Primal Estate: The Candidate Species

by Samuel Franklin

  The body of the coyote rose into the air above the portion of branches that were directly in front of her face at the top of the ledge. The lioness instantly knew she’d been seen. Coyote flying, twisting to escape. Too far to catch. Injured jackrabbit just below…flashed in her mind as she simultaneously entered the downwind scent cone that just then had managed to crawl up and around the ledge on the light breeze…Human! Fear struck her soul as she realized that the cunning of the human had brought her in closer than ever before. Her whiskers froze, and adrenaline flooded her brain as she silently whirled away from the top of the ledge and jumped from boulder to boulder in a panicked effort to reach distance and concealment at once. She forgot completely about her hunger and wanted only to become again the ghost that was her kind, always unseen, always unapproachable.

  Two airborne predators were bounding away from the human who hadn’t even known they were there. Never in the history of the Southwest had so many top predators been so close, so hopeful, so fooled, so surprised, so panicked, and so disappointed all within the space of a few leaps and a few seconds.

  “What the hell…” Rick muttered, unable to control the announcement. He hadn’t moved, sniffed, snorted, anything. The breeze was still in his face and he was in full camouflage sitting in the black shade of this tree under the full solar glare of the open desert. How the hell did that coyote see me?! He scanned the distance, then called a little more hoping to bring the coyote back.

  Finally, curiosity overwhelmed him and he decided he’d rather figure this out than continue hunting. He slowly emerged from his hide and crept in the direction of the coyote’s last position. As he moved slowly, he thought quickly and discounted the possibility that he had been seen, smelled, or heard. It must have been something else. Everything happens for a reason, and out here in the desert, unless that reason flew in and flew out, Rick would find evidence of it on the earth. Tracking was one thing he was very good at.

  Rick soon located the spot where the coyote had executed its aerial half gainer with a running re-entry. He chose to follow the incoming tracks rather than the outbound as this would give him insight into the behavior and methods of the approaching animal. He already knew its motivation and method for the outbound tracks: fear and speed.

  Rick turned around to look back at the place where he’d hidden. It was a great spot. The underside of the tree was pitch black in the brilliant glare of the late morning sun. There was just no way! Something else had spooked the coyote. He backtracked the inbound coyote prints for about 25 yards and then broke off to the left with the intent of conducting a 360 around his position to see if anything else had been in the area. It didn’t take him long before he found them.

  The mountain lion tracks were large compared to the coyote, with the telltale spread pads of a feline instead of the two aligned front toes and visible nails of the canine. Rick looked back toward his hide. They were headed slightly to the right of that spot. “All we need to do now is see how close she got,” he muttered under his breath. He always thought of cats in the feminine. It just seemed right.

  Rick followed the tracks through brush and around boulders as they weaved their way through the terrain. It was remarkable how the path maintained concealment, almost as if the cat didn’t want to be able to see anything. That makes total sense, thought Rick. One of the general rules of a gunfight is that if you can shoot them, they can shoot you. To be seen is to be exposed to a threat. To be seen is to be naked before the enemy. To be unseen, you must not be able to see. To be invisible you must be blind yourself.

  The tracks passed his former position, proceeded up the boulder-strewn slope, and curled around to the top of the ledge. Sly old girl, Rick mused. They disappeared on the ledge, just above his hide position, on the exposed rock. Rick turned and looked northwest, downwind, lifted binos to his eyes and glassed the area in the hope of seeing her. Silly, he thought of himself. She is long gone. He walked to the edge of the ledge and looked down at the spot where he’d hidden, then out to the spot where the coyote had made its abrupt retreat, and shook his head. The only thing that saved him was that the cat was surprised by the smell of a human. His being tucked into the tree didn’t hurt either. Rick wondered, how can an animal such as man, concealed, with advanced weaponry, optics, planning and intelligence be nearly caught by the very animal he was trying to hunt? How can the apparently superior be beaten at a game of his own making by the inferior? Rick knew the answer. Out here, despite all my advantages, she was not inferior. “But she didn’t get me, did she? I’ll remember this one,” he said aloud.

  Not having many opportunities to track fresh lion spoor, Rick looked for prints all around the cat’s presumed escape route. He found nothing. These cats are thought of as ghosts, he reminded himself. No wonder. She must have made her hasty departure over rocks. It was as if she had disappeared, leaving no trace. What’s the spoor left by a ghost? Rick questioned. He’d found his answer listening to the dead quite of the advancing morning. It was silence.

  Rick looked at his watch. There were procedures for recovering the track, but they were time consuming and time was up. He didn’t want to leave Carson alone any longer. People hunting alone for big or dangerous game was a relatively modern phenomenon, made possible by advanced weapons. Not all the animals necessarily got that memo.

