Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [220]
A woman hunter with blood on her hands turned her head to give the man a contemptuous look. “Quit fooling around,” she said.
The spear thrower laughed. “You don’t have to worry. These dams are a hundred times stronger than they need to be.”
The woman shook her head, disgusted. “It’s stupid to tempt fate.”
“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”
“You’re a fool,” the woman said. “Luck is as real as anything else.”
“Luck! Fate! Ka.” The spear thrower picked up his spear and ran and threw it at the dam again; it rebounded and almost hit him, and he laughed wildly. “How lucky,” he said. “Fortune favors the bold, eh?”
“Asshole. Show some respect.”
“All honor to that buck, indeed, crashing the wall like he did.” The man laughed raucously.
The others were ignoring these two, busy butchering the animals. “Many thanks, brother. Many thanks, sister.” Nirgal’s hands shook as he watched; he could smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines steamed in the chill air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waist bags and telescoped out, and the decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the legs. Hunters at the ends of the poles hefted the headless carcasses into the air.
The bloody-handed woman shouted at the spear thrower, “You’d better help carry if you want to eat any of these.”
“Fuck you.” But he helped carry the front end of the buck.
“Come on,” the woman said to Nirgal, and then they were hurrying west across the canyon floor, between the great wall of water and the last of the massive sequoias. Nirgal followed, stomach growling.
The west wall of the canyon was marked with petroglyphs: animals, lingams, yonis, handprints, comets and spaceships, geometric designs, the humpbacked flute player Kokopelli, all scarcely visible in the dusk. There was a staircase trail inlaid in the cliff, following a nearly perfect Z of ledges. The hunters hiked up it and Nirgal followed. Shift into the uphill rhythm one more time, his stomach eating him from within, his head swimming. A black antelope splayed across the rock beside him.
Above, a few giant sequoias stood isolated on the canyon rim. When they reached the rim, returning to the sunset’s last light, he saw that these trees formed a circle, nine trees in a rough woodhenge, with a big firepit at their center.
The band entered the circle and got to work starting a fire, skinning the antelope, cutting big venison steaks out of the haunches. Nirgal stood watching, legs in a sewing-machine tremble, mouth salivating like a fountain; he swallowed again and again as he sniffed the steak juices lofting in the smoke through the early stars. Firelight pushed like a bubble at the dusk’s gloom, turning the circle of trees into a flickering roofless room. The light flickering against the needles was like seeing your own capillaries. Some of the trees had wooden staircases spiraling around their trunks, up into their branches. High above them lamps were being lit, voices like skylarks among the stars.
Three or four of the hunters bunched around him, offering him flatcakes of what tasted like barley, then a fiery liquor out of clay jars. They told him they had found the sequoia henge a few years before.
“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked, looking around.
“Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.”
“Besides she fucked up, she don’t want to.”
“Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a reason.”
They laughed and moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred steak, waved it on its stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little sister.” And bit into the steak.
Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot taste of the meat, chewing hard but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz with trembling light-headed hunger. Food, food!
He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His