On the Oceans of Eternity (17 page)

“Rich, too,” Eddie mused, biting the last of a kidney off a stick and then prying at a fragment between two teeth with a fingernail. “And I don’t mean the gold; gold is good, but you can’t eat it or ride it. This would be a stockman’s paradise, and it’s getting better as we get lower. Even better than the plains east of the mountains, more sheltered, not so cold in winter—wonderful, wonderful, wonderful grass,
Hepkonwsa
hear my word. The horses are putting on flesh, even as hard as we’re working them.”

Giernas snorted. “You know, back when I was a kid, before the Event, I read about a party coming west—this was long before my time, a hundred and fifty years—who starved near where we wintered.”

“In the Donner Pass?”

“Yeah, the place was named for them. The Donner Party.”
Donner, party of sixty-seven, your table’s ready,
he quoted to himself; it would take too much effort to explain it to the ex-Alban.

Eddie looked baffled. “Starved? Even in deep-snow winter ... that would be like starving in a stock pen.”

“Natural-born damned fools can do that anywhere—”

They shot to their feet at the dogs’ baying and Tidtaway’s shout, wheeling and crouching. The horses began to snort and back, working their feet against the picket ropes and hobbles. Giernas snatched up his rifle and thumbed back the hammer; the others did likewise, except for Spring Indigo, who grabbed a Seahaven crossbow they had along, with a bow made from a cut-down car spring. He’d adjusted the stock for her smaller arms. The pawl-and-ratchet cocking lever built into the forestock was easy to handle, and since bolts were reusable she’d practiced enough to be a clout shot. She pumped it six times and slotted a short, thick bolt into the groove, moving with businesslike dispatch.

“Old Ep, sure enough,” Giernas said grimly. “Perks, Saule, Ausra—back and watch! Stand!”

The humpbacked bear walked into the open shade of the great trees with a shambling arrogance, his silver-tipped cinnamon hide moving on the great bones like a loosely fastened rug. The big-dished muzzle lifted, sampling the air with its strange, tantalizing smell of cooking meat and undertone of raw bloody flesh, and then he reared to his full twelve feet of height with a grumbling bellow.

Four .40 bullets and a crossbow bolt designed to punch through armor might be enough to take him down; or they could just make him very, very angry. Since there was very little apart from another grizzly that could meet a charge, Old Ep didn’t have much of a run-away-when-hurt reflex. Giernas swallowed past a dry mouth, watching the bear, watching his reaction to the unfamiliar scents and sounds, to the three dogs making little snarling rushes and bouncing about just out of range of the piledriver paws. Sometimes grizzlies ran a wolf pack off its kill....

Dane Sweet ought to see this,
he thought.
Hell,
we’re
the endangered species, hereabouts.

“I don’t think he’s angry. just curious.” he said finally. “We’ll try and see him off. Jaditwara, you and I’ll fire over his head. Everyone else, yell. Sue, Eddie, Indigo, keep him covered.”

The shots blasted out, jets of off-white sulfur-smelling smoke rising from the rifles. The butt thumped his shoulder with a familiar blow. Giernas’s hand went to the knob on the top of the rifle’s stock, pulled it up and the lever with it, and the brass plunger attached to the underside that filled the breech. That was blocked by the greased wad from the base of the nitrated paper cartridge; he dropped a fresh round into the slot and pushed it forward with his thumb, driving the spent wad ahead of it. A quick slap of the hand brought the lever back down; he pulled the hammer back to half-cock, brought the priming flask up and thumbed the catch to drop a measured pinch of fine-grained powder into the pan, used the flask-head to knock the frizzen back to cover it, then dropped it to dangle on its shoulder cord while he brought the weapon to full cock.

That all took ten seconds, the fruit of endless practice. Meanwhile he could see and hear the others yell, jump, howl, shriek. The bear started violently at the hammer noise of the firearms, and more at the unfamiliar scent of burned powder, falling to all fours and roaring with wide-stretched mouth, showing long wet yellow teeth in a pink cavern of mouth.

Tidtaway surprised him, turning to snatch the ends of burning sticks from the campfire in both hands. Whipping them into flame he ran forward, waving them aloft and screeching. The bear began to back up, waving its dish-faced head from side to side on the long snaky neck.

