea.
"Think I'll call it a Mehitabeloid," he decided finally. "We can stand a few references to the classics in our new taxonomy, and I don't suppose it will ever get into the literature anyway."
Bridger had swung far to the south of their previous route to avoid the ratoids and parrotoids. The going was a bit harder than the professors had encountered, for the country seemed to have been burned over in the not too far distant past, leaving a zone of dead stubs and blow-downs, effectively interwoven with blackberry bushes, which made the most effective barrier they had yet seen.
Barnes eyed the tangle thoughtfully. "Could be lightning, of course," he said as Bridger came up. Much the same ideas had been passing through the chemist's mind, but he did not want to arouse any false hopes. Forest fires back in the world he knew were nine times out of ten started by careless people.
Beyond the blow-down the woods grew thinner and the party soon came to the edge of the promised open country, with tall grass growing to their shoulders among scattered clumps of trees. Bridger chose the largest hill he could see and led the march to its top. From the summit they could see the prairies stretching away for miles between the projecting tongues of forest. In the distance were slowly moving specks that were animals of some kind—undoubtedly herbivores which, if they could kill one, would make good eating.
"Look down there—to the left," Barnes told them. "Looks to me like something lying in the grass, and something smaller moving around it. Might be a young one whose mother just died. If it is, it can't do us any harm."
Bridger squinted in the direction indicated. "Maybe you're right," he said. "We might wander down a little closer and see."
The moving animal, when they were close enough to see, was even larger than a wolf, which it vaguely resembled. It looked more like a huge yellow mongrel dog, with a strong strain of German shepherd. And it was not mourning the death of a parent; it was tearing at the haunch of a carcass . . .
It halted its meal abruptly and gave a deep warning bark.
Bridger turned to his party. "Maybe we can drive the thing off," he said, "but there's a good chance that it'll show fight. I wouldn't risk it, except that we need the hide and meat. Who thinks we ought to try?"
"I dunno about the rest," asserted Macdonald, "but for a real steak I'd fight Rin-tin-tin barehanded." There was a chorus of agreement, so Bridger organized the crowd into a phalanx, spears in the front rank, and advanced upon the foe.
The dog stood over its kill and growled and snarled and barked, first menacingly, then furiously, then frantically. The spears came nearer and the people howled and screeched. When they were barely twenty feet away the dogoid began to give ground, foaming and snapping its great jaws in rage. But it's courage was not up to attacking twenty-odd strange upright creatures that did not seem in the least afraid of it. Finally it withdrew to the edge of a patch of woods, sat down, and whined pitifully as it watched them swarm over its dinner.
Scherer was scratching his head. "Well," he growled, "this beats anything I've seen yet. Size of a husky mule, with ears twice as long; rodent teeth; no sign of a tail; and one big nail that's neither a claw nor a hoof on each foot. I don't know where to put it."
"Why not the Leporidae?" asked Enid Hansen.
Scherer looked at her in admiration. "I used to think I was a pretty good mammalogist, little one, but maybe you've got me beat. A rabbitoid, of course—or maybe a hareoid, if you want to be technical. I'll be able to tell you more after I get a look at the skull."
The grey-haired principal smiled. "When you've seen as many rabbits as I have in my kindergartens every Easter, you'll be able to tell them blindfolded. It's odd, though, that it should be so much bigger than the dog.
Evidently the various species haven't changed in proportion."
"Our biggest animals have always been herbivores," Scherer told her. "There's more for them to eat. Carnivores have to be reasonably fast on their feet to eat at all. In our own time the biggest carnivores were the Alaskan bears, which were about as omnivorous as we are. I suppose the tiger was about the biggest strict meat-eater we had."
Two hours later the blood-red sun was dropping below the treetops. Bridger, with Zbradovski's help, was dissecting the flayed carcass of the super-rabbit with Morelli's hunting knife while Scherer stood over them and made entries in his painfully crowded notebook. Aaronson squatted in the grass and worked a patch of green hide into the semblance of a pair of moccasins. As he skillfully measured and pared and punched with a pocket-knife he seemed happy for the first time since the death of his child.
