by Robert Adams
Twelve-year-old Bahb’s acceptance of the situation was beamed clearly, but the younger boy, Djoh, asked silently, “But sister, there are so many of them and they are all so big and strong. What if we cannot get away?”
“Then you must go to Wind, little brother,” Stehfahnah replied. “You must get or make a weapon and force them to slay you . . . but, for the honor of our clan, you must try to take at least one of the pigs with you. Be not overhasty, though, in aught you do. Depend upon Bahb’s judgment — he has the mind of a full-grown warrior, for all that he has seen but twelve summers.”
The barge had commenced to move forward, the heavy oars rising and falling rhythmically to the resounding strokes of a mallet on a hollow board. Stehfahnah took one last, deep gulp of air, then let go her hold and began to swim with the current, angling toward the western bank of the river.
* * *
The bargemen, long familiar with cases of near-drowning, had pumped the water out of Trader Stuart’s body. Then his own men had stripped him of his soaked clothing and carefully bedded him down in his personal wagon. It was not done out of love or even liking for the man, but rather out of respect — respect for him both as a man and as a fighter of some note, not to mention the fact that he paid a decent wage for hard work. Never had he been known to try to cheat an employee out of monies due him.
Senior Wagoner DonnHwyt dropped heavily to the upper deck from the tailgate of the wagon. The aging but stocky and still powerful man was the nearest thing to a true physician that the caravan had. He was paid an extra amount for doctoring horses and oxen, but he practiced on the men as well whenever there was need. Now his thin lips were drawn even thinner into a grim line.
Three men awaited him — the two junior traders who had chanced to be on the lead barge, Hwahruhn and Custuh, plus Stuart’s bodyservant-cum-sometime-bodyguard, “Clubber” Fred Doakes.
Custuh, almost qualified to be a senior trader himself, was the first to speak. “Well, man,” he lisped through the gap left when the nomad boy had smashed out his front teeth with the pommel of a saber, “will he live or not? If he will, ith he tho badly hurt he won’t be able to command nekth yearth venture?”
Old Don shrugged, his broad shoulders rising and falling, his big, callused hands spread wide, palms facing outward. “Lordy, Misruh Custuh, I ain’t no real doctor. And it’d tek one to tell yawl awl thet. Mistuh Stuart’s left shoulder is broke, bad broke — thet oar done as much damage as a iron mace, and even if some surgeon don’t tek the arm off, he won’t never use ’er much agin.
“And the outside tendon a-hint his right knee’s done been sliced clean in two, but thet ain’t awl. His bag was damn near tore loose from his pore body by the there damn lil bitch. It’s a pow’ful good thang he done a’ready got him a son ’r two, ’cause I ’spect he ain’t never gonna git him no more younguns of no kind awn no woman . . . if he does live, thet is.”
“The real question is,” commented Hwahruhn, scratching at the scalp beneath his silver-shot black hair, “dare we — any of us — go back on the plains next year, since the gal’s gotten free? If you’ll all recall, I was against the whole dirty business from the outset — the treachery, the killing, the kidnappings, not to mention the way that gal was abused during these last few weeks. If she gets back to her clan . . .”
Custuh snorted derisively. “Bert, you maunder like an old woman, you do! ‘If the gal gits back to her clan,’ indeed! Did you ever hear tell of anybody swimming this here river with all their clothes on? Huh? And too, while all the rest of you were set at getting ol’ Stuart out’n the water, I had a pair of darts ready and was watching to see her haid come back up . . . and it never did, so she probly drownded.”
But Hwahruhn shook his head, unease in his voice and worry in his dark-brown eyes. “What you aver is just possible, true, but these nomads are tough, wiry, resourceful people. They’re survivors, Liasee. If the child you all insisted upon wronging gets out of the river alive . . . God help us all!”
* * *
Stehfahnah had not intended to come out of the river in close proximity to the trader town, but she certainly would have preferred to get out of the cold, swirling water much sooner than was the case. When at last she was able to drag herself up an inclined and muddy bank on the western side of the broad waters, she could but lie for a long while on the brush-grown verge, her muscles jerking and twitching with the fatigue of her efforts.
