Win Some, Lose Some

by Mike Resnick

  “Chajinka has been to the tree where we tied the dead meat animals,” I continued.

  “And?” said Marx.

  “The ropes were untied. Not cut or torn apart or bitten through; untied. So we know that the Snark either has fingers, or some damned effective appendages. And some meat was missing from the carcasses.”

  “All right,” said Ramona. “We know he can untie knots. What else?”

  “We know he’s a carnivore,” I said. “We weren’t sure about that yesterday.”

  “So what?” asked Marx. “There are millions of carnivores in the galaxy. Nothing unique about that.”

  “It means he won’t stray far from the game herds. They’re his supermarket.”

  “Maybe he only has to eat once every few months,” said Marx, unimpressed.

  “No,” I said. “That’s the third thing we’ve learned: he’s got to eat just about as often as we do.”

  “How do we know that?” asked Ramona.

  “According to Chajinka, he approached the meat very cautiously, but his tracks show that he trotted away once he’d eaten his fill. The trail disappeared after a mile, but we know that he trotted that whole distance.”

  “Ah!” said Ramona. “I see.”

  “I sure as hell don’t,” complained her husband.

  “Anything that can sustain that pace, that kind of drain on its energy, has to eat just about every day.” I paused. “And we know a fourth thing.”

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “He’s not afraid of us,” I said. “He had to know we were the ones who killed those meat animals. Our tracks and scent were all over the place, and of course there were the ropes. He knows that we’re a party of at least nine—five, if you discount Chajinka and the three gunbearers, and he has no reason to discount them. And yet, hours after learning all that, he hasn’t left the area.” I paused. “That leads to a fifth conclusion. He’s not very bright; he didn’t understand that Marx’s gun was what wounded the animal he killed yesterday—because if he realized we could kill from a distance, he’d be afraid of us.”

  “You deduce all that just from a few tracks and the signs that Chajinka saw?” asked Desmond skeptically.

  “Reading signs and interpreting what they mean is what hunting’s all about,” I explained. “Shooting is just the final step.”

  “So do we go after him now?” asked Marx eagerly.

  I shook my head. “I’ve already sent Chajinka back out to see if he can find the creature’s lair. If he’s like most carnivores, he’ll want to lie up after he eats. If we know where to look for him, we’ll save a lot of time and effort. It makes more sense to wait for Chajinka to report back, and then go after the Snark in the morning.”

  “It seems so odd,” said Ramona. “We’ve never seen this creature, and yet we’ve already reasoned out that he’s incredibly formidable.”

  “Of course he’s formidable,” I said.

  “You say that as if everything is formidable,” she said with a condescending smile.

  “That’s the first axiom on safari,” I replied. “Everything bites.”

  “If this thing is as dangerous as you make it seem,” said Desmond hesitantly, “are we permitted to use more…well, sophisticated weapons?”

  “Show a little guts, Philemon,” said Marx contemptuously.

  “I’m a banker, not a goddamned Allan Quatermain!” shot back Desmond.

  “If you’re afraid, stay in camp,” said Marx. “Me, I can’t wait to get him in my sights.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Bell,” persisted Desmond.

  Mbele pulled out the Statute Book and began reading aloud. “Unless, in the hunter’s judgment, the weapons you are using are inadequate for killing the prey, you must use the weapons that have been approved for the world in question.”

  “So if he presents a serious threat, we can use pulse guns and molecular imploders and the like?”

  “Have you ever seen a molecular imploder in action?” I asked. “Aim it at a 50-story building and you turn the whole thing into pudding in about three seconds.”

  “What about pulse guns?” he persisted.

  “There’s not a lot of trophy left when one of those babies hit the target,” I said.

  “We need something, damn it!” whined Desmond.

  “We have more than enough firepower to bring down any animal on this planet,” I said, getting annoyed with him. “I don’t mean to be blunt, but there’s a difference between an inadequate hunter and an inadequate weapon.”

