Jean looked up from the lathe where he was turning a firing pin for one of the double rifles. Levi-Stuer was whistling a tune the young man had never heard before and, as Jean was a collector of tunes, he listened for a moment, memorizing. But it was only a fragment which Levi–Stuer kept repeating.

“Herbert,” he called, “what tune is that?”

“Um? Was I whistling?”

“Yes, but I don’t know the tune.”

The gunsmith looked puzzled. “I don’t know what I was whistling; I wasn’t paying any attention.”

Jean chuckled and whistled the fragment back to him. Herbert laughed. “I haven’t heard that in years. My wife would disown me if she knew I knew it.”

“That good, eh?”

“You bet! Listen.” He sang it in a broken baritone, all about a femme of unlikely appetites and proportions. They laughed together until tears came.

Levi–Stuer leaned weakly against the bench and wiped his face. “If you tell anyone where you learned that one, I’ll not forgive you.”

“Never!”

Herbert had mellowed in the months since Jean first came to him. His life had been unutterably lonely before and Jean had wondered why he chose to make rifles rather than wield them, much as his community needed the weapons. Now he knew, though Levi–Stuer would never admit it. It was written in his red eyes and the way he leaned forward to inspect his work with an eye almost to the metal. Herbert Levi–Stuer, master gunsmith – before Jean’s coming, the only gunsmith – was more than half blind. Jean didn’t mention it, not wanting to shame the older man.

Jean limped over to the desk where they took their lunch, cradling his bastard child. It was a weapon such as that world had never seen, a normal muzzleloader with a long, tapering 10mm barrel and a normal hammer mechanism and trigger, but with a very short second barrel mounted where the fore-stock should have been. This second barrel was calibered to 17mm and fired from a separate hammer and trigger set forward of and below the first. No one else was the least interested in it because it weighed several kilos more than the already heavy muzzleloaders; but then, no one else had had such a pointed reminder that single-shot weapons are not satisfactory for dangerous game.

Jean accepted a mug of chota and set to sanding the stock. He worked on his personal project only when no other task was pressing. Herbert watched for a moment, then chuckled, “Andrax would have liked that weapon. It would have appealed to his way of thinking.”

Jean was curious. “Andrax? You mean Jandrax?”

“Jan Andrax was his name. It was only after he left that people bastardized his name.”

Jean laid his pet aside. “People say that he designed the muzzleloader.”

“That he did, and a fine job, too. In all my studies since I have never seen a simpler design that would be workable with our limited technology. Take that thing of yours. No offense, but the effort you put into it could have produced two normal muzzleloaders.”

“I know. I would like to design a true double rifle like the offworld guns, but every time I try to get one off paper it turns out too heavy.”

“Exactly! Andrax was a genius. We would never have made it without him.” more tomorrow

Jean smiled and said sotto voce, “Not you, ma petite. You I can live without.”

Anger took her color and he wondered what he had ever seen in her. Walking past her, he took down a trihorn antler from the mantle.

“What are you doing,” Anton shouted. “That’s mine.”

“A trophy? These are as common as rocks. What makes this one so special?”

Anton said nothing.

Jean measured the antler against his cane, then tossed the cane into the fire.

“This is the horn that tore out my leg. You’ve said so many times, so it is reported to me. Very well, let the beast who crippled me provide my cane. I say that I own this antler, n’est-ce pas?”

Slowly Anton nodded, looking as if Jean had cut the thing from his body.

Jean turned at the door. “It is fitting that I should have this. A payment of debts. I always pay my debts.

“And others always pay their debts to me.”

***

Perhaps it was the foolishness of youth that impelled Jean to do it, but he didn’t think so. Youth has no monopoly on foolishness. Jean never mentioned the incident to anyone, nor ever again mentioned his “accident”. Within the small community there was no one who didn’t know the story. He carved a bone handle at the base of the antler and never walked with any other cane.

He could have lived on his past work and on sympathy, but that was not his way. He could not say that he did not despair or that he was not bitter. He railed at his weakness, at the fates, and at the untrustworthiness of his friends. Yet he kept his feelings to himself.

Jean would never walk straight again; therefore he could not hunt, for he was in no condition to hunt alone and no one would trust his life to a crippled hunting partner. Not even his father or brothers would have been so foolish. So be it.

