A Different Flesh

by Harry Turtledove

  Charles had made a pun after all, even if unintentionally.

  The game path they were following twisted southward bringing the edge of a large clearing into view. Kenton stared in open-mouthed wonder at the teeming, milling bur&lo the break in the trees revealed.

  There were more of them than Virginia herds had cattle. The beasts were of two sorts. The short-horned kind, with its hump and shaggy mane, was also fairly common east of the mountains; it closely resembled the familiar wisent of Europe. The other variety was larger and grander, with horns sweeping out from its head in a formidable defensive arc. Only stragglers of that sort reached Virginia. They were notoriously dangerous to hunt, being quicker and stronger than their more common cousins.

  The rumble the sim and scout had heard was coming from the clearing; it was the pounding of innumerable buffalo hooves on the turf. Charles poinoed to the herd, signing, Good hunting. Good eating

  "Good hunting indeed," Kenton said. Its meat smoked over a fire, a single buffalo could feed Charles and him for weeks. But the scout saw no need for that much work. With the big beasts so plentiful, it would be easy to kil one whenever they needed fresh meat.

  Good hunting in another way also, the scout realized. A herd this size would surely draw wolves and spearfangs to prey on stragglers.

  Kenton smiled in anticipation. He would prey on them.

  "Let's get some meat," Kenton said matter-of-factly. Charles nodded and slipped off the trail into the trees. The scout followed.

  He could just as well have led; the sim and he were equal y skilled in woodscraft But he would not go wrong letting Charles pick a spot from which to shoot.

  Once away from the trail, the scout felt as though the forest had swallowed him. The crowns of the trees overhead hid the sun; light came through them wan, green, and shifting. Shrubs and bushes grew thick enough to reduce vision to a few yards, but not enough to impede progress much. The air was cool, moist, and still, with the smell of earth and growing things.

  Steering by the patterns of moss and other subtle signs, Charles and Kenton reached the clearing they had spied in the distance. It was even larger than the scout had thought, and ful of buffalo. More entered by way of a game track to the north that was wider than most Virginia roads; others took the trail south and west out.

  Charles picked a vantage point where the forest projected a little into the clearing, giving Kenton a broad view and a chance to pick his target at leisure. "Good job," the scout murmured. Charles wriggled with pleasure at the praise like a patted hound.

  But Kenton knew there was more to the sims glee than any dog would have felt. Charles's reasoning was slower and far less accurate than a man's, but it was enough for him to understand how and why he had pleased the scout. People who treated their sims like cattle or other beasts of burden often had them run away.

  Kenton shook his head slightly as he aimed at a plump young buffalo not thirty yards away. If Gharles wanted to flee on this journey, he had his chance every night.

  The flintlock bucked against the scout's shoulder, though the long barrel of soft iron reduced the recoil. Buffalo heads sprang up at the report; the animals' startled snorts filled the clearing. Then the buffalo were running, and Kenton felt the ground shudder under his feet.

  If the sound of the beasts' hooves had been distant thunder before, now the scout heard the roar as if in the center of a cloudburst. Charles was shouting, but Kenton only saw his open mouth, his cry was lost in the din of the stampede.

  The cow the scout had shot tried to join the panic rush, despite the blood that gushed from its shoulder just below the hump and soaked its shaggy brown hair. After half a dozen lurching strides, blood also poured from its mouth and nose. It swayed and fel .

  Several other buffalo, most of them calves, were down, trampled, when Kenton and Charles went out into the clearing, which was now almost empty. The scout took the precaution of reloading, this time with a double charge, before he emerged from the woods, in case one of the buffalo stil on their feet should decide to charge.

  Crows and foxes began feasting while Charles was still cutting two large chunks of meat from the tender, fat-rich hump. Soon other hunters and scavengers would come: spearfangs, perhaps, or wolves or sims. Kenton preferred meeting any of them on ground of his own choosing, not here in the open. He drew back into the woods as soon as Charles had finished his butchery. They got well away from the open space before they camped, and Kenton made sure they did so in a small hollow to screen the light of his fire from unwelcome eyes.