  Rick turned in the direction of his truck, up on top of the mesa a couple kilometers away, and started walking. “Three hunters walk into a bar,” he spoke aloud in a conversational voice, “a mountain lion, a coyote and a human. The human is looking for a coyote, the coyote is looking for a rabbit, and the lion is looking for…” Rick couldn’t think of that part of his new joke composition, so he skipped it and continued, “So the bartender asks the human, ‘What’s your poison?’ The lion looks at the coyote and says…” Rick realized his joke wasn’t taking him anywhere. He’d had his little adventure today and was getting curious about what Carson had been up to. He had a little over an hour to get back to the Jeep, then to pick up Carson. He lengthened his stride, still making sure to step on either sand or rock. No sticks allowed. The entire distance he kept the M4 in his shoulder, thumb on the selector, ready to shoot should he encounter a target. Nevertheless, in his mind the hunting day was over, and he needed to get his head in gear for his real life back in the world.

  The dark green SUV crept down the mesa-top trail. It made its way unseen from the canyon below as the lonely road was closely trimmed by scrub pinions and cedar. Ahead of it was Rick Thompson’s Jeep. The SUV approached slowly from a distance down the thin dirt trail and then stopped while still one hundred meters away, but within view of the Jeep. It remained there for a minute or two and then backed out, as there was no place to turn around. The one lane trail made it difficult for the driver to back up easily, and the pine trees crowding each side of the vehicle periodically scraped down the side of the new paint. After about fifty meters, the single lane opened up, and the SUV turned around, making haste to leave the area. The driver had seen what he was looking for. No need to hang around.

  Rick reached the top of the mesa, a considerable distance from his Jeep. As was his habit he never doubled back over the path he’d previously taken. His reason could have been for all kinds of stealthy, high-speed, low-drag tactics. But it wasn’t. He simply found that if he went a different way every time, he’d learn more about an area, see new things, and make occasional interesting discoveries. His path back had led him to a particularly difficult area of climbing up that cliff on the top edge of the mesa and he’d been forced to divert in the opposite direction from his vehicle.

  Once he reached the mesa top, for a considerable distance he had to walk down the road he’d driven in on. He noticed another vehicle had come in while he was away as some tire tracks were covering his own. They’d come in then left, it appeared. He wondered if whoever it was had messed with his Jeep, until he came across the spot where the vehicle had made a three point turn after backing up a distance.
Since they’d backed up, they must not have gone all the way to where he parked, as it was open enough there for them to turn around. Maybe another hunter looking for an unoccupied spot saw that he was there, backed up, and left?

  Rick crouched and examined the tracks. They had a design that reminded him of a reptile, an alligator to be exact. He tried to take a mental picture of the pattern of knobs on the tread. Had he been seriously tracking someone he would have drawn a quick sketch of it, scraping it on his arm with a stick to make a picture with welts if necessary. But today was not that day. Rick named the pattern something that would describe it, as his training had taught him. “Gator” seemed appropriate. He looked away and visualized “Gator”, then looked back at it again. “Gator” was now his for as long as he cared to remember it.

  Rick continued further toward his Jeep, retrieving his keys from under the rock only after scanning a quick 360 to see if anyone was around who might be watching him. He smiled to himself as he approached his vehicle. So much great training, courtesy the American taxpayer. Had they gotten their money’s worth? Rick didn’t think so.

  As he pulled the Jeep away from his little hunting adventure, the lioness in the canyon below listened to the distant engine noise. She looked up at the mesa top and the image and smell of a vehicle invaded her thoughts. She’d seen them a few times before and didn’t like them. Sometimes dogs came out of them. This was very bad. After today, she would have an even closer association than she had before between vehicle sounds and humans in her territory. A controlled rage at her previous lapse in vigilance arose in her that magnified her hunger. Energy overtook her as her ears and eyes and nose soaked in the desert, and all the things living in it. She turned and moved slowly, calmly, and carefully away.

  Rick pulled up to the location where he’d left Carson, which he had memorized by a unique cedar broken and bent over. He’d nicknamed it “arm bar” so he’d remember it. He pulled to the side of the single lane, got out, and located the boy’s prints in the dirt. Five minutes later Rick walked up to his position. Carson was wedged into a crevasse in a ledge and was making a reasonably good effort at making squeaks on his call. He heard his dad coming, knowing he was making noise on purpose to announce his arrival.

  Carson looked in the direction of the approaching sound and sighed in relief. He’d just woken from sleeping for a good three hours. He’d been more fatigued than he’d thought. Like most boys his age, he couldn’t always get a good night sleep and last night hadn’t been any different. It took him a good twenty, thirty minutes to get fully awake, and he was surprised how soundly he could sleep in the sand. The rising sun had kept him warmer as the day progressed, even as his body cooled with deeper sleep. It felt just perfect. He had dreamed the most fantastic things but couldn’t quite remember them. When he looked at his watch to see the hours he’d missed, he crawled between two rocks, got out his call, blew a couple squeaks, and heard his father coming.

  Rick sat near him and smiled, saying nothing.