The colony was only twenty years removed from an advanced, mechanized civilization, and the colonists were farmers. Yet few native plants would grow on their irrigated farms, and the vast herds were their true livelihood. To be a hunter was to be a man.

To be unable to hunt was to be emasculated.

Putting it so crudely was unfair to a subtle state of affairs, but it was true.

This, too, Jean had to accept, or at least to find a way around. It was for that reason that he took back the antler. A highly symbolic act.

That Anton had allowed Jean to take it without challenging or killing him on the spot was an admission of guilt. Jean could have ruined him with the story, but did not. Yet he walked with the antler cane and speculation followed him. Several times someone asked if Anton had given him the antler, but Jean never answered and no one pressed him. The very question bordered on insult and no one risks a challenge unnecessarily.

Jean went to Levi-Stuer’s smithy, limping along the street in the dry, cold winter sun. The old man admitted him and closed the door against the cold. Levi-Stuer had been born and raised on Bordeaux; judging by his age, Jean felt that he must have been about forty when the Lydia arrived. He had taught himself the art of gunsmithing from the computer’s memory banks, aided, some say, by Jandrax. Jean had never known how much of the Jandrax legend to believe.

Jean leaned the antler against the wall, accepted the mug of chota, and told Levi-Stuer that he was ready to learn his trade. more tomorrow

Chapter 10

The elders find low winter a gloomy time, though Jean could not imagine why. The sky is clear most days and when it is not, the high ice crystals which pass for clouds make beautiful patterns. Of course, there is no vegetation but there is never vegetation except during the melt or where there is liquid water – along the river, surrounding the lake, and, of course, in the irrigated fields. When high winter arrives and the snow comes, the elders seem better contented, saying that the snow covers the barrenness of soil and rock. Jean simply could not imagine what it might be like to live where vegetation was a year–round thing. He loved the melt as well as the next person, but he also treasured a return to the lean cleanness and the simplicity of rock and soil.

The streets were compacted earth again, now that the mud had gone. Jean leaned on his cane and started out again after resting against the side of a building. He was still very weak and his leg never stopped hurting. For a week he had been exercising near his father’s house and this was the first journey of any length he had tried. Across the settlement to the house that Anton and Chloe were occupying.

He knocked on the door and waited, his breath freezing in a circle against the rough wood. That was the curse of low winter; every breath sucked a man dry and he must drink water by the gallon. Chloe opened the door and stepped back in horror.

“Good day, Chloe,” he said.

From within the house all sounds ceased as Anton, unseen, froze at whatever he was doing. After a moment Jean heard his footsteps approaching and greeted him as he entered the room.

Anton’s reply was half-hearted at best. Jean tried to interpret the look in his eyes. Hatred? Fear? Mere uneasiness? It was more than Jean could manage.

“It is good to see you up and around,” Anton said.

Jean ignored him and turned to Chloe. “You didn’t come to see me during my convalescence.”

She opened her mouth; closed it. Then she turned angrily and went to sit by the fire. Anton replied for her, “She has been busy. It’s not easy to start a household.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Now Anton was really angry, but holding it back.

Jean had him at a disadvantage for he made no accusations. He did not ask Anton what had happened – why he had not fired. Anton wanted Jean to ask so that he could defend himself against the unspoken accusation; or, better still, for Jean to deny Anton’s story so that Anton could attack. Jean said nothing except, “You have something of mine.”

Chloe stiffened.

“I have nothing that is yours,” Anton replied.

“Yes, you have something that is mine by right of pain and I have come to take it.”

Chloe stared her amazement. Jean was crippled, but he carried his blade. He smiled and said sotto voce, “Not you, ma petite. You I can live without.” more tomorrow

Jean woke. It was a sudden thing; after weeks of madness, the fever broke in the night and he woke with his full faculties, but weak, incredibly weak. He was in his own bed in his parents’ house. The quilt which lay over him was the one his mother had sewn of krathide the year she died. Jean had slept under it for nearly a decade.

Outside the ground was bare and brown. The shutters were closed tight but he could see through a crack. Another crack near the ceiling let a ray of light fall across his hands. They were fearfully thin. The ground outside told him that the melt had passed and the single shutter told that full winter had not yet come. Later, double shutters would be hung with dry leaves as insulation between them. At least a month had passed, but not more than two.

