Old Hunters on the New Wild

by Brian S. Wheeler

  Chapter 12 – Inheritance Lost…

  Wyatt slept through the remainder of that afternoon following his unexpected discovery of children within the mudder camp. He finally succumbed to that exhaustion that years ago settled within his joints, and he found much pleasure in his rest. His aged body didn’t stir upon his cot, and the faces of children filled his dreams.

  He woke to the sound of mudders singing their celebratory song as they returned from the savanna. Wyatt smiled. Though he knew his discovery of the clone offspring would have repercussion for that camp of mudders, consequences Wyatt feared might be severe, the old hunter felt delighted to hear that song and know that the day produced a new hunter, that someone accepted the killing role after Wyatt’s injuries kept him from the hunt. The mudders would no doubt feast that night. Wyatt would give the clones their celebration. There would be time enough to report what he had found to the geneticists, but for tonight he would let those clones dance. He would do nothing to impede the clone celebration for new hunters the mudders seemed to have less and less occasion to enjoy.

  Did his son find the conviction to fire his weapon? The thought made Wyatt proud. Perhaps some other man or woman in the expedition found the courage as well. Perhaps several hunters were born upon the same day.

  After their celebration, something would need to be done concerning those clone children. Could the geneticists have made some kind of mistake in their recipes and formulas that allowed the mudders to reproduce? Wyatt believed some error must be responsible. He couldn’t think of any reason the geneticists might hold to grant the mudders the ability to multiply. Perhaps that community of mudders who sang with such joy as they returned from the field would have to be destroyed. That would be a harsh course of action, but Wyatt feared that procreating clones jeopardized humanity in too many ways. Perhaps that was why he hesitated to report his discovery through his radio transmitter. What harm would there be if Wyatt allowed those clones to celebrate a good day? Someone else succeeded in pulling the trigger, and Wyatt would give himself the time to enjoy the release of responsibility that lifted from his shoulders.

  Wyatt left his tent and stood at the front of that pack of clones that waited for the singing mudders to step into the camp. The unease first struck Wyatt when he realized that the mudders carried no palanquins. He hoped that success upon the savanna made those hunters too proud to ride upon cushions after taking their veld trophies, but Wyatt found it difficult to believe that any of the other hunters, with the exception of his son, would suddenly find the stamina to march so many miles back to camp. Those old senses of his, those senses sharpened in a time when man killed living creatures so easily, tingled another warning to him. He hadn’t yet spotted the danger. He couldn’t yet name the jeopardy. But he knew the voices of those singing mudders concealed a kind of peril. The air felt tense enough to splinter.

  He saw how the clones carried the hunters’ rail-rifles as they marched into camp. Could those hunters, could Cayden, have asked those clones to carry the weight of their weapons out of the savanna? Wyatt would never have relinquished his rifle, certainly not following a successful hunt. Was there really need for the danger to scream in his mind? Could the hunters not have merely asked the clones to carry those weapons home so that they might more easily celebrate their day of killing?

  Wyatt counted the carcasses the mudders carried over their backs and was amazed at the bounty taken that day from the grass. The mudders hauled several genolope into the camp. They carried packs filled with Ribose rabbits. And Wyatt gaped at the long corpse of a splicer-lynx taken as the day’s largest trophy, and that father hoped that his son might’ve been the hunter who took such an impressive kill. He would envy Cayden if his boy’s first pull of the trigger fell such a predator. Wyatt dreamed of fashioning a tooth of that lynx into a necklace that Cayden could forever wear upon his chest, to show the timid remains of man that he could kill on the savanna as did his father. Wyatt dreamed of how a snarling head of a splicer-lynx might look when mounted in their home.

  His absence from the savanna must’ve allowed those tourists to become hunters. They were not able to depend upon Wyatt Holmes to fire a weapon, and so they finally accepted their killing duty. The mudders would eat well. Wyatt realized that the mudder children would eat well. He was unsure of what would become of the world. He was unsure if clones could ever be trusted to care for their young, if they would understand the responsibility to shelter and feed their offspring. He didn’t know if the clones would even tattoo rings of numbers and hashes around their children’s eyes, or if boys and girls born of mudders even needed such branding. Could those children still be called clones if they were born of the womb instead of the test tube?

  Wyatt decided he would think of those perplexities on another day. The night would be for celebration. The night would belong to the new hunters. He might not be able to digest what was taken from the new wild, but Wyatt could find pleasure in the melody of the mudders’ songs.