"They won't be so good like they was made by an Indian," he explained, "but if you stuff grass in them they will be better than nothing. No, Mamma, you can't have them. We draw lots for them like Professor Bridger says. Later maybe we get enough for all to have."
Mrs. Aaronson subsided. Her loss had taken much of the fight out of her. Moreover, the life they had been leading had reduced her bulk and hardened her husband's muscles until they stood more on an equal plane physically. There was no reason to suppose that blows had ever been exchanged between them, but Rachel Aaronson's physical preponderance might have had something to do with her mental domination of her husband. Gradually, as his skill and patience made a place for him in the little community, the balance was shifting.
No Neanderthal hunter squatting on the banks of the Dordogne ever devoured his prey with the enthusiasm with which the people gorged themselves on rabbitoid. "Eat it up, folks," Bridger told them. "It'll spoil if we try to keep it very long, anyway."
Scherer divided his attention between the roast and his notes, to which he was adding assiduously. The distribution of fat on the creature's back and flanks was far more characteristic of the hoofed animals of his own time than of the rabbit family, he pointed out.
"Maybe it's a cross between a jackass and jackrabbit," Wilson suggested, but the mammalogist refused to reply to such an absurdity.
7
RECEPTION COMMITTEE
They reached the lake on the evening of the following day. Bridger leaned against a convenient tree and listened without pleasure to Marie Smythe's gushing about the beautiful scenery. The vermilion sunset and the setting of blue hills were beautiful, undoubtedly, but Henley Bridger's scientific mind could see no reason for jawing away about something that anyone could see for himself. If you had information to impart, or a theory to expound, or a joke to tell, there might be some excuse for talking. Otherwise it was a waste of good time which might be put to better use in constructive thought.
Constructive thought was something they needed. In all probability they were going to have to live out the rest of their lives somewhere on the shores of this lake; certainly they must winter here—this aimless wandering was getting them nowhere. It was up to him to find the place where they would camp—to get cabins or shelters of some kind built with the crude and inadequate tools they had or could improvise—and to start a plan for storing food for the months when they could not hunt or fish. He had no idea how much time he would have, but this was apparently still the temperate zone and they would have two or three times as long a period of cold weather ahead as could possibly remain of the summer. Well, introspection would get them nowhere; he needed facts before any decisions could be made.
"All right, folks," he said, "turn to." More than by the view across the lake, he was thrilled by the prompt a
nd orderly way in which the people went about their duties: Packard and Morelli to cast for fish, others to gather firewood and build a barricade, still others to perform the miscellaneous chores of making camp and getting supper ready. Guess I'm not such a flop as a leader after all, he thought; I've sweat blood over this gang, and at last, by God, they do the right things without being told, they don't complain as much as you'd expect, and some of 'em even like me!
They camped by the lake for a day while the fishermen tried their skill and a hunting party explored the nearby prairie. The fishing was poor; the water was deep, and the tackle Packard and Morelli had was not suited for trolling even if they had or could have improvised a boat. If they could find shallower water, both men agreed, they should have better luck.
The hunters did better, returning proudly with three marmot-like animals which had sat stupidly on their haunches until the stalkers were within spear-cast. One of the three had been brought down by an arrow shot by the Pierne girl—a good shot rather than a lucky one, Barnes told him in confidence. Bridger resolved to assign more time to practice with the bow for anyone who showed the least ability; it wasn't going to take long for even the most stupid gopheroid or woodchuckoid to get the idea that they were dangerous and dive for its hole the moment a man appeared on the skyline.
In the morning they broke camp and took up their march along the lake shore in search of the outlet, which Barnes and Scherer, from their experience with topography, agreed should be somewhere to the southwest. As the terrain grew lower and flatter they found that they had to detour around the heads of long narrow bays full of the wreckage of drowned timber. Packard and Morelli eyed the shallow water wistfully but dared not risk their precious lines in the maze of stumps and sunken logs.
At the campfire conference which Bridger was making more or less a matter of habit, Barnes agreed with his conclusion that the best place for a permanent camp would be near the outlet of the lake.
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