  “You can say that again!” muttered Marx.

  “That was very blunt, Mr. Bell,” said Desmond, getting up and walking to his Bubble. His wife stared at him expressionlessly, then pulled out her book and began reading.

  “That’s what you get for being honest,” said Marx, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “I just hope this Snark is half the creature you make it out to be.”

  I’ll settle for half, I thought uneasily.

  * * *

  Chajinka, who was sitting on the hood of the safari vehicle, raised his spear, which was my signal to stop.

  He jumped down, bent over, examined the grasses for a few seconds, then trotted off to his left, eyes glued to the ground.

  I climbed out and grabbed my rifle.

  “You wait here,” I said to the four humans. The Dabih gunbearers, who clung to handles and footholds on the back of the vehicle when it was moving, had released their grips and were now standing just behind it.

  “Whose shot is it?” asked Marx.

  “Let me think,” I said. “You shot that big buck yesterday, and Mrs. Desmond killed the boar-like thing with the big tusks just before that. So Mr. Desmond has the first shot today.”

  “I’m not getting out of the vehicle,” said Desmond.

  “It’s against regulations to shoot from the safety of the vehicle,” I pointed out.

  “Fuck your regulations and fuck you!” hollered Desmond. “I don’t want the first shot! I don’t want any shot! I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing on this stupid safari!”

  “Goddammit, Philemon!” hissed Marx fiercely.

  “What is it?” asked Desmond, startled.

  “If there was anything there, Mr. Desmond,” I explained, trying to control my temper, “you just gave it more than ample reason to run hell for leather in the opposite direction. You never yell during a hunt.”

  I walked away in disgust and joined Chajinka beneath a small tree. He was standing beside a young dead herbivore whose skull had been crushed.

  “Snark,” he said, pointing to the skull.

  “When?” I asked.

  He pulled back the dead animal’s lips to examine its gums, felt the inside of its ears, examined other parts for a few seconds.

  “Five hours,” he said. “Maybe six.”

  “The middle of the night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree

  That it carries too far, when I say

  That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,

  And dines on the following day.”

  “Can you pick up his trail?” I asked Chajinka.

  He looked around, then gave the Dabih equivalent of a frown. “It vanishes,” he said at last, pointing to a spot ten feet away.

  “You mean some animals obliterated his tracks after he made them?”

  He shrugged. “No tracks at all. Not his, not anyone’s.”

  “Why not?”

  He had no answer.

  I stared at the ground for a long moment. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s get back to the vehicle.”

  He resumed his customary position on the hood, while I sat behind the control panel and thought.

  “Well?” asked Marx. “Did it have something to do with the Snark?”

  “Yeah,” I said, still puzzled by the absence of any tracks. “He made a kill during the night. His prey was an animal built for what I would
call evasive maneuvering. That means he’s got excellent nocturnal vision and good motor skills.”

  “So he’s a night hunter?” asked Ramona.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that,” I replied. “He killed the crystal-horned buck at midday, so like most predators he’s also an opportunist; when a meal is there for the taking, he grabs it. Anyway, if we can’t find his lair, we’re probably going to have to build a blind, sit motionless with our guns, hang some fresh bait every evening, and hope it interests him.”

  “That’s not real hunting!” scoffed Marx.

  “There’s no way we can go chasing after him in the dark,” I responded.

  “I’m not chasing anything in the dark!” said Desmond adamantly. “You want to do it, you do it without me.”

  “Don’t be such a coward!” said Marx.

  “Fuck you, Willard!” Desmond retorted.

  “Bold words,” said Marx. “Why don’t you take some of that bravery and aim it at the animals?”

  “I hate it here!” snapped Desmond. “I think we should go back to camp.”

  “And do what?” asked Marx sarcastically.

  “And consider our options,” he replied. “It’s a big planet. Maybe we could take off and land on one of the other continents—one without any Snarks on it.”