At length, as hunger began to nibble at her belly, she sat up and commenced — as she had been taught — to think out her situation, to take stock of her possessions and gauge their potential usefulness for accomplishing her purpose.
She knew that she was far, far east of the last place her clan had been encamped. She and her brothers, one of dozens of farming hunting parties, had been a good two days’ ride from camp when they had been taken, and the wagon train had lumbered on for nearly three weeks after. Therefore, she estimated that a span of not less than three days’ ride west would bring her near the tents and yurts of her people . . . but she had no idea just how far south the river might have borne her this day. Also, she had no horse or any hope of easily acquiring one, unless she should chance across one of the increasingly rare wild herds and could mindspeak the king stallion into allowing one of his sons or daughters to accompany her on her quest. She knew better than to approach any of the scattering of dirtman settlements; such would only mean slavery or worse.
She sighed, then spoke aloud to herself. “So I must walk. Sun be praised that the wolves are well fed this time of year.”
But if she must plan upon making a journey of such length solely on foot, it might well take a month or more. Winter storms had been known to come very early, and if she was to survive alone, dismounted and friendless upon the open plains, she must have many things she now lacked — more and heavier clothing, more effective weapons than one large and one small knife, some kind of food that could be packed without quickly spoiling, a container for water, a means of making fire.
The last necessity was fulfilled almost at once. When she got around to closely examining the weapon she had torn from the trader’s belt, she found not only a knife, but a number of smaller enclosures within the leathern sheath. A hone stone occupied one pocket, another held a flint and a steel for fire-making, and two smaller ones contained a tiny steel eating skewer and food-knife plus a small silver spoon.
The belt knife itself was a heavy, handsome, formidable weapon — a full foot of thick, broad blade, honed to razor keenness along all of one edge and the first third of the other. Below the polished steel ball pommel, the wooden hilt had been well covered with black leather and wound with many yards of silver wire, and the number of deep nicks in the blade side of the shiny brass guard showed that the weapon was not simply a gaudy showpiece.
Knowingly, Stehfahnah weighed and balanced the knife, finding its weight properly distributed to render it an effective missile. A design had been etched onto both sides of the blade, and Stehfahnah grunted satisfaction when she closely studied these. She had had little experience at the arts of reading and writing — not many of her people had, for few books had survived six hundred years of chaos, and neither of these two talents were necessary for survival on the prairies, high plains and mountains wherein Horseclansfolk dwelt — but she could write her own name and that of her clan, so she easily recognized that the letter S was the central motif of the designs and at once felt that Wind had intended this fine, deadly, lovely weapon just for her, Stehfahnah’s, hands.
The boot knife was typical of weapons of its type — a leaf-shaped, double-edged blade of some half-inch width and some four inches in length, guardless and with a plain hilt of deer antler. Stehfahnah found that it fitted securely into the sheath built into her own left boot top.
Her gnawing hunger partially assuaged by a few handfuls of berries and the raw legs of a large frog she was fortunate enough to catch, the Horseclans girl sought and found a willow tree, and her ni
mble fingers had soon produced a quantity of twine from the inner bark. After locating three game trails in the riverside brush, she constructed as many simple snares of whittled twigs and twine nooses, plus a log deadfall where the mark of cervine hooves was plain; if even one of the traps proved effective during the night to come, she would have fresh meat, a skin or hide of some description, bone and possibly sinew or horn with which to fashion other tools and weapons.
By the time she returned to her starting point, the late-afternoon wind had completely dried the shirt and trousers which she had carefully draped over bushes. Dressed, she began to cast about for a safe place to spend the night, finally settling for the spacious crotch of a huge mimosa tree. Cold she knew it would be, but safe from any prowling predators, poisonous snakes or the like. That decided, she cut armfuls of springy pine tips and coarse grass and filled the depressed crotch with them. She debated kindling a fire with which to warm herself before she climbed aloft to sleep, but decided to not do so, for if her former captors were searching along the river for her, smoke or flame might give away her position.