  After he had eaten, he wiped his greasy hands on the grass, then dug into his pack for his journal, pen, and inkpot. He wrote a brief account of the past couple of days of travel and added to the sketch map he was keeping.

  As always, Charles watched with interest. Talking marks? he signed.

  "Aye, so they are."

  How do marks talk? the sim asked, punctuating the question with a pleading whimper. Kenton could only spread his hands regretfully.

  Several times he had tried to teach Charles the ABCs, but the sim could not grasp that a sign on paper reprented a sound. No sim had ever learned to read or write.

  Then the scout had an idea, maybe his map would be easier than letters for Charles to understand. "Recall the creek we walked along this morning, how it bent north and then southwest?"

  The sim nodded. Kenton pointed to his representation. "Here is a line that moves the same way the creek did."

  Charles looked reproachful y at the scout. Line not move. Line there.

  "No; I mean the line shows the direction of the creek. D'you see?

  First it goes up, then down and over, like the stream did."

  So? In their deep, shadowed sockets beneath his brow ridges, Charles's eyes were full of pained incomprehension. Line not like stream. How can line be like stream?

  "The line is a picture of the stream," the scout said.

  Line not picture. Charles's signs were quick and firm. Picture like thing to eyes. Line not like stream.

  Kenton shrugged and gave up. That had been his last, best try at getting the idea across. Sims recognized paintings, even pen-and-ink drawings. Abstract symbols, though, remained beyond their capacity.

  The scout sighed, got out his blanket, and slept.

  Instead of returning to the clearing, Kenton decided to parallel the game track down which the buffalo had fled. Mockingbirds yammered in the treetops high overhead, while red squirrels and gray frisked along the branches, pausing now and then to peer suspiciously down at the man and the sim.

  "An Englishman I met at Portsmouth told me there are no gray squirrels in England, only red ones," Kenton remarked.

  No grays? Who ate them?

  Kenton smiled, then sobered. There was more to the question than Charles, in his innocent ignorance, had meant. People on both sides of the Atlantic were still hotly debating the notion someone had put forward a generation before: that the struggle of predator against prey determined which forms of life would prosper and which would fail.

  The scout liked the idea. To his mind, it explained why such beasts as spearfangs and hairy elephants lived in America but not in Europe, though their ancient bones had been found there. Humans, even savages, were better hunters than sims. Already, after less than a century, spearfangs were scarce in Virginia. No doubt they had been exterminated east of the ocean so long ago that even the memory of them was gone.

  The thought of life changing through time horrified folk who took their Scripture literal y. Kenton could not fathom their cries of protest.

  America had shown so many wonders the Bible did not speak of, sims not the least, that using Scripture to account for them struck him as foolish. Like most colonists, he preferred to judge truth for himself, not receive it from a preacher. A little past noon, the scout began hearing the low rumble of many buffalo hooves again. He found a herd gathered at a salt lick, pushing and shoving each other to get at the salt like so many townswomen elbowing their wa
y to a peddler's cart. He took out his journal and noted the lick. When settlers eventual y came, they could use the salt to preserve their meat.

  He had not intended to hunt that day, not when he and Charles were still carrying some of the buffalo hump. But a tawny blur exploded from the far side of the clearing and darted toward a yearling cow at the edge of the herd. The spearfang's roar sent the buffalo scattering in terror and made ice walk up Kenton's back.

  The spearfang's powerful forelimbs wrapped round the buffalo's neck.

  Despite the beast's panic-stricken thrashing and bucking, the spearfang wrestled it to the ground. Excitement made the big cat's short, stumpy tail quiver absurdly.

  The struggle went on for several minutes, the buffalo trying desperately to break free and the spearfang to hold it in place with front legs and claws. At last the spearfang found the grip it wanted.

  Its jaws gaped hugely. It see its fangs slashing across the buffalo's throat. Blood fountained. The buffalo gave a final convulsive shiver and was still. The spearfang began to feed, tearing great hunks of dripping meat from the buffalo's flank.