  “Nonsense!” said Marx. “We came here to hunt big game. Well, now we’ve found it.”

  “I don’t know what we’ve found,” said Desmond, halfway between anger and panic, “and neither do you.”

  “That’s what makes it such good sport and so exciting,” said Marx.

  “Exciting is watching sports on the holo,” Desmond shot back. “This is dangerous.”

  “Same damned thing,” muttered Marx.

  * * *

  We spent the next two days searching unsuccessfully for any sign of the Snark. For a while I thought he had moved out of the area and considered moving our base camp, but then Chajinka found some relatively fresh tracks, perhaps three hours old. So we didn’t move the camp after all—but we also didn’t find the creature.

  Then, on the third afternoon of the search, as we were taking a break, sitting in the shade of a huge tree with purple and gold flowers, we heard a strange sound off in the distance.

  “Thunder?” asked Marx.

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” replied Pollard. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

  “Well, it’s something,” continued Marx.

  Ramona frowned. “And it’s getting closer. Well, louder, anyway.”

  On a hunch, I set my lenses to Telescopic, and it was a damned lucky thing I did.

  “Everybody! Up into the tree—fast!” I shouted.

  “But—”

  “No arguments! Get going!”

  They weren’t the most agile tree-climbers I’d ever encountered, but when they were finally able to see what I had seen, they managed to get clear of the ground in one hell of a hurry. A minute later a few thousand Marx’s Gazelles thundered past.

  I waited for the dust to settle, then lowered myself to the ground and scanned the horizon.

  “Okay, it’s safe to come down now,” I announced.

  “Why didn’t we climb into the vehicle?” asked Ramona, getting out of the tree and checking her hands for cuts.

  “It’s an open vehicle, Mrs. Desmond,” I pointed out. “You could have wound up with a fractured skull as they jumped over it—or with a gazelle in your lap if one of them was a poor jumper.”

  “Point taken.”

  “What the hell would cause something like that?” asked Pollard, staring after the stampeding herd as he brushed himself off.

  “I’d say a predator made a sloppy kill, or maybe blew one entirely.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because this is the first time we’ve seen a stampede…so we can assume that when they’re killed quickly and efficiently, the gazelles just move out of the predator’s range and then go back to grazing. It’s when the predator misses his prey, or wounds it, and then races after it into the middle of the herd that they panic.”

  “You think it’s one of the big cats?” asked Pollard.

  “It’s possible.”

  “I’d love to get some holos of those cats on a kill.”

  “You may get your wish, Mr. Pollard,” I said. “We’ll backtrack to where the stampede started and hope we get lucky.”

  “That suits me just fine,” said Marx, patting his rifle.

  We headed southwest in the vehicle until the terrain became too rough, then left it behind and started walking as the landscape changed from hilly and tree-covered to heavily-forested. Chajinka trotted ahead of us, eyes on the ground, spotting things even I couldn’t see, and finally he came to a stop.

  “What it is?” I asked, catching up with him.

  He pointed straight ahead into the dense foliage. “He is there.”

  “He?”

  “The Snark,” he said, pointing to a single track.

  “How deep is the cover?” I asked. “How do you know he didn’t run right through it?”

  He pointed to the bushes, which were covered with thorns. “He cannot run through this without pain.”

  “You’ve never seen him,” said Ramona, joining us. “How do you know?”

  “If it did not rip his flesh, he would be a forest creature, created by God to live here,” answered Chajinka, as if explaining it to a child. “But we know that he hunts plains game. A forest dweller with thick, heavy skin and bones could not move swiftly enough. So this is not his home—it is his hiding place.”

  I thought there was a good chance that it was more than his hiding place, that it could very well be his fortress. It was damned near impenetrable, and the forest floor was covered with dry leaves, so no one was going to sneak up on him without giving him plenty of warning.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Marx, approaching with Desmond. He stopped long enough to take his rifle from his gunbearer.