Twice during the long, dark night, she awoke with a start, gasping and trembling and imagining herself still confined within that hateful, wooden-walled wagon, defenseless prey to the lusts of the hateful traders. Throughout all the suffering, the horrors and deep humiliations she had been forced to undergo, Stehfahnah’s fierce pride had sustained her, and she had refused to allow her tormentors the satisfaction of seeing a Horseclanswoman’s tears; but now, alone and high in a riverside tree, she wept, violently, uncontrollably, and at long last she slept again, so deeply that the warming beams of Sacred Sun on her face finally wakened her to the first morning of her new-won freedom.
Two of the snares still gaped empty, but the third had caught her a fine, fat rabbit. With practiced ease, she broke the neck of the struggling animal and went on with the furry carcass slung from a loop of the twine.
“Wind be praised!” she breathed fervently at the site of her painfully constructed deadfall, for beneath the heavy log lay a buck, so recently dead that the carcass still was warm. True, he was much smaller than most varieties of plains bucks, but his dearth of meat and smallness of hide was fully compensated for in the girl’s mind by the pair of slender, needle-tipped and almost straight horns standing a good two feet up from his head.
Good fortune remained with her. Two days later, now armed with a brace of horn-tipped spears and a hand-carved spear thrower, she slew a large white-tailed doe. With the sinews of her two largest kills and the knife-shaped trunk of a redbark bow-wood tree, the wood roughly cured over the heat of her carefully shielded cooking fire, she began to fashion a bow. Arrows were whittled down from lengths of birch, fletched with owl feathers and tipped with fire-hardened bone shards. Birch bark and strips of partially seasoned deerhide were fashioned into a combination bowcase and quiver.
She also began the involved process of converting the doe’s second stomach into a water bag for her journey. She felt pressed for time, being fully aware from a lifetime on the plains that she still was highly vulnerable to the elements and that the first freezing storm of winter could swoop down upon her with amazing suddenness.
Stehfahnah’s first warning that she was not still alone in the riverside woods was the smell of smoke. She had been ranging farther and farther afield since she had finished her makeshift bow. Armed with it and her balanced pair of spears, she was seeking feral cattle or the large, curved-horned bucks for the thicker, better-quality hides they grew, knowing that her thin, flimsy riding boots would need heavy reinforcement soon.
Then she found an otter in a steel trap. The sinuous shiny-brown creature’s frantic struggles to free itself had only broken the flesh of its pinioned leg, the remorseless bite of the metal jaws cutting the flesh to the bone. The beady eyes were full of pain and terror, and the whiskered lips writhed back to bare the white teeth.
The fine, large, water-resistant pelt would have been a most welcome addition to Stehfahnah’s growing hoard, but her recent ordeal bred within her a kindred feeling with the trapped and suffering animal. Recalling that some animals, predators in particular, could often be reached by mindspeak, she made the effort.
She had mindspoken horses and a few of the prairiecats — the huge, long-fanged felines which had for hundreds of years lived among and made common cause with the Horseclans-folk — but she found the water dweller’s mind significantly different from the other two animal sentiences. Silently, she offered to free the trapped creature if, in return, it would agree not to bite her.
The otter mind was a roiling maelstrom of agony and terror and bloodlust. “Hurt . . . kill . . . kill . . . kill!”
Broadbeaming a message of soothing, Stehfahnah repeated her offer. “Furry brother, if you will not bite me, I will free you from the hurting thing.” After a number of repetitions, when she had almost despaired of reaching the pain-mad beast and was upon the point of ending its suffering with a well-placed shaft from her bow, the otter abruptly ceased to struggle against the trap, although its muscles still jerked involuntarily with the pain.
“Stop hurt thing?” he queried. “Not bite if stop hurt.”
Laying down her spears and throwing stick, unshouldering her bowcase-quiver, Stehfahnah approached the otter, wondering if he really understood her. With some trepidation, she knelt near the trap, which was chained to a deep-driven wooden stake. The otter was big — almost four feet long — and could seriously hurt her before she could draw a knife and kill him if he had misunderstood the tenuous mental messages.
Nonetheless, she gripped the blood-slimy jaws of the trap and tried to pull them open, but the leverage was not right and her fingers kept slipping from the smooth, wet metal. Her well-intentioned efforts were only hurting the otter more, and his snarls were not reassuring to her.
