Working carefully in the uncertain moonlight, he reloaded the lower barrel, thanking the fates that had sent his finger to that heavier charge. He had fired two shots here and one on the island, all from the upper barrel. This was the first shot from the lower. He could not continue to use his rifle in this manner if he were to survive the half year it would take him to return to the colony.

He should move out, he thought, but he could not face the snowmelt. Instead, with rifle ready he sat at the part of the hillock furthest removed from the longneck’s carcass.

Several things were apparent. He needed waterproof footwear if he was to survive, for the continual wetting would lead to pneumonia and death. It must be made with care, tightly sewn and well greased. He needed a fine hide – the longneck would provide that – and a fat animal from which to render lard. The herby he had killed would have provided grease, had he known that he would need it. Jean would also need a fine bone awl or needle and patience.

It was also apparent, and even more pressing, that he must find a way to sleep without being attacked. So far he had done poorly – almost fatally poorly. Finally, he had to find a way to conserve his ammunition.

When morning came, he ate longneck meat and removed the hide, carefully scraping the inside and rolling it into a bundle. He took a rib to make an awl and started north.

Whatever else he did, every day must carry him onward. Were he to become injured or ill, the melt would pass him by and he would starve.

He cut wands of siskal, lal, and greenhorn as he walked and stripped them of their bark. The colonists had never had to discover which native woods would make bows for they fabricated fiberglass bows in the landing craft’s small workshop. Now he would experiment.

He stopped early that night about half a kilometer past a thicket of dry brush and built a good–sized fire. He hung his bow staves to cure; then cooked herby meat, now slightly high, and the remainder of the longneck. He sliced the meat thin and hung it over the fire on green branches, watching it carefully so that it dried without burning. The result was poor jerky, lacking salt and not having had the time to cure properly, but at least it gave him some emergency supplies. He alternated watching the fire, the meat, and the bow staves and working on the longneck hide. When nightfall was near he killed the fire and retreated to the brush for the night.

He had lost time and he knew it, but it had been necessary. He hiked straight through the next day, eating dried meat and the seeds and fruits that he found and by nightfall felt that he had gained some distance. Again his leg throbbed, though perhaps not so much as before. Near nightfall he stalked and killed a big trihorn.

Once again he did not sleep, but sat the night through beside the carcass, working by firelight to jerk the meat and preserve the hide. It was for the hide that he had killed the animal.

In the morning he started out under the burden of the trihorn hide, carrying three strung bows. Throughout the day he tried them, firing cut reeds at impromptu targets and concluded that the greenhorn was too limber for use. The siskal broke during the morning. The lal was a poor bow wood, but he could do no better. more tomorrow

Chapter 14

The first day, Jean merely walked. He had enough meat for at least three days and he gathered such fruits as he came across on his trek. During the morning he kept to the lake shore, but about noon he came to a small river which he could not cross and turned inland.

This was the first obstacle he had encountered and already he was wondering if it were not insuperable. He had no boat and could not swim with his bad leg. There were no logs with which to make a raft. By nightfall he was far inland and no better off than he had been. Finally he burrowed into a thicket of dry greenhorn, a remnant of the last melt, and wrapped himself in the remains of the sail. He had to have sleep so he trusted the greenhorn to give warning of the approach of any animal. Three times during the night he was wakened by something rustling in the dry brush, but each creature retreated when he shouted.

In the morning he hunted again, even though he needed no meat. This time he carefully removed and emptied the herby’s stomach, tied off one end, and inflated it. With fresh meat and his few possessions wrapped in the sail and his rifle and ammunition held high, he floated across the river on the inflated stomach. It was barely buoyant enough to keep his head and rifle above the water.

He had lost time going upriver so he made no move to return to the lake. Nothing was there for him now. All day he walked, dragging his bad leg in ankle-deep mud, splashing clumsily through knee-deep pools of snowmelt. He was constantly cold from the wet.

That night he was close to despair. His leg throbbed unmercifully and he had walked past sundown looking for another dry brush thicket. He had found none, and now he dared not sleep for fear of longnecks. He wrapped himself in the sail and sat cross-legged atop a bare knoll; he had no fire for nothing was dry enough to burn. His rifle lay across his knees as he struggled to stay awake. The cold that had been with him all day intensified now. His head nodded and soon he was asleep.

