Below me a herd of hebras grazed, rotating between watcher and eater, the distance making animals with heads towering above my own look small.
A breeze kissed the tops of the grasses, bending them south in ripples. A few lines of grass moved the wrong way as a pack of seven demons surrounded twice as many hebras. I spotted the dogs’ path even before the wily old watch-hebra bugled fear and loathing.
The hebras ran together, almost lockstep, all of them trying for a gap between two of the demons, heading sideways to me, their heads bobbing up and down with their ungainly rocking run.
The dogs raced to make a line in front of the hebras, cutting them off. They began to bay, a high long-winded howl that instilled fear in me even though I stood so far above them the sound was faint and thin.
The hebras turned, all together, a wave of long necks and thin tails.
The dogs flowed behind them.
The tallest hebra let out a short high-pitched squeal, and the hebras twitched and broke into three lines, 180-degree turns, as if they practiced every day. Maybe they did. They had it down, stretching out long, taking turns teasing the dogs. The gap between grazer and hunter widened.
A dog nipped at the last animal in one line, a brown blur flashing momentarily up above the high grass and then falling back down. The target hebra twisted, probably kicking even though I couldn’t see its legs for the grass, and then put on a burst of speed. It passed two other hebras, and a different animal became last, running right in front of the slavering dogs.
I’d been in the grass the week before. It pulled and cloyed and knotted and tripped. But the hebras and the demons slid through it, streams of living beings, barking and baying and bugling.
The air had cooled down a little, but I stood with goose bumps rising on my forearms, transfixed, and afraid that if I moved I’d somehow change the outcome of the race down below.
It was nearly too dark to see by the time the first of the dogs stopped, the grass swallowing the hunter as it became still. I lost the place it stood entirely in the space of two breaths.
As the stars and two of our moons brightened in the black sky above me, I realized the hebras had won fairly easily. They were off grazing somewhere else, and the dogs would have a hungry night.
If it had been fourteen unarmed humans against seven demons, I’d have bet on the dogs.
Our roving scientists brought back a lot of djuri bones, jaws, and the thick back legs cracked open by teeth. But not many hebra bones. Some. They did die. But not very fast, or very easy.
So I swore I’d figure out how to tame them. Not that we’d gotten within two hundred meters by then. The great beasts were shy of us, and fast.
I couldn’t catch one myself. I was almost sixty already, and slowing. I took my story to the town council, which was led by Jove Alma at the time, a nervous man with a deep focus on making and keeping plans. He thought the tighter he gripped our choices in his and the council’s fists, the more of us would live. Some believed him, some hated him, but everyone obeyed. The previous leader had been a risk-taker, and cost almost all of us people we loved. That’s the long way round of saying that catching animals wasn’t in Jove’s plan, and the council turned me down flat. There was a city being built and the chill of winter already clinging to every dawn.
The winter was the second harshest we’d ever had, with snow in town instead of just in the hills and two sheet-ice storms. We lost ten more people. Two froze to death on a trip out into the woods to bring back samples of winter plants, leaving behind two orphans to add to our growing stockpile. The third one who went with them lost three fingers and part of her sanity. Cats ate two adults and a babe, fire claimed a family of four, and one of the men my age hanged himself in the middle of town. We had two less births than deaths that season.
All that long cold I thought of the hebras. Sometimes I glimpsed them down below on the cold grass plains. Fire had flamed the grass flat and low and the hebras sometimes loped like shadows at the edge of the plain near the sea, clearly visible when frost turned the stubble white and hoary in the early dawn. But mostly they hid in the Lace Forest that surrounded us.
Come spring, we stopped huddling together in the buildings we’d made for guild halls and finished up some of the houses. I built mine at the edge of town, as close to the cliff as the town council would let me. Mornings, as dawn split the sky open, I sat and watched the fading moons and the greening grass below. The hebras returned, sleeping on the plain, two watch beasts circling the sleepers restlessly, heads way up. I was pretty sure they traded off watches just like we did, and for the same reason. It made me feel kindred.
One morning when the grass was knee-high to a human and the first spindly-legged baby hebras clung to their dams, Jove came and stood silently beside me, looking down at the plains. His gaze was unfocused, as if he saw the whole thing and the sea beyond, but not the hebras right below. “Three of the orphans got in trouble last night. Fought each other and one’s fetched up in the infirmary with a broken leg.”
He’d hate that. Jove hated all disorder. I waited him out, curious what he’d say next.
“Council met, and we figure you got room for two boys.”
Shock gave way to liking the idea pretty fast. I’d never married, never had kids, just managed farms and hired help. But there was no help to hire here. My ancestors had farmed Deerfly by making babies, back in the days before there were too many bots and androids to count and people didn’t have any work to do that looked like farming except training exotics. So I didn’t stand and blink stupidly at Jove for long, but instead I just said, “Thank you.”
He looked surprised at that, like he’d been expecting resistance, so it was his turn to pause for a beat too long and then say, “Thank you,” himself. He smiled before he walked away, the sun fully risen now, shoving his shadow behind him as he walked back to town.