  “We’re waiting until I can figure out the best way to go about it,” I responded.

  “We walk in and blow him away,” said Marx. “What’s so hard about that?”

  I shook my head. “This is his terrain. He knows every inch of it. You’re going to make a lot of noise walking in there, and the way the upper terraces of the trees are intertwined, I’ve got a feeling that it could be dark as night 600 yards into the forest.”

  “So we’ll use infra-red scopes on our guns,” said Marx.

  I kept staring at the thick foliage. “I don’t like it,” I said. “He’s got every advantage.”

  “But we’ve got the weapons,” persisted Marx.

  “With minimal visibility and maneuverability, they won’t do you much good.”

  “Bullshit!” spat Marx. “We’re wasting time. Let’s go in after him.”

  “The four of you are my responsibility,” I replied. “I can’t risk your safety by letting you go in there. Within a couple of minutes you could be out of touch with me and with each other. You’ll be making noise with every step you take, and if I’m right about the light, before long you could be standing right next to him without seeing him. And we haven’t explored any Dodgson forests yet—he might not be the only danger. There could be everything from arboreal killer cats to poisonous insects to 50-foot-long snakes with an attitude.”

  “So what do you propose?” asked Marx.

  “A blind makes the most sense,” I said. “But it could take half a day to build one, and who the hell knows where he’ll be by then?” I paused. “All right. The three of you with weapons will spread out. Mr. Pollard, stand well behind them. Chajinka and I will go into the bush and try to flush him out.”

  “I thought you said it was too dangerous,” said Ramona.

  “Let me amend that,” I answered. “It’s too dangerous for amateurs.”

  “If there’s a chance that he can harm you, why don’t we just forget about it?” she continued.

  “I appreciate your concer
n,” I began, “but—”

  “I’m not being totally altruistic. What happens to us if he kills you?”

  “You’ll return to base camp and tell Mbele what happened. He’ll radio a subspace message to headquarters, and Silinger & Mahr will decide whether to give you a refund or take you to another planet with a new hunter.”

  “You make it sound so…so businesslike,” she said distastefully.

  “It’s my business,” I replied.

  “Why did you ever become a hunter?”

  I shrugged. “Why did you become a judge?”

  “I have a passion for order,” she said.

  “So do I,” I replied.

  “You find order in killing things?”

  “I find order in Nature. Death is just a part of it.” I paused. “Now, Mr. Marx,” I said, turning back to him, “I want you to…”

  He wasn’t there.

  “Where the hell did he go?” I demanded.

  No one seemed to know, not even Chajinka. Then his gunbearer approached me.

  “Boss Marx went there.” He pointed to the forest, then ruefully held up the back-up rifle. “He did not wait for me.”

  “Shit!” I muttered. “It’s bad enough that I’ve got to go in after the Snark! Now I stand a hell of a good chance of getting blown away by that macho bastard!”

  “Why would he shoot you?” asked Ramona.

  “He’ll hear me before he sees me,” I answered. “He’s running on adrenaline. He’ll be sure I’m the Snark.”

  “Then stay out here.”

  “I wish I could,” I said truthfully. “But it’s my job to protect him whether he wants me to or not.”

  That particular argument became academic about five seconds later, when we heard a shot, and then a long, agonized scream.

  A human scream.

  “You two stand about 200 yards apart,” I said to the Desmonds. “Shoot anything that comes out of there that doesn’t look like me or a Dabih!” Then, to Chajinka: “Let’s go!”

  The Dabih led the way into the forest. Then, as it started getting thicker and darker, we lost Marx’s trail. “We’re more likely to find him if we split up,” I whispered. “You go left, I’ll go right.”

  I kept my gun at the ready, wishing I’d inserted my infra-red lenses into my eyes that morning. After a minute I couldn’t hear Chajinka any more, which meant when I finally heard footsteps I was going to have to hold my fire until I could tell whether it was the Dabih or the Snark.