What woke him he could not have said, but when he opened his eyes he was looking into the snarling face of a longneck. The creature had been overcome with curiosity at his strange figure and had not attacked at once. Jean grabbed convulsively for his rifle, thumbing the hammer and squeezing the trigger in one motion. In his haste he had grabbed the forward hammer and the 17mm short barrel went off like a small cannon, blowing a gratifyingly large hole in the carnivore and shocking the night into wakefulness.

He sat for a long time with the longneck at his feet, the blood black in the wan moonlight, shivering uncontrollably. Then he slit the hide and ate, the still warm juices returning life to his frozen body. Nothing moved. Jean got to his feet and surveyed the nightworld around him. In every direction the world was a shallow lake, save for his low hillock. He should leave the place because the smell of blood would soon attract other predators, but to do so would be to expose himself again to the numbing waters. more tomorrow

He dropped down on a broken stave and sat inert. Slowly he forced himself to consider the meaning and implications of his plight.

Jean could not return, yet he had not entirely planned to return. He realized then that he had been thinking, in the back of his mind, of returning to the island, to the abode of peace, there to spend his life in the company of the semi-human dilwildi. The fear that had driven him away had abated over the subsequent weeks, but he had not acknowledged his plans even to himself.

Now he could not return to the island, nor could he return to the colony by water. The wood in the gig would not make a raft even if he could recover it all, and there were no trees here. Perhaps there were trees in the mountains that his map had shown to be several hundred kilometers to the west, but there was no way he could reach them, nor cut them down, nor return them to the lake. The bushes that grew during the melt were all but useless for wood.

He could not go by water and he could not remain where he was. Soon the melt would pass, and he would starve here. Without shovels he could not dig a permafrost cellar, nor could he hope to fill one while hunting alone. He would starve if he remained, nor did he wish to remain cut off from his fellows in such a desolate place. Solitude might have been acceptable amid the beauty of the island but not here.

He would follow the herds. There was no other hope.

For years the younger colonists had speculated whether the others lived nearby or followed the herds. Only a few would champion the latter position. It seemed absurd that anyone could survive constant migration, or that anyone could trek so many kilometers every year. Now Jean would get a chance to prove or disprove the theory. It was not a prospect that pleased him.

He searched through the wreckage of the gig, recovering his few belongings. These he bundled together and then he laid out the torn sail. It was too large to carry so he carefully cut out a sleeping robe from the best of it and then sat before a fire made of the pieces of his gig and made himself a fresh pair of moccasins from part of the remainder.

As he sat, he calculated that the melt moved at an average rate of thirty-five kilometers per day. He would be hard pressed to maintain that pace day after day, especially since he would also have to hunt and avoid being hunted at the same time.

He would not survive. Somewhere he would be too slow and a trihorn or longneck would get him. Or he would run out of ammunition. Or, worst of all and most likely, his leg would not let him keep up the pace and he would slowly fall behind the melt until low winter and starvation overtook him.

If so, so be it. His earlier shock had given way to a new fatalism. His one great adventure was ended and an even greater one had begun. It would be better to die thus than to have lived out a miserable life as a half-man in the colony. Yet he did not look forward to death as he had before, for it would be sweeter still to survive and return.

Night was about him and the fire was low. He had not slept the night before and now he must. He might die from sleeping, but there was no help for it. He put his finger through the trigger guard, his thumb on the hammer, and let go of consciousness. more tomorrow

Vapor slipped away from the fire after half an hour. By that time he knew everything that could be learned from it. The aroma of the meat told him that it was hump ox and the absence of caterwauling nearby told him that the stranger had sense enough to make camp far from the scene of his kill. He carried a muzzleloading rifle, but of a different design from those Vapor had seen before.

The other wore a full beard and shaggy hair, neither yet streaked with gray, though his face was lined with worry or some great sorrow, giving him the false appearance of age. He had been injured at some time in the past, for he unconsciously stroked his left thigh in the manner of one remembering some old pain.

His clothing was of fur, of course, but much more conservatively cut than that which Vapor’s people wore. Also it was quite heavy and the fire was high. Perhaps this one was ill or he was not inured to the climate or he did not know how to avoid the carnivores at night. Perhaps a combination of these factors existed.

Vapor was curious, but Grandaddy Longneck was getting too close for comfort. Vapor could smell the creature upwind of where he lay. It would not do to become careless while watching the stranger. He slipped away into the night.