  Kenton swung up his musket, glad he had a double charge in the gun.

  Luckily, the spearfang was exposing its left side to him. He released the set trigger, took a deep breath and held it to steady his aim, touched the second trigger.

  His flint and gunpowder were French, and of the best quality; only a farmer would use Virginia-made powder. Along with the twin triggers, they ensured that the musket would not misfire or hang fire.

  The spearfang screamed. It whirled and snapped at its flank. But the wound was not mortal, for the spearfang bounded into the woods the way it had come.

  "Oh, a pox," Kenton said; the shot had struck too far forward to pierce the heart. He paused to reload before pursuing the big cat. He was not mad enough to follow a wounded spearfang armed only with a brace of pistols.

  As he had been trained, Charles trotted ahead to find the trail.

  Kenton soon waved him back to a position of safety; the spearfang had left a blood-spattered spoor any fool could follow.

  That over-confidence almost cost the scout his life. Once in the forest, the spearfang doubled back on its trail. Kenton did not suspect it was there till it burst from the under growth a bare ten yards to his left.

  Those yawning jaws seemed a yard wide, big enough to gulp him down at a single bite. He had not time to turn and shoot; afterwards, he thought himself lucky to have got off a shot across his body, his musket cradled in the crook of his elbow.

  With a lighter gun, he probably would have broken his arm. But one of the reasons he carried a five-foot, eleven pound rifle was to let him take such snap shots at need.

  Because of its weight, it had less kick.

  The spearfang pitched sideways as the ball, which weighed almost a third of an ounce, slammed into its face just below a glaring eye. An instant later, Charles's hatchet clove the beast's skull. Kenton thought his bullet had already killed it, but was honest enough to admit he was never quite sure. His narrow escape made his hands shake so much he spilled powder as he reloaded, something he had not done since he was a boy.

  Charles had to set a foot on the spearfang's carcass to tug his hatchet free. He used it and his knife to worry the fangs from the cat's upper jaw, handed Kenton the bloody trophies.

  "Thanks." The scout wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with the back of his hand. "That, by God, is 5 pounds earned."

  The sim shrugged. With his simple wants, money meant little to him.

  Ever practical, he signed, Good meat back there.

  Here in this unexplored territory, 5 pounds was of no more immediaoe use to Kenton than to Charles. The scout nodded, made his wits return to the business at hand. "So there is. Let's get at it." He and the sim walked back toward the buffalo the spearfang had kil ed.

  Kenton made a semi-permanent camp near the salt lick, building a lean-to of branches and leaves for protection against the warm summer rain. He went back to the lick for both deer and buffalo, and added three more sets of spearfang teeth in less hair raising fashion than he had col ected the first.

  The hunting was so easy it required only a small part of his time.

  He ranged widely over the countryside, adding to his map and journal.

  The more he traveled, the richer he judged the land. Not only was it full of game, but the rich soil and abundant water were made for farming.

  Sometimes Charles accompanied him on his journeys, sometimes he went alone. The sim traveled too, though not as widely as Kenton.

  Often he would bring back to camp smal game he had slain himself rabbits, turkey, a beaver, a porcupine that proved amazingly tasty once it was skinned. They made a welcome change of diet.

  Saw strange thing, Charles signed after one of his solitary jaunts. Many buffalo bones. He opened and closed his hands several times, indicating some number larger than he could count.

  He led Kenton to the spot the next morning. The scout whistled in surprise as he looked down into a dry wash at the tangle of whitened bones there. "Must be a hundred head, easy," he said.

  Charles repeated the sign for an indefinitely large number.

  Together they scrambled down the steep side of the ravine, going slowly and often grabbing at bushes for support. Kenton tried to imagine what could have made a herd plunge down such a slope. Even at fuII stampede, the buffalo should have turned aside.

  Then the scout was among the bones. Scavengers had pul ed apart many skeletons. Bushes were pushing through rib cages, climbing over skulls.

  The herd had met disaster at least a year ago, Kenton judged.