Reaching behind her, she drew one of the spears closer. Drawing out her big knife, she worked the blade in near one hinge of the biting steel jaws, then gingerly twisted the knife. Haltingly, the trap opened a fraction of an inch, then a Smidgen more. When it was open to the extent of over two fingers’ width, she mindspoke again.
“Now, furry one, pull out your leg, quickly!”
Scurrying as rapidly as three legs would carry him, the otter disappeared into the brush in the direction of the nearby river. Stehfahnah, unable to either pull up the stake or break the chain, finally squatted over the trap and urinated on the device, knowing that the strong odor of human urine would warn animals away from the hellish instrument.
Within the next several hours, she chanced across half a dozen identical traps. Each one of them was empty, and she used a spearbutt to spring them all, also disturbing the ground about them, spitting to be certain of leaving twolegs scent. Such was her preoccupation with the traps that her day’s hunt proved fruitless and she trudged back to her campsite that afternoon empty-handed.
She had just lit her squaw-wood tinder and laid a virtually smokeless fire in the little hollow and had lowered a quarter of venison she had hung high on an oak branch preparatory to slicing off enough meat for her dinner when she suddenly realized that she no longer was alone within the brushy-banked hollow.
She let go of the deer meat and whirled, crouching, her big knife held low, ready to stab or slash or throw. But then her blue-green eyes widened in stunned disbelief.
On the river side of the fire pit were no less than three otters. The largest she recognized as the big male she had earlier freed from the steel trap; the other two were significantly smaller, although obviously adult animals. Before the trio, in the weeds, lay a big catfish, still flopping and feebly gasping.
Sheathing her knife, Stehfahnah mindspoke, “Welcome, furry ones. Will you share this meat with me?”
The larger mustelid had sunk into a crouch, taking his weight off the three legs now, perforce, doing the work of four. It was he who answered, although Stehfahnah could feel the attentiveness of the two smaller beasts.
&
nbsp; “Why female twolegs stop hurt thing and let this one go free, why not kill like kill other furry ones and take hides? Why hunt out and kill other hurt things of male twolegs?”
Stehfahnah herself was not really sure just why she had passed up the opportunity — Sun-sent — to add the otter’s fine pelt to her racks of seasoning skins, or why she had then wasted all of one precious afternoon in disarming the line of traps rather than preparing for the grueling journey which lay ahead and which must soon commence if she was to live to see its end.
She replied, “This twolegs hunts for food as well as for hides. She tries’ to kill quickly and not hurt. Also, you furry ones remind her of others, furry cats, with whom she grew up. This twolegs would be your friend, would share her meat with you. If you will allow her to do so, she has certain herbs she can apply to your leg to stop the hurting for a while and help the flesh to heal quicker.”
The larger, male otter, it developed, thought of himself as Mighty-and-Invincible-Killer-of-Much-Meat-in-Water, a sobriquet he had assumed after, sometime in the past, having attacked and torn the throat out of a swimming deer, then guided the carcass to the bank. After he and the two female otters had gorged on raw deer meat and Stehfahnah had avidly devoured the tender fillets of the fish, he sat motionless, snarling only sporadically while she cleaned his lacerated hind leg, plastered it thickly with a mixture of herbs and deer fat, then bound it with a strip of cloth torn from her only shirt, warning him to refrain from chewing off the cloth for at least three days.
The smaller of the two females was somewhat shy and “spoke” but little. The other, however, “chatted” on at some length throughout the meal and while the girl tended the hurt male.
Mother-of-Many-Many had once borne and successfully reared no less than six kits in the same litter, though her present litter numbered only three. Fast-Swimmer also had a litter of three kits, and the two females were sharing the single den, as well as hunting responsibilities for and protection of the six kits. The male, for all that he also used the same enlarged muskrat burrow, hunted only for himself, and, from the various “conversations,” Stehfahnah was never sure if he had fathered both or either of the litters. Otters, apparently, had never developed the close familial ties of the prairiecats or of the nomads’ breed of horses.