By first light he was backtracking the stranger and soon he reached the humpox. Only bones and tattered hide remained. Vapor made a large circle about the site in order to get beyond the area which the carnivores had churned. There he found the stranger’s back trail again and followed it toward the lake.

Vapor was amazed at what he read in the mud.

The stranger was a cripple! His right footprint was uniformly deeper than his left and showed a dragging trail where he lurched each time his left foot was down. His left footprint was shallow and smudged where he twisted to thrust his good leg forward. That such a one should be here was incredible.

He soon observed the lurching gait for himself as he came up behind Jean making his way toward the lake. Vapor followed close behind, chafing at the slowness of their progress.

The stranger reached the bluff overlooking the lake and turned north, worked his way to the beach down a stream and turned north again. Vapor stayed on the embankment out of sight. Then he saw how the stranger had come and at the same time realized that he was about to get a new insight into his character.

He had come by boat, but he would not leave in that manner, for the gig remained only as memory and a scattering of shattered staves and timbers. Vapor could read the story in the mud even from the embankment above. A small herd of trihorns had been spooked by a pair of longnecks and had stampeded down the beach, running over the boat in the darkness and in their panic.

The stranger broke into a lurching trot, then stopped dead. Vapor settled down to see how he would handle this new situation.

***

Jean’s emotions ran the gamut, from disbelief to anger, to self–recrimination, to fear, to grief, and back to disbelief. The gig was shattered beyond repair and scattered over three-hundred meters of beach.

He dropped down on a broken stave and sat inert. Slowly he forced himself to consider the meaning and implications of his plight. more tomorrow

Even if he were that fortunate, the other cow would kill him. He was sorely tempted. Here would be a fitting end for a man and a hunter. He sighted on the bull, his finger caressing the trigger, but did not fire.

After a time the trihoms wandered away, the cows having sensed something strange in the area. Trihom belligerence is matched only by trihom caution, so the beasts drifted off to the north.

Jean sat beneath the siskal, chewing a fresh stalk and thinking. He tried to unravel what had held his finger. It was partly because of what he had glimpsed on the island – the possibility of an existence where killing did not reign supreme. It was also partly the influence of Levi-Stuer who had preached that being a man was more than merely being a hunter. Part of his hesitation was due to his own thinking as well. He had done things that no man had done before. No brave hunter from the colony had ever dared the lake or sought out the secret of the disappearing herds, yet he, a cripple, had done so. His impulses had been largely self-destructive, true, but they were not so any longer. He had faced death and therein found the courage to face life.

When he crawled out of the bushes and set off he limped no less but was somehow less conscious of it.

He had not found new self-worth in a moment, but in a moment he had realized the culmination of that which had been building for a year. He was a man; let others think what they wished – he knew his own worth.

And having so reestablished his own worth, his loneliness was thereby intensified.

***

Firelight flickered in the night. Jean lay against the backrest of lal that he had woven, contemplating the fire and the various night sounds beyond. His belly was full to repletion and a massive hunk of humpox meat hung beside the fire, slowly drying and cooking. The carcass that had given up this meat lay nearly a half kilometer to the west and was doubtless even now being stripped by longnecks and krats. Jean had killed early in the afternoon and had lost no time getting what meat he could eat and retreating before the carnivores arrived.

His rifle, carefully recharged, lay across his knees. Behind him was a shallow pool which would give warning splashes if anything tried to reach him from that side. He did not even bother to turn his head in that direction. Ahead the ground fell away from the hummock he had chosen and any carnivores out there would be wary of the fire. Of course he dared not sleep until he returned to the gig and put safely out into the lake. That he would do in the morning, for he had much to think about tonight.

He had found the herds, which had been his ostensible purpose. Now he could return to the colony with his findings. Yet he knew that few would be interested, for it would be knowledge without practical import.

For the first time since his injury, he was lonely for humankind. Even during the year he had spent with Levi–Stuer he had shunned his fellows. Now he was transformed, though outwardly unchanged. It had been a slow process, but he had established a deeper acquaintance with himself and a truer picture of his abilities and failings.

He had no illusions about his fellow man, however. They would no more accept him now than they had before. This then was his dilemma, that he had progressed beyond his fellows and was thereby cast out.

Beyond the firelight, eyes watched him. Yellow, slitted eyes on a finely sculpted head – longneck. Other eyes watched him as well, brown eyes like his own, set in a human face. more tomorrow