Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [124]
“Hapec and me, we do all right. But it’s more than that. Our ancestors lived free here, hunting and fishing all over this country. They took what they wanted, when they needed it. When the Reserva was drawn up and its boundaries formalized, everybody who lived here was kicked out and resettled on the borders of their former homelands. All in the name of preserving a lousy bunch of plants and animals and a natural CO2 exchanger for the atmosphere. Like the planet was going to run short on oxygen, anyway.” His tone was bitter. “This is Hapec’s and my way of getting a little back, of reasserting our ancestral claims to this land.”
Cheelo nodded somberly. “I can understand that.” Privately he thought the poacher’s explanation was a facile rationalization heavily layered with pretentious bullshit. Their two captors kept slipping into the Reserva not to honor their ancestors but because they were making a nice, cushy, illicit living, and for no other reason. Taking revenge for some long-forgotten, sketchily remembered great-grandpa had nothing to do with it. He’d known small-time ninlocos like Hapec and Maruco all his life, had grown up with them. Maybe it made them feel a little better to conduct their miserable, self-serving offenses under the cover of an agreeable fiction. Cheelo Montoya didn’t buy it for a minute. What the ingenuous insectile in his company thought of the situation he couldn’t imagine. Nor could he find out if he wanted to, at least not for a while. To ensure that Cheelo’s captors kept him alive it was necessary for the bug to continue to play mute.
Rustling noises rose from behind the encampment, back among the denser undergrowth. Cheelo strained to see. “So, this little place of yours: Where is it?”
“You’ll see soon enough.” As Maruco spoke, his partner began to remove from their stretchers and carefully fold the partially cured jaguar and margay pelts. When he had finished with that, he resumed breaking camp, reducing everything to a pile of poles, bindings, and disparate organic waste. This was then scattered among the concealing brush, to decay and disintegrate, along with any indication that people had ever spent any time at this particular spot.
“Must be rough.” Cheelo was under no illusion that his attempts at casual conversation would ingratiate him with their captors, but in lieu of any alternative activity, it would have to suffice. “Having to tear down and make a new camp every time you come into the Reserva.”
Maruco was dismissive. “Gets easier with practice. You learn what trees make the best hide stretchers, what vines are the most supple and easiest to work. Why do you give a damn?” He grinned nastily. “Thinking of going into competition?”
“Not me.” Cheelo shook his head. “I’m a city boy.”
“I figured. You skin different game.”
As soon as the airtruck was loaded, the two captives were herded on board. Cheelo found nothing exceptional about the vehicle. He’d seen camouflaged stealth transport before. But Desvendapur was fascinated. It was the first complex piece of purely human technology he had encountered in person, and every facet of it, from the layout of the instrumentation to the design of the climate-controlled interior, was new to him. There was, of course, no place for him to sit down. For thranx purposes, the floor was more accommodating than the seats designed for humans. He chose to stand, balancing himself as the vehicle lifted in virtual silence from its hiding place to rise into the canopy.
Though it took four times as long as a straight flight would have, Maruco followed a course that kept them below spreading crests of the forest emergents, utilizing the canopy for cover whenever possible and only rising above it when the airtruck threatened to leave too expansive a path of destruction in the form of broken