  “Any luck?” Carson asked.

  “Nope. You?”

  “No, but I enjoyed it,” Carson replied, feeling better rested than he could remember.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  They got up and started walking back to the Jeep. Rick looked at him and said, “A lion almost got me, so I guess I did have some luck.” Carson looked at him as if to scream, Tell me! Rick related the adventure on the way home.

  Chapter 4

  On the Provenger ship,

  RecentlY returned to the solar sYstem

  Over the years, his anxiety and excitement regarding his fights with these beasts had faded into apathy and calm. He didn’t really care about winning anymore. His record was about even; he’d won as much as he’d lost, consistently through the last ten years. But whereas in his early years he exerted a full effort, he now only went through the motions. What the Provenger didn’t know was that in the last few years he’d purposely thrown half of his fights. He could beat them now, always, but he didn’t want them to know it. As he had learned to move with their speed, anticipate their actions, watch their eyes, and see their center, he’d begun to taper off his efforts. He had become so adept at reading them that when the fights became a grapple, he could even get cues from their scent.

  He’d made a study of how to beat them, and when he’d learned all he could from victory, he’d made a study of how to lose to them. Learning the markers of their emerging confidence and arrogance, he gained knowledge of when and where they would let down their guard. He’d learned what they would do in a moment of confidence, the traps they would set, and he would deliver himself to them, for fun, to see what they would do. Yootu could even manipulate their reactions after achieving a victory.

  He realized all this gave him even more insight into who they were. He obtained a sense of the engineering of their minds. They seemed to him as machines made of flesh, complex yet predictable, passionate yet soulless. Despite their superior technology, size, and strength, he was planning for the day that he doubted would happen, a day that he would need his skills to exact revenge. Yootu feared the day would never come. But if it did, he knew they would never see it approaching. Their hubris would be their downfall.

  Just as they knew nothing of his physical abilities, he also wisely hid from them his true intellect. For reasons Yootu didn’t completely understand, he had always been able to speak with strangers in their own tongue very quickly. He could communicate with animals in their own way; he understood them. And when he was abducted, he quickly learned the Provenger language, and he remembered all that he heard. He was, in fact, brilliant.

  Yootu slipped on the level two sparring gauntlets that served as his weapons, securing one on each forearm. As he touched it to his skin, the intelligent fabric almost integrated with his alien flesh, for he was human, and it was made for Provenger.

  The gauntlets were almost exactly like the ones the Provenger wore for real fighting and hunting except for two major differences. They had no embedded technology, and the two long, ridged blades which extended out along the back of each hand were made of moderately hard, but only slightly sharp polymer. They were formulated to break if used to stab, and if used to slash, which was its standard use, to be of minimal effectiveness. It was just enough to let the opponent know they’d been sliced. The level one sparring gauntlet that was normally used for these bouts had soft polymer blades with dye markers on the end. Wherever an opponent was hit, it would leave only a line of pigment.

  Today Layrd, the first Provenger Yootu had ever fought and a particularly powerful opponent, was paying Yootu’s keeper extra for the use of the level two. Yootu knew he could not only beat Layrd, but that he could kill him if he wanted. And he wanted to, for it was Layrd that had brought this curse of bondage upon him many years before. Layrd had taken him from his tribe on Earth during the rebellion and fight that caused the death of Youtu’s father, Romus.

  No, Yootu thought, I will lose again today, and tomorrow and the next. I will make them think that I am getting old and slow. They will see me as tame. I will no longer be dangerous to them. And we will see if I can improve any of my opportunities. I have nothing else to do.

  Standing over six feet tall, hulking, and ripped with lean muscle, in his breechcloth and bare chested, scars replete across his arms and chest from previous battles lost and won, Yootu was an imposing figure. To the Provenger he was a wild man with alien blue eyes, long reddish brown hair and beard. They perceived him as simpleminded, even if he happened to spar especially well. They joked about how he’d never improved, and thought him incapable of learning much. Despite this, he felt dangerous to them because, unlike sparring with each other, they always sensed the anger in him and imagined that quality of a real fight, where the rules of etiquette and technique immediately became irrelevant, and the struggle for life emerged as the only arbiter of success. It infused a thrill to their sparring that they could not get otherwise. And
they paid well for the opportunity.

  Yootu and Layrd assessed each other from across the ring, a large circular pit twelve feet deep, all white, with a highly textured floor and walls to enhance traction while one was covered with sweat, blood, or vomit. Toward the center of the ring were six graduated columns in a circle, wide enough at the top to be mounted by a single fighter and only so far apart that he would be within reach of the fighter on the adjacent columns. Yootu had learned long ago that taking the fight to the top of the columns rarely, if ever, provided a fighter with any advantage. The tops were merely pedestals that allowed the prideful to display themselves to onlookers. The best place to fight was on a surface that offered itself any time the foot sought its security and aided in a variety of stances.