“Sue, Eddie, more shots in the air,” Giernas shouted, keeping the bear’s right foreleg in his sights—he was pretty certain of breaking the bone, there.

Crack. Crack.
A frenzy of reloading.

The grizzly flinched, and Tidtaway ran toward it, throwing a burning stick pinwheeling through the air. It landed in dry pine duff not far from the animal. Sparks flew out, caught, and turned into crackling fire and smoke. The bear visibly decided that food wasn’t worth all this trouble no matter how good it smelled and turned, hurrying away with a shambling gait that covered ground faster than a man could run, then breaking into a slow gallop, complaining gutturally. Giernas worked his mouth, whistled on the second attempt. The dogs halted, despite the almost irresistable attraction of the retreating grizzly’s rump; the last thing they needed now was the bear enraged by a mouthful of fangs in the ass.

“I must be getting old,” Giernas muttered. “I’m learning to leave well enough alone.”

And the adventures had been a lot more carefree before Jared was born. Not just the danger of the child being injured, first and foremost and bad though that was. He found himself worrying about getting injured or killed himself and not being there to protect his son. If it hadn’t been for good friends who he knew would pitch in, it would have taken all the fun out of things.

Eddie came up, laughing as he eased the hammer of his rifle back to half-cock, the safety position. “Pete, that was one beautiful rug we lost there. Did you see the size of him! That hide would be
perfect
for in front of the fire in the place I’m going to build back home on Long Island.”

That was Eddie’s particular dream, land of his own and fat herds and tall horses and strong sons; in that, he was still Zarthani. When the gold was in the saddlebags he could do it, and quickly, although Giernas suspected he’d be bored. The other ranger went on:

“And after I’d told her how I killed the beast single-handed as it charged, roaring like thunder, what girl could resist getting laid on it?”

Sue came up beside him. “Plenty, when they saw the scars where your face used to be before the bear ate it,” she said dryly. “You’re going to raise horses, so use a horsehide rug.”

He glared at her for an instant, genuine horror in his look. “Kill a
horse
to make a
rug?
Are you crazy or ...” He caught the half wink she gave Giernas. “Oh, the Lady of the Horses give you both arse-boils and bleeding piles, you scoffers!”

She shook her head as he stamped off; however assimilated in other ways he remained an obstinate pagan, convinced that Christian scorn for his tribe’s ancestral gods was both blasphemy and likely to bring bad luck to boot, at least for him personally. Sue enjoyed ribbing him about it occasionally, and it usually stayed good-humored enough.

“Let’s get moving, people,” Giernas called, in what he thought of privately as his head-of-the-expedition voice. He chopped his right hand westward and downslope. “Yo!”

Tidtaway resumed his position after they’d extinguished the fire with earth and water, and the party passed through a rocky field of boulders, over a ridgeback, down further on the westward path.

“Good, with the fire sticks,” Giernas said, in what he hoped was the guide’s language. He spoke Lekkansu fluently, the tongue of the tribes who lived along the New England coast near Nantucket. That had about as much relation to the languages hereabouts as English did to Babylonian. “Strong heart.” He thumped the fist of his free right hand on his hunting shirt. “Guts” didn’t usually translate well.

Tidtaway shrugged. “Bears ... with long time,” he said, in atrociously accented English, and held his own hand out at waist level.

I think he means he grew up around ’em,
Giernas decided.
Since he was knee high to a hopper.

The ranger nodded; the smaller black bears were worth treating with respect, but these Western silvertips were a lot bigger and meaner. Most of the time they’d leave you alone unless you provoked them. Then again, they might suddenly decide you were edible, or just slap out at you like a man at a fly.

He snorted softly. The Lost Geezers, the way they talked about animals ...
Hell, I
like
animals. Wouldn’t want to be in a place where they were scarce. But Jesus, they’re not all little fluffy bunnies that’ll die if you think mean thoughts!
Time to get to business, though.

He pointed westward. “Your friends?” he said.