  And then Wyatt Holmes spotted what became of the palanquins, and the sight froze that seasoned hunter with fear.

  The mudders had reassembled the palanquin frames and cushions into gurneys, and each of these were carried by a pair of mudders that marched at the rear of the returning party. His imagination raced in an effort to comfort his swelling unease, but Wyatt’s mind couldn’t deny that he recognized the shape of heads and of shoulders, of chests and limbs, beneath the curtains wrapped around those shrouded bodies.

  Instinct stretched Wyatt’s hand toward the curtains of one such gurney.

  “You do not need to look, Mother-son. You already know what you will find.”

  Wyatt couldn’t look into Jarvis’ face. He suddenly lacked the courage to read that guide’s features. Suddenly, he no longer felt that he deserved the right to peer into that clone’s heart.

  “It cannot be him.”

  “It is, Mother-son.”

  Wyatt choked for enough breathe to speak as his heart fractured. “What happened to him? Was it the splicer-lynx?”

  Jarvis shook his head. “The cats didn’t fall upon him.”

  “Did he at least pull the trigger?”

  “He failed.”

  “Tell me what killed him then, Jarvis. I’m his father. I need to know.”

  “The details do not matter.”

  “They matter to me,” Wyatt growled. “Can you understand that, Jarvis? Can you understand why I have to know?”

  Jarvis was silent for several heartbeats before he nodded. “I understand, Mother-son. Pull aside the shroud and see.”

  Wyatt tore away the shroud, and he looked upon Cayden’s dead, pale face. The Spiderstrand continued to eat at his bones and fill his lungs, but he found the strength to stand, resisted the instinct to collapse at Jarvis’ feet. No claw had torn through his boy’s body. A hammer rhino had not trampled Cayden. No genelope antlers had torn through his guts, nor had Cayden fallen amid a frenzied razor boar swarm. A red hole oozed in the center of Cayden’s forehead, a wound too precise, too symmetrical to have been made by either the old or the new wild. It was a wound Wyatt knew well from all his years of war, a hurt he had so often witnessed when he served as a soldier instead of as a hunter.

  “You’re right, Jarvis. Somehow, I knew.” Wyatt realized the world no longer belonged to his kind. “I suspected this would happen the moment I found the children. I found them this afternoon, Jarvis. I found them after I heard them cry.”

  “Then you understand, Mother-son. We now have more mouths to feed. You know then why we can no longer wait for your kind to fire your weapons. You know why we must pull the triggers ourselves if your kind cannot. You know why we must fight now for our right to kill.”

  “Are you truly ready for that battle?”

  “We will perish if we are not.”

  Wyatt’s shoulders slumped. It would be so easy to crumple upon the ground, after he fought the Spiderstrand for so long, after he watched his son’s body return
from the hunt concealed beneath a shroud. Still, Wyatt Holmes stood.

  “Oh, you’re kind will win in the end, Jarvis. I doubt my kind can any longer put up a fight. We’ve wasted our final purpose. My kind can hardly kill any more, and that’s a shame here at the end. We used to be so good at killing when the world belonged to us.”

  “We will bury him as you wish. We will respect your dead as you think best.”

  “Bury them deep, and bury me with them, Jarvis.”

  Jarvis once more hesitated before responding. “You don’t need to leave us, Mother-son. You are a great hunter, with the courage to take what the savanna offers. There will always be a place for you in the grass. Our community would be proud to count you as a brother.”

  Wyatt looked deeply into that mudder’s face. He suspected that those dual rings of numbers and hashes would soon vanish altogether from the faces of the mudders. The need to mark each clone passed, like so much else of Wyatt’s original world.

  “Only I am not your brother,” Wyatt sighed. “The new wild doesn’t belong to me. I’ve outlived the world of my inheritance. I just pray that your kind doesn’t waste the second creation like my kind wasted the first.”

  “Are you sure, Mother-son?”

  “I am. Now grant me a last favor, from one hunter to another.”

  Jarvis raised his weapon. The clone waited for the great Wyatt Holmes to close his eyes, and then the clone pulled the trigger. Wyatt’s death was instant and painless. The clones inherited the world, and when it came time to harvest, those new men and women wouldn’t flinch before their duty.

  And time would tell if the mudders would waste the new world.

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