Expendable - James Alan Gardner [70]
But the tears did not stop stinging.
Walking (Part 2)
We slept the night in spoon position, with the Bumbler keeping watch for prowling bears. Only my legs got cold—the rest of my body was protected by the insulated remains of my tightsuit. An hour before dawn, I heaped fallen leaves over me from thigh to ankle, so I wasn’t directly exposed to the breeze. The improvement was immediate; I kicked myself mentally for not doing it when I first lay down. Something had frazzled my survival instincts, and I couldn’t allow that to continue.
The day dawned cloudy, and by noon it was raining. The good news was that we were walking through forest; the bad news was that the trees had shed enough leaves for rain to get through anyway. Little dribbles trickling down Oar’s body looked like drops on a windowpane.
The drizzle continued intermittently for a day and a half. It started warm but turned colder on the second morning: a drop of five degrees according to the Bumbler. I hoped this wasn’t the tip of the icestorm…but the temperature stabilized during the afternoon of our third day of travel, and the clouds thinned enough to let the sun glimmer through whitely. By then, we had reached the end of full forest and were picking our way through patchier groves down into the great prairie basin.
The next day we had to detour around an enormous herd of buffalo grazing directly in our path. Oar was surprised we didn’t walk straight through them; but large bull ruminants are notorious for nasty tempers, and I had no intention of getting trampled. It took four hours to circle to a point where we could turn south again, which tells you how big the herd was…several thousand animals in total, all of them shaggy with winter fur.
In midafternoon, with the herd still visible behind us, we came upon a dozen wolves. No doubt, the pack was shadowing the buffalo; I couldn’t remember whether wolves were day or night predators, but they would attack when they were ready, running in to pull down a calf or an elderly animal too weak to defend itself. In the meantime, they eyed us from a judicious distance of a hundred meters, sizing up our food potential.
“Clap your hands,” I murmured to Oar.
“Are we expressing admiration for those dogs?”
“Just do it!”
Oar slapped her hands together several times: glass on glass, each impact as loud as a hammer blow. The noise hurt my ears; and the wolf pack vanished like mist at dawn, slipping silently away through the tall grass.
We had no more trouble with animals that day. Most wildlife stayed away from us through the entire journey. As the terrain flattened out, it became easy to spot ground mammals a long way off—prairie dogs, rabbits, coyotes—but they always disappeared before we came near. Birds let us get closer; they stared at us suspiciously from trees or bushes, or flew overhead in vast migratory flocks. It was late the same day we passed the buffalo that I looked up at one flock and said, “Holy shit!”
“Do Explorers revere shit?” Oar asked with interest.
“It’s an expression,” I said, still staring at the sky. “Do you know what those birds are?”
“No, Festina.”
“I can’t be sure…but I think they’re passenger pigeons.”
The Pigeons
“Do those pigeons carry passengers?” Oar asked. “I should enjoy flying on a bird.”
“I don’t know why they’re called passenger pigeons,” I told her. “They’ve been extinct for five hundred years.”
“Extinct means dead?”
“Yes.”
Oar burst into giggles. “Dead things do not move, Festina. You are very, very stu—confused.”
I didn’t answer. Over the past few days, I had grudgingly accepted Melaquin as Earth’s near-twin; but the sight of an extinct species jolted me. There weren’t even passenger pigeons on New Earth—when the League of Peoples built humanity its new home, they could only duplicate what was still alive on….
“Damn, I’m stupid!” I said, hitting my head with my palm.
“No, just confused,” Oar insisted generously.
Duplication
In all my time on Melaquin, my mind had been too lost in dismay and