The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [23]
My gear was delivered. I strung the canteen and the beamer and the sheath knife on a loop of line. I filled the canteen with water, changed my mind and replaced it with Gatorade, and left it all in a refrigerator.
I watched three more hunts. Once they hunted melk again. Once it was pigs. That wasn’t very interesting. B-beam said, “Those were a gift. We mated pigs to wild boars, raised them in bottles and turned them loose. The Folk were polite, but I don’t think they like them much. They’re too easy.”
The last film must have been taken at night, light-amplified, for the moon was blazing like the sun. The prey had two enormous legs with too many joints, a smallish torso slung horizontally between the shoulders, and tiny fingers around a strange mouth. Again, it looked well fed. It was in the forest, eating into a hanging melon-sized fruit without bothering to pick it. I said, “That doesn’t look right.”
B-beam said, “No, it didn’t evolve alongside the Folk. Different planet. Gligstith(click)tcharf, maybe. We call them stilts.”
It was faster than hell and could jump too, but the Folk were spread out and they were always in front of it. They kept it running in a circle until it stepped wrong and lost its balance.
One Folk zipped toward it. The stilt tumbled with its legs folded and stood up immediately, but it still took too long. The designated killer wrapped itself around one leg; its jaws closed on the ankle. The stilt kicked at its assailant, a dozen kicks in a dozen seconds. Then the bone snapped and the rest of the Folk moved in.
“Do you suppose they’ll wear translators when they hunt with us?”
“I’d guess they won’t. I know some Folk words and I’ve been boning up. And I’ve got a horde of students looking for anything on Folk eating habits. I’ve got a suspicion.... Rick, why are we doing this?”
“We ought to get to know them.”
“Why? What have we seen that makes them worth knowing?”
I was hungry and I ached everywhere. I had to think before I answered. “Oh ... enough. Eating habits aside, the Folk aren’t totally asocial. They’re here, and they aren’t xenophobes.... B-beam, suppose they don’t have anything to teach us? They’re still part of a galactic civilization, and we want to be out there with them. I just want humanity to look good.”
“Look good ... yeah. I did wonder why you didn’t even hesitate. Have you ever been hunting?”
“No. You?” “Yeah, my uncles used to take me deer hunting. Have you ever killed anything? Hired out as a butcher, for instance?”
“... No.”
And I waited to say, Sure, I can kill an animal, no sweat. Hell, I promised! But he didn’t ask; he only looked.
I never did mention my other fear. For all I know, it never occurred to anyone else that B-beam and I might be the prey.
Intelligent beings, if gullible. Armed, but with inadequate weapons. Betrayed, and thus enraged, likely to fight back. The Folk eat Earthbom meat. Surely we would make more interesting prey than the boar-pigs!
But it was plain crazy. The Chirpsithra enforced laws against murder. If humans were to disappear within the Mojave hunting park, the Folk might be barred from the Chirp liners! They wouldn’t dare.
The Folk came for us at dawn. We rode in the Xenobiology lifter. We left the air ducts wide open. The smell of five Folk behind us was rich and strange: not quite an animal smell, but something else, and not entirely pleasant. If the Folk noticed our scent, they didn’t seem to mind.
B-beam seemed amazingly relaxed. At one point he told me, casually, “We’re in danger of missing a point. We’re here to have fun. The Folk don’t know we’ve been sweating and moaning, and they won’t. You’re being honored, Rick. Have fun.”
At midmorning we landed and walked toward a fence.
It was human-built, posted with