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

The barges were loading for the hunting kraals upriver. Scouts had brought word that the main herd had arrived along the Lydia. Two-thirds of the able bodied men in the colony would be out hunting, nearly three times as many men as there were firearms. Of course the rest of them would not be unarmed, but a bow is a poor weapon with which to face an adult trihorn or a prowling longneck.

Jean had nearly reached the wharf when he heard Chloe’s footsteps. She was coming from the north end of town, not from her parents’ house. That puzzled him; later he would see greater significance to the fact. He stepped into an alleyway with her so that their good-byes could be private.

***

They were thirty to a barge, but none rode. Twenty strained at the traces like dray beasts, dragging the obdurate devices against the current, while ten stood guard – four with the offworld double rifles, six with Levi-Stuer’s muzzleloaders. Once they were beyond the town, they would be fair game for leers, trihorns, humpox, and longnecks. There were six barges, their crews assembled by lot. Jean had been chosen to man the third outpost, seventy kilometers upstream; he pitied the unlucky ones who had been chosen for outpost number six.

They made twenty kilometers a day and at night anchored in midstream. After the first day they saw animals everywhere, vast herds that came en masse to water at the river. The herds seemed as endless as the stars, but in three weeks they would be gone, chasing the melting snows southward, leaving the bushes and gluegrass churned and mutilated behind them.

Outpost three was simply an earth and stone enclosure four meters high and twenty meters across with no openings to the outside. The crew entered by climbing the rough walls.

Lone hunting was almost a sport, and had aspects of glory. Not so the communal hunts. They were all business; they put meat in the locker. As soon as the barge was moored and their meager supplies were inside the circle, it began. One man, rifle-armed, would set out with two others, to make his kill. Then he would stand guard while his companions butchered. Load the meat in the hide, drag it back to the enclosure, and trade off, one of the butchers taking the rifle, the former rifleman taking up his knives. And so on, from earliest morning until dusk gave the advantage to the longnecks.

At night they ate cooked meat. When hunger overtook them on the hunt, they ate as they butchered, raw. It was brutal, mankilling work and it was dangerous; for each trihorn or herby the hunters killed, they had to kill at least one krat or longneck intent on robbing them. The nights were punctuated by gunfire and the men praised the three moons for the light they gave. The plains became littered with bones and entrails as the colonists gathered a year‘s meat in three weeks.

Anton Dumezil was among the men assigned to outpost three. Jean saw him in the course of his work, but exchanged no word. Anton’s earlier irritability had hardened into a sullen hatred. Why, Jean did not know. Three times the two were assigned to hunt together and did so without comment, but the strain was noticeable. more tomorrow

A week later they loaded the gig and set it free.  With the melt in full swing, the North River was high, deep, and muddy. There was a stiff silence between them.

They reached the lake in three effortless days, then spent two backbreaking ones rowing between the mouth of the North River and the mouth of the Lydia. There were half a hundred people waiting at the landing, but most of them turned away when it became apparent who they were. Those would be the relatives of the others who had gone north. Perhaps half a dozen parties of youths had gone out on advance hunts. They would bring back the first fresh meat that the colony had had in nearly a year, but that was not their true purpose in going. It was a testing of manhood, a rite-de-passage, though an informal one, entered into voluntarily. Such hunting was deadly dangerous and that, of course, was its appeal. The main meat harvest would come in another month when the herds crossed the Lydia.

By the time Jean and Anton had tied up, only their families and a few friends remained. Chloe was among them. They heaved up their bundles of furs and lightly salted meat. Jean’s father and younger brother loaded them onto a cart.

“A very good hunt, mon fils; you do us proud.”

“Thank you, Papa.”

It was good to be back, good to see Chloe again, but the edge was taken off it all by Anton’s reaction. After all, he had been Jean’s friend. He walked over to where Anton stood watching his uncle load his furs and meat. “A good hunt, Anton,” he said, “It was a pleasure going with you.”

“You did well enough, enfant.” Jean stiffened at the term, started to retort, then let it die. Something in Anton’s eyes told him that he wanted a fight, and whatever he wanted it would serve Jean well to deny him.

Jean entered the stockade with Chloe on his arm and returned his rifle to the city arsenal. All of the original cartridge rifles were held in common trust, as were a number of Levi-Stuer’s muzzleloaders. A man could rent one of the latter if he contributed a portion of his kill to the colony, but only a proven hunter could rent a cartridge rifle. It was a high privilege.

