The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [27]
In place of the anticipated lethal bite to the skull, Whispr had suffered only an annoyed swipe across his upper back. In the absence of a mirror he could not tell the extent of the damage. The flexibility afforded by his slender frame did allow him, however, to reach all the way around back and feel the area. The contact pained him and his fingers came away bloody—but not too bloody. Trying his best to ignore the burning he alternately stumbled and swam northwestward. The sensation was akin to someone taking a sheaf of new nine-kilo bond and dragging the edges across his deltoids: a hundred paper cuts all concentrated in the same place. He was hurting, but he would not die.
Not from the single glancing paw swipe, but just possibly from hunger. He struggled onward. Many decades of federal protection resulting in the restoration of filtering reed beds, mangroves, and sawgrass had rendered the waters of the reserve in which he found himself at least nominally fit to drink, but he was still growing weaker by the hour. It had been too long since he had last had anything to eat and his slenderized melded frame contained no reserves of fat. He needed food.
About right, he mused. He had eluded the police, avoided the dangers of the swamp, and escaped death by jaguar only to look forward to perishing for lack of access to something as banal as a vending machine.
It was midafternoon and crushingly humid when he stumbled into the isolated fishing outpost.
Dirty white, mussel-encrusted pylons supporting multiple nets speckled with electronic ministunners identified the dwelling as the home of a fisherman. Though licenses to work the broad stretches of the coastal preserves were heavily regulated, individuals or families lucky enough to have obtained one could make a good living fishing within their designated boundaries since large commercial operations were banned inshore. The majority of catches ended up in the restaurants and markets of Greater Savannah. Any excess was vacuumed up by the insatiable market of the Atlanta Conurbation.
Utilizing whatever posts, pilings, trees, and brush presented itself, a cautious Whispr slowly worked his way closer to the buildings. The cuts on his upper back throbbed. He could only hope some of the more exotic parasites to be found in the preserve had not already wormed their insidious way into the open wounds.
Outward appearances suggested that the unpretentious venture was doing well, though not making its owner rich. Fronting the water behind the wall of drying nets was a boathouse fashioned of premolded permeable foam sections painted green and brown to blend in with the preserve surroundings. A lack of sharp corners combined with deep-earth anchors kept it from being blown into the next state by the repetitious hurricanes that now afflicted this part of the Atlantic coast. The boathouse was connected by raised catwalks to a processing shed and, farther on, to a residence. Sprawling over several uplifted platforms the house looked as if rooms had been added on one at a time, one year at a time. More profits, more rooms, Whispr knew.
A pair of electric jetboats were visible bobbing inside the boathouse. Two adjacent slips were empty, suggesting that the owner/operators might be, unsurprisingly, out fishing. Whispr licked his lips. If he could get one of the idle craft started it would save him days of stumbling through the remainder of the preserve. It would also allow him to avoid the risk of trying to hitch a ride into town. Once your image was out and about, hitching became a risky proposition. Prior to picking up someone standing on the side of the road with their thumb out,