The boys were Derk and Sho. Derk was thin and wiry, and won the boys informal footraces. Sho plodded and had so much patience I couldn’t imagine what had made him part of the fight at all until one day I came across two other boys teasing him in high, mean voices for being stupid. They were wrong, I already knew that. But sometimes being the silent type means people make their own decisions about who you are.
Sho and Derk had school and then work every day, but since they were only twelve, they had energy to spare in spite of the harsh schedules. It only took a few days before they stood beside me at the cliff’s edge, looking down at the herd.
Sho started drawing hebras in the dirt with sticks, and they both started naming them.
As the days got longer, we gave up sleep to pick our way down the steep path between Artistos and the wide road on the plains where we’d trucked tools and technology from the shuttles at our makeshift spaceport.
The boy with the broken leg, Niko, recovered enough to follow us down the path and soon all three of them laughed together, their raised voices surely spreading all across the plain. Soon half the teens and a few of the old singles from town began to join us at the crack of dawn.
Some of the watchers wanted to catch a hebra, some to stun one. Those weren’t the right answers. I knew it deep in my gut, found it hard to say why I knew so hard, so I just told them, “If we scare them off, they might never come back.” I never let them get close to the herds, just to watch them. The boys helped me—all three of them now living with me, and acting like herd dogs to the new people.
The trail from town to plain lay nearly naked against the cliff, a thin ribbon of dirt with no place big enough for predators to hide. We could stand safely or sit on small rocks and talk. The hebras knew we were there, sometimes lifting their heads and pointing their broad, bearded faces at us. I wanted them to know we weren’t their enemy. We kept it up all summer, the crowd straining against my calls for patience. Sho stood beside me, facing them, telling them off with his eyes and his stance, and they listened. Derk and Niko stood quietly at the rear, watching everyone and all the hebra
s, eyes darting from one to one to one, keeping count and order.
Some of the boys were fascinated with the hebras’ beards, maybe because they had the first hint of stubble on their own chins. They started drawing pictures of the girls in town with beards and longish necks, and giggling.
The grass stretched its fairy-duster seedpods toward the autumn sky, tall as me if I stood inside it. Demons started hunting more, sometimes running the hebras twice a day. The herd lost one old hebra and one very young one that twisted a leg. The pack lost one old dog and two pups. So in a way, the hebras were winning. Except, of course, that one hebra fed all the dogs and dead dogs didn’t feed the hebras anything.
The cats stayed away. I suspect our scent and presence did that. They were just as quick to hunt us as they would the hebra, but they liked us in small groups. There were about twenty humans on the path most mornings.
Once a week or so Jove came and watched, always walking away before the bells rang for breakfast. I knew that he was thinking, but it did no good to push Jove, and thus no good to push the town council. But if the plains burned below us, we’d have to wait another year to capture even one hebra.
One morning after Jove ghosted away from us, Sho asked, “Is he scared of catching one?”
“Hard work to run a colony. He has to choose.”
“He should see how much we and the hebras need each other.”
I suspected the boy had the right of it, but it does no good to downtalk leaders. “Jove is a busy man.”
“Can you ask him for some rope?”
“What are you going to do with rope?”
“Catch a hebra.”
“Probably not. You think about how to do that, and we’ll try your idea if I can get rope. Rope is dear.” We had what we’d brought, and some we’d made. But none of our homemade rope was strong enough for this.
“Please ask.”
The persistence of boys. “If an opening comes up.”
About noon that same day, Jove came by to watch us raise the roof on the smelter. The metal slabs had come all the way from Deerfly and been brought in pieces from Traveler in one of the little shuttles a year ago. Jove stood to the side as we used chain to hoist the metal, the chain traveling over a tall wooden post-and-beam structure we’d lashed together just for this job. Even with the leverage, it took three men sweating to get the last and largest section up and held while three more of us fastened it with nails also brought from the ship.
At the end, Jove came and stood silently beside me. “Good job, Chaunce. Now we can make our own nails.”
“That’s what we did all this work for? Nails?”
“And hinges. And maybe bits for those animals down below.” He nodded at the roof. “One of your beasts might have pulled that easier.”
It wasn’t a use I had thought of—I’d been thinking of riding them. I felt doubtful they’d be pullers. But if they were—we could make wagons and flatbeds and farm tools. The thought was good. “Can I have some rope?”
“You might get hurt. Or die. The boys might die.”
“We’ve gotta find accord with some of the wild things here. We can’t fear them all forever.” But then, he’d lost a wife to a pack of demons, found her in pieces three days after we landed. Years had passed, but some memories burn your soul.
He toed the ground for a while.
I could get enough of the council to override him if I really tried. But he was a good leader, and I’d learned that if you undermine a good leader you can be rewarded with a worse one.
He swallowed and looked off at some distant spot in the sky before he said, “Let’s go get it.”
I had plenty of time to think, lurching home in the darkening night with three hundred feet of rope coiled over my right shoulder. I understood Jove’s issue: Time breathed down on us. We were failing, dying by bits each year as we missed goals, became food for the local predators, fought amongst each other, and tried ever so hard to learn the dangers and opportunities here. We needed more stout, warm buildings, to retrieve the rest of our supplies from Traveler before the shuttles ran out of fuel, to build better perimeters, and to breed more children than Fremont took from us. Taking the three boys out on the plains represented a hefty risk of our future. Better to risk boys than girls, but still . . .