Jean remembered everything up to the moment he was hurled to the ground. He wanted to see his leg, but it took a long time to get the energy to throw back the quilt. When he did, he found his leg was wrapped in bandages and he got a look at his body. White; skeleton thin. The bandages were not bloody, and Jean was determined to see what lay beneath them. He nearly passed out from the effort of removing them; then he wished that he had.

The scars were massive, ridged, and ugly. That he could live with. But the bone had been broken and Jean could see that it had not set properly.

He moaned when he passed out, and his sister found him uncovered and unbandaged when she came rushing in.

A week later broth and renewed appetite had restored some of his strength. He found that much had happened during his unconsciousness. He had lain at the edge of death from infection and that was why, despite Doctor Marcuse’s undeniable skill, his leg had healed crookedly. It was a wonder that it had healed at all.

And Anton had married Chloe.

Looking back and pondering – there was certainly time enough for that now – it all made sense. Chloe had never been what Jean would have termed faithful. That she had been seeing Anton at the same time she was seeing him was no great surprise – in retrospect. It also explained Anton’s late-blooming hatred.

Why had he not fired?

Jean had to have the story, but he had to get it carefully. If it were an obvious lie, he had to consider whether or not to refute it. What could Jean accuse him of – attempted murder? Or failure under pressure, which carried as stiff a penalty and greater shame. Would such an accusation be fair?

Furthermore, Jean had to consider whether or not he wanted to make an enemy who might call him out to fight. Once that would not have bothered him, but now . . . .

Anton’s story, as Jean got it from Claude Delacroix, was that he had fired as the trihorn passed – that is, he had pulled the trigger but the primer failed. He then recocked the rifle and took new aim, but held his fire rather than hit his partner. When the trihorn tossed Jean away, Anton killed it.

The story could have been the truth. Or it could have been a lie, and no one but Anton would ever know. Primers do fail, though rarely.

Jean could make no accusation. more tomorrow

The supply of meat grew until longnecks and krats were constantly scaling the walls in vain attempts at theft. Claude Delacroix assigned more men each day to the task of guarding the enclosure. By the third week, eight men were standing guard while the rest worked, one hunter to one butcher. The work of butchering a trihorn alone had to be experienced to be believed. Still the hunter had to stand guard, so the butchers simply gritted their teeth and continued, knowing that the hunter who stood guard would be down there butchering the next beast when turnabout came.

On the seventeenth day, Jean and Anton were assigned to hunt together. Anton accepted the rifle, a muzzleloader, and they went over the wall with first light.

The ground was littered with freshly picked bones where the krats had cleaned up after the hunters. The herds had thinned considerably and the bushes were torn and tattered. The pair went straight downriver for nearly a kilometer without spotting game. Finally Anton decided to drop down and try along the river.

Jean had his bow out, arrow nocked, when they came upon a trihorn – an old bull without a mate. There is no meaner animal than a trihorn in full rut and unable to find a female. He heard them, turned and charged.

Anton threw up his rifle but didn’t fire – wisely, for only the one load stood between them and death. He sidestepped right as Jean sidestepped left and then Jean released his arrow.

It was a deliberate act, an act of faith such as men who hunt dangerous game together must make. The arrow could not stop the trihorn; it could only divert its charge toward Jean.

The trihorn charged past Anton, presenting a perfect broadside target. A perfect setup. Anton swung the rifle.

He did not fire.

Jean was poised; he was so certain of the flash and the report that his mind heard what his ears did not. The trihorn did not falter; it did not fall to its knees, heart shot. Jean was momentarily paralyzed by his expectations and when he hurled himself aside, it was too late.

The upper point caught him in the left thigh and pierced to the bone. He felt the shock; heard the grating of horn on bone; felt himself lifted. Jean looked down on the earth as a bird looks, from above, saw the back of the trihorn, saw Anton’s white face, saw the ground rush up.

***

There was talk of amputation and Jean screamed. Then he felt pain such as he had never known and he lost consciousness knowing that his leg was gone.

Somewhere in Jean’s crazed world of pain, he found the will to move his hands. He found a great mound of bandages but there was still a leg beneath it and he let a calmer unconsciousness take him.

The delirium lasted for weeks, first from pain, then from infection. Certain bacteria are highly resistant to antibiotics, and one such lives in the trihorn dung which coats the ground in the time of the melt. All this Jean knew from later report; he remembered nothing except pain and fear. more tomorrow