  Many great legbones were neatly split lengthwise, almost al the skul s smashed open. When Kenton found a fist sized lump of stone with an edge chipped sharp, it only confirmed what he had already guessed.

  He tossed the hand-axe up and down.

  Charles recognized it at once. Sims. Wild sims.

  "Aye. No animal could've gone for the beasts' brains and marrow so."

  Likely, Kenton thought, the subhumans had driven the buffalo into the gully. He glanced round, as if expecting to see a sim crouching behind every shrub. He had never doubted sims lived west of the mountains, but this was the first sure sign of it, and a sobering reminder.

  Big killing, Charles signed, his eyes traveling the scatered bones.

  Kenton wondered what was going through his mind, wondered if he was proud of the slaughter his distant cousins had worked. Some Englishmen trained their sims to hate and fear the wild ones. The scout had never seen the need for that. Finding out he was wrong might prove costly.

  He did his best to keep his voice casual. "Let me know before you join them, eh?"

  Charles's face was troubled. Joke? he signed at last.

  Kenton dimly realized how hard it had to be for sims to keep track of men's vagaries they could not share. "Joke," he said firmly.

  Charles nodded.

  They spent a while longer investigating the ravine.

  Kenton turned up a few more stone tools, but nothing to show that the sims had come back to this immediate area since the year before.

  That was some relief, if not much.

  When Charles wanted to go off for some purpose of his own, Kenton said only, "I'll see you back at the camp this evening." The last thing he wanted was the sim thinking he mistrusted him. He wished he had kept his mouth shut instead of letting his stupid wisecrack out.

  Thinking such dark thoughts, the scout decided to return to the salt lick. The chunk of venison he had cached in a tree probably would not be fit to eat by nightfal , not in this heat. And game was so easy to come by west mountains that he did not have to put up with meat even a little off.

  He wormed his way to his familiar cover. Excitment coursed through him as he looked into the clearing of the lick. A spearfang had just slain a plump doe dragging the carcass back into the bushes to feed, without conscious volition, his rifle sprang to his shoulder and spoke.<
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  The spearfang yowled with anguish as it staggering from its kill.

  Kenton reloaded, hurried after it. He held the gun at the ready, although he did not think he would need it for such desperate work as before. The big cat's gait reflected a wound that would soon be fatal.

  So it proved. Less than a furlong from the fallen doe the scout found the spearfang dead, its mouth gaping in defiant snarl. Insects were already lighting on the cat They buzzed away as Kenton stooped beside it.

  He set down his rifle, used his knife and a stone out the beast's fangs. They were a fine pair, not much shorter than the gap between his thumb and little finger when he splayed them wide. He bound the two long teeth with a rawhide thong, slipped them into his pouch rest.

  He caught a slight motion out of the corner of his eye. Still on his knees, he turned. "See, I'll be rich yet.” The words caught in his throat. The sim behind was naked, and shorter and stockier than his companion and hefted a stone in its right hand.

  The tableau held for several seconds. The sim looked at Kenton as if unsure it believed its eyes. He beratted himself for putting his musket to one side. The sim might hurl its rock before he grabbed the gun.

  And at twenty feet, he might miss with a pistol. .

  All the same, his right hand was easing towardthe musket when three more sims, all adult males, slid silently out. No chance now he could frighten them off.

  He drew a pistol. That alone would have sent wild Virginia sims running; They knew what guns could do. But these sims did not know filearms.

  One drew back its arm to cast its stone into the air. At the report and the noise the sims shouted in fright. The scout could flee, but the one that had its rock ready and that rallied the others. They rushed at him the missile, snatched out his other gun, and at blank range. As happens too mournful y outside of action romances, he missed. He brought the gun down club-fashion on a sims head. The stunned sim stil surged forward to grapple him, as they had thicker skulls than humans. The scout was just as glad not to remember the fight with the sims. What he could recal hurt. He soon lost consciousness The sims were not sophisticated enough to use deliberate cruelty, but when four of them beat him into submission the result came close enough to foolall, but the most exacting critic.