Of course, one could buy a muzzleloader from Levi-Stuer, but the price was more than it took to equip a farm. Jean, like every other youth, wanted one in the worst way.

It was Levi–Stuer’s standing lament that he could not get an apprentice; the young men preferred bolder endeavors and the older men lacked the steady hands. Jean had even considered becoming his apprentice, but pride kept him from it.

They walked through the stockaded city to the river’s edge. Chloe said she had missed him, called him by tender endearments she said were his alone (a declaration he tended to doubt), and they found privacy beneath the bank where prying eyes were not likely to come.

***

It was early in the melt when Jean and Anton went on their lone hunt. Around the colony the lal bushes were still in bloom. Now the siskal and greenhorn had both bloomed in turn and all three were fully leaved, only a few purple blossoms still clinging to the greenhorns. The gluegrass was a solid carpet as far as one could see.

Jean paused outside the Chambard’s door until Chloe’s mother appeared. No, she replied, Chloe was not at home but would probably be back soon. Jean was surprised and a little hurt, but not so much that he missed the strange look the older woman gave him. It made him thoughtful as he walked down to the wharf. more tomorrow

Among leers, the female is the more deadly and they almost always run in pairs. One always shoots the female and leaves the male.

Jean relaxed his forefinger and waited, sighting past the bayonet fitted at the end of his rifle. The male dipped his head, then tipped it back to drink. Long minutes passed, but a hunter must be patient above all things. The male moved back into the bushes and Jean wondered if he had erred and thrown away his chance. Time passed.

Jean’s caution was rewarded as the female strutted forth, her pink feathers iridescent in the noon sun. She was cautious. After carefully scrutinizing the area she dipped her head, then tipped it back. When her eyes were skyward, Jean shifted his aim slightly to cover the spot where she had drunk. When she dipped her head again, he fired.

The leer collapsed as the shot echoed across the pool. There was agitation in the bushes and the male burst forth.

For a space of four heartbeats Jean watched as he charged. Time seemed to hang suspended. Jean heard the insects buzzing nearby, thought of Chloe, of the warmth of the sun, and of the fabled toothless birds of other planets. He did not think. of his weapons any more than he would think of his foot or his arm. They were simply there, a part of him.

The leer darted his head forward, teeth aimed at Jean’s neck. A little sidestep, just as old Renou taught; the shock of contact as the teeth met on the hard leather shield at his shoulder; the shock of the bayonet going home; the shock of Jean‘s back striking the sodden ground as hunter and prey fell in a tangle of limbs. Then up, thrusting and parrying against that sinuous, deadly head. Finding the rifle torn from his grip. The sudden fear; the warm comfort of a blade hilt. The sudden overhand slash that ended it all.

Jean swayed on his feet, bleeding from a score of insignificant lacerations; his shoulder was bruised and painful. But the leers were dead, both of them, and he had been alone.

***

Anton jammed a section of leer haunch onto the stick he had sharpened, then held it to the flame. He had not made a kill during the day and he communicated his irritation through curt movements at the fire.

Jean leaned against a backrest woven from a living greenhorn and fought back a scowl. The hearts of his leers hung over the fire, but Anton had given no word of approval. Still, Anton was his friend, so he ventured, “Tomorrow your luck will change.”

“You seem to have it all. Besides, I don’t need luck.”

Jean clamped his jaws shut and started forward, then relaxed. Anton was ready for him to make a move. Anton had always belittled him, but never before had he actually goaded him. “What’s wrong with you, Anton. You act more like an enemy than a friend.”

Anton sat back and something seemed to go loose inside him. He smiled with no humor. “Maybe I’m just surprised that your luck carried you through so easily.”

“Like you said, luck had nothing to do with it.” Anton motioned toward the steaming hearts. “Two leers, one rifle. I call it luck.”

“What’s wrong with you?” .

He shrugged. “Nothing. I was just surprised.”

“Why? When have I ever shirked any task? Why should you expect me to fail as a hunter?”

“Oh, shut up and eat. You’re just strung out from the hunt.”

*****

This Anton is the patriarch’s grandson. The patriarch’s son, also Anton, now leads the community. Ugh, too many people, too few names. more tomorrow