When I dropped my load of rope on the ground outside the house, the three of them tumbled out right away, faces full of excitement. They’d been planning. Sho came up to me and said, “We can’t get that over their heads. We can’t get it around their legs or we might break them.”
I considered. I’d been thinking of horses. But we were not cowboys. I’d never tried to catch a wild animal in my life. Ran from a few here. The animals on my farms had been born in warm stables and grown up unafraid of me. This was a puzzle. “We can’t cut the rope too short or we’ll never be able to use it for anything else.”
So we made walls on two sides, using the cliff as the third.
We lost a whole day hiking to the Lace Forest and finding four big logs, dragging them back, and posting them upright into the ground. About the time we finished that, the work crews had broken for the day. They helped us string and tie the rope walls, the lowest rope at hebra-knee height, which was about our waists, and the highest something I could barely touch with my hands.
When we finished, the dark brown rope stood out against the pale green grasses of late autumn. The corral did not look like it would work for much of anything. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to get them anywhere near it.
Now we had to do what Jove was afraid of. We had to walk through the tall grass and get the hebras to walk away from us and into the makeshift corral. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this—maybe we should have tried to get close without rope. Maybe we should have tried to find them in the winter woods. At any rate, it no longer mattered what we should have done. The shadow of night was knifing across the plains, and it was time to beat it up the cliff and bed down.
I slept fine, but before first light all three boys came to my room. Derk, the biggest, rested his arms on Niko’s and Sho’s shoulders. “Sho was dreaming of hebras, and when he came to wake me up, I was dreaming about them too.”
Sho nodded. “We dreamed they got caught in the walls we made and the dogs got them, rising up over their back legs and standing on their backs.” He stopped, his eyes wide. He might cry if I let him keep worrying, and then he’d lose face, and maybe be the next one to end up with a broken leg.
“And biting their necks,” Niko added, not helping.
“Did you dream too?” I asked Niko.
He shook his head. “No. But I’m worried about the hebras.”
“Well, I’m glad you care. That should make it easier to catch them.”
“Really?” Sho asked.
“Yes,” I assured them all. Might as well believe in success. It couldn’t hurt.
“Can we sit in here with you?” Niko asked.
So I let them stay. In ten minutes they had fallen asleep all over the bed like a litter of puppies, and I got up to watch for the light and pack us all a good lunch. The apple trees had come in well this fall, and Jove’s new wife, Maria, made excellent goat’s-milk cheese. We’d be set if we added a bit of fresh bread from the communal kitchen. Even though the morning shadows were still black ghosts, the first loaves should already be out. I shrugged into my coat and opened the door.
I nearly jumped as a shadow moved nearby. Jove. Wordlessly, he held out three loaves of bread.
“I don’t need that many.”
“Yes, you do. I gave everyone on your shift the day off.”
I raised my eyebrows and spoke more boldly than I ever had to him. “Big risk for you.”
Although I really only still had moonlight to see by, I swear his cheeks reddened. “I had trouble sleeping. I kept doing math in my head. Doing just what we’re doing, if we keep dying so fast, there won’t be anything left of us in two hundred years.” He looked directly at me fo
r the first time in a few days. “I remember what you said when you brought your ideas to us. Last year. We have to risk.”
I could barely imagine what that cost him. People followed him because they were afraid. Like him. And now he was being brave. This would change us, and only success would change us for the better. The stakes had just risen.
Together, Jove and I made up sandwiches for thirty people. My shiftmates started gathering outside, stamping against the morning cold, dressed in layers against the heat that would follow by midday. They chattered amongst themselves, a few nervous, a few excited. Laughter broke out over and over.
The boys didn’t want anything more than excitement for breakfast, but I got them each to take a bread heel down in their coat pockets against the hunger that would threaten them as soon as we stopped and waited. At first I worried that Jove would try to take over, although in truth, neither he nor I knew much of anything about hunting hebras.
He didn’t take charge. He stood to the side, curious and watchful and very silent. People looked to him at first, and then when he looked to me, they did too. A relief and a worry.
We handed out stunners to all of the adults, two to the good shots. Half of our total stock, a firepower that scared even me. The stunners quieted everyone a bit. One shot would stop a human, two a demon, three a paw cat.
The hebra herd watched us come down, and of course, we watched them.
I expected them to think it was like any other morning, since we always came down at dawn to watch. But they scattered before we were even halfway down. Maybe because we started later than usual. Maybe just something in the way we walked, like we had a purpose instead of a simple curiosity.
Jove spoke what I was thinking. “Maybe they don’t want us any more than the rest of this cursed planet wants us.”
There were twenty-five of us total. I broke us into groups, and sent four groups of five off. I thought about keeping Jove with us, but since I was keeping all three boys I decided I needed a shooter I could count on, and so I sent Jove off with the group that I figured would be safest. So that’s how me, the three boys, and my second in command from the smelter project, Campbell, all went over to stand downwind of the rope corral.
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