Tidtaway looked around at the landscape. then up at the sun that was sinking before them. When he spoke, Giernas sighed and gestured to him to slow down. After half an hour, he judged he’d gotten a confirmation of previous conversations, if they weren’t just misunderstanding each other in the same way every time. The band ahead weren’t of Tidtaway’s people, and didn’t speak his language although it was related to his. But he’d visited years ago to trade obsidian and quartz for shells and salt, and he spoke their tongue a little, and they were hospitable to traders and travelers.

The trail was widening, and they were in the real foothills now, growing less rocky and steep as the land flattened. The Indian looked around, increasingly puzzled.

“Where people? See hunter here, see woman here—crazy, where people?” he bust out at last, then a long sentence in his own language, and back to English: “Bullshit, man. Fuckin’ bullshit.”

They crested a rise and looked down into a valley bright-green with spring grass, streaked with orange-yellow drifts of California poppies. It was broad, opening out to the west into the Sacramento plain, with a river fringed by big live oaks rushing over rocks to their right, falling to a pool and then meandering down the middle of it. Here and there it spread out in shallows that reflected blue from the cloudless sky overhead, great flights of wildfowl taking off and landing as he watched. The hills to either side were low and smooth, open savanna studded with round-topped trees, huge valley oak lower down and black oak on the summits. He unlimbered his precious pre-Event binoculars and scanned; at the far western edge of the valley he could see a herd of pronghorn antelope cantering, a hundred or so of them.

Wait a minute, he thought. They shouldn’t be that close to a lair of humans.
H. sapiens was the top predator in any area, even one infested with grizzlies. Game should be a little wary, at least.

The glasses swept back to the Indian settlement in mid-valley. There were ten dwellings built amid the valley oaks for shade and shelter, circular domed huts of overlapping reed bundles bound on bentwood frames, with low doors closed by hide curtains on the southern side and smokeholes at the tops. Fairly small dwellings, six to twelve feet in diameter, easy to throw up in a few hours—the inhabitants would probably move on a set round with the warmer seasons, and shift these semipermanent winter quarters whenever the surroundings got too noise-some. One hut was larger, and thickly plastered with clay over the reeds, probably a sweat house. The site was a good one, dry even during the winter rains but near good drinking water and fishing, with marshes for wildfowl, grassland for elk and mule deer and antelope, and it looked to be good gathering country, too. Certainly there were a clutch of acorn granaries, like huge man-tall baskets woven around stout poles at their corners.

Where the hell are the people, though?
There ought to be fifty or sixty in this band, from the buildings. Women grinding acorns, cooking, weaving baskets, out in the land about gathering fresh spring greens; men toolmaking, hunting, working on hides; both sexes teaching older kids by demonstration; younger children running about at simple chores or play.
There isn’t even any
smoke,
goddammit.
Locals never let all their fires go out—it was taboo, and just too much of a pain in the ass to relight, when all you had was a hand-drill. They couldn’t all have gone up into the Sierras already, it wasn’t quite the season, and even then some of the older folks would remain at the winter base to look after their stuff.

“Doesn’t look right,” he said, and handed the binoculars to the guide.

Tidtaway was worried, too; he simply took the binoculars and used them, without any of the usual fulsome wondering admiration. Among his people, if you praised something highly the owner had to give it to you. He still had trouble really believing that Nantucketers didn’t operate that way.

“Nobody,” he said after a moment.

“War?” Giernas asked. Not likely, but ...

Tidtaway made a gesture of negation, tossing his head, then remembered to shake it in the manner of Western civilization.

“War, kill one man one time, steal one woman one time out alone. Not whole bunch. Nobody here.” His face screwed up in bewilderment.

You look just how I feel,
Giernas thought. A suspicion moved below the surface of his mind.
No. Not here.

“Sue, you come with me,” he said. “Eddie—” he unhooked the binocular case and handed it over. “You’re in charge here; keep watch. One shot for come running with fangs out and hair on fire, two for danger and stay put, three for run like hell. Perks, heel! Saule, Ausra, stay.”

The three of them set out at a steady loping wolf-trot, slowing a little as they came down into the valley flat. Giernas kept his eyes moving; there was nothing except the usual bugs and birds, small animals; once a startled cougar standing on a rock that took one look at them and fled. The wind was steady at his back as they approached the Indian settlement.