what
I would find if I went on a little farther. I could hear the flies
buzzing and the wild dogs bickering with the vultures. Much closer
and I would smell it, too. Did I
have
to look?
Basically, there was no getting out of it. There was maybe one
chance in a hundred that I was wrong and the centerpiece of that
grisly feast was a woods bison. If I was right, chances were ten to
one against me finding anything that would split things wide open.
But you can’t skimp and take shortcuts. The odds are always
against you until you do stumble across that one in ten.
Still, dead people who have been lying around in the woods for
days aren’t particularly appealing. So I spent a few minutes
considering a spider web with dew gems still on it before I put my
dogs on the ground and started hoofing it toward a case of upturned
stomach.
Five years in the Marines had brought me eyeball to eyeball with
old death more times than I cared to remember, and my life since
has provided its grisly encounters, but there are some things I
can’t get used to. Consciousness of my own mortality
won’t let me.
The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an
open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches
of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen
loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They
snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around
humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Especially
farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or
whatever.
The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn’t bluff. They got
themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking
down and thinking,
Someday, you too, man.
In the pantheon
of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a
vulture.
Maybe that’s why I hate the damned things. Or maybe
that’s because they’ve become identified with my
military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of
futility where young Karentines died for their country.
So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the
dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forcing myself to
inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started
looking at what I’d come to see.
There wasn’t a woods bison in that mess.
I muttered, “I ought to remember Saucerhead’s
tendency to exaggerate.”
I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or
five he said he’d taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre
ugly. They’d been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves,
and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades
differently than ogres do. They don’t form bonds the way
humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an
obligation.
No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.
You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke
around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure
out that the living hadn’t been in too big a hurry not to
loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn’t
the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But
with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the
old saw, “Waste not, want not.”
I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of
comings or goings other than by the route I’d followed, and
that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the
soil was very moist from groundwater seepage. Such places
sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut
the trail of a guy on crutches or one who wore his feet backward;
something that would stick out if I happened to be hanging around
with a bunch of ogres and one of the bad guys showed up. I
didn’t expect to find anything, but luck doesn’t play
for the other side all the time. Got to keep looking for that ten
to one.
I found the nothing I expected, though not exactly because there
was nothing to be found. It was
I would find if I went on a little farther. I could hear the flies
buzzing and the wild dogs bickering with the vultures. Much closer
and I would smell it, too. Did I
have
to look?
Basically, there was no getting out of it. There was maybe one
chance in a hundred that I was wrong and the centerpiece of that
grisly feast was a woods bison. If I was right, chances were ten to
one against me finding anything that would split things wide open.
But you can’t skimp and take shortcuts. The odds are always
against you until you do stumble across that one in ten.
Still, dead people who have been lying around in the woods for
days aren’t particularly appealing. So I spent a few minutes
considering a spider web with dew gems still on it before I put my
dogs on the ground and started hoofing it toward a case of upturned
stomach.
Five years in the Marines had brought me eyeball to eyeball with
old death more times than I cared to remember, and my life since
has provided its grisly encounters, but there are some things I
can’t get used to. Consciousness of my own mortality
won’t let me.
The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an
open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches
of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen
loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They
snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around
humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Especially
farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or
whatever.
The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn’t bluff. They got
themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking
down and thinking,
Someday, you too, man.
In the pantheon
of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a
vulture.
Maybe that’s why I hate the damned things. Or maybe
that’s because they’ve become identified with my
military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of
futility where young Karentines died for their country.
So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the
dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forcing myself to
inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started
looking at what I’d come to see.
There wasn’t a woods bison in that mess.
I muttered, “I ought to remember Saucerhead’s
tendency to exaggerate.”
I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or
five he said he’d taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre
ugly. They’d been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves,
and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades
differently than ogres do. They don’t form bonds the way
humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an
obligation.
No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.
You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke
around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure
out that the living hadn’t been in too big a hurry not to
loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn’t
the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But
with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the
old saw, “Waste not, want not.”
I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of
comings or goings other than by the route I’d followed, and
that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the
soil was very moist from groundwater seepage. Such places
sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut
the trail of a guy on crutches or one who wore his feet backward;
something that would stick out if I happened to be hanging around
with a bunch of ogres and one of the bad guys showed up. I
didn’t expect to find anything, but luck doesn’t play
for the other side all the time. Got to keep looking for that ten
to one.
I found the nothing I expected, though not exactly because there
was nothing to be found. It was
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