The sim handed him the piece of wood He began hollowing out the branch with his dagger. The work took most of the day. It was interrupted when he had void his bowels. After a while, an old female, wrinkling its broad, flat nose got a handful of leaves and carried the dropping away. He hoped the sim would clean him too, but it did not. sighing, he went back to his carving.
When the rude cup was done, he explained with signs what it was good for.
The grizzled male took some time to understand. When at last it did, it hurried off to test the marvel for itself. It came back with a wide grin on its face. Standing where he could see it, it held the cup over its hea and poured water into its mouth from arm's length. It got wet, but it did not seem to care.
The female that had wanted him returned from another foraging trip. It handed him another piece of cold cooked bear meat. Eat, it signed again. This time he felt ready to try. The flesh tasted like beef, but was greasier. His stomach, long empty, churned uneasily.
His bowels moved again not long after that The young female dealt with the mess in the same way the old one had before. It came back, though, with more leaves, and did a rough job of wiping him.
Thanks, he signed. It only grunted; the gesture meant nothing to it.
Back in the settled parts of the Commonwealths, where sims served humans, polite phrases had come into hand-talk.
They had not, however, become part of the rough, abridged version this band used. Quick shook has head, sorry he could not express the gratitude he felt.
The last thing he remembered when he fel asleep that night was seeing the grizzled sim hard at work on another cup. The one he had made was in front of it. Every so often it would pick his up and study it, as if to remind itself what it was doing.
The trapper woke before sunrise, shivering. He had thought of the pain in his leg as a fire before; now it was hot in the most literal sense. He put a hand to his forehead. Water, he thought. It was the last coherent thought he had for a long time.
He never knew how long he lay in delirium; the hours and days stretched and twisted like taffy. Every once in while, something would lodge in his memory. He recalled, young sim bending over to peer down at him, its solemn face so close to his that it filled his field of vision. A mite was crawling across its cheek.
The mite seemed more interesting to him than the little sim.
He remembered tel ing the male that had brought him l, the marten fur how to get coffee stains out of linen. He went into great detail, though the sim knew nothing of either coffee or linen and understood not a word of English. Using hand-talk never occurred to him. After a while, the sims went away. Quick kept on talking until his mind clouded I again.
He remembered being fed two or three times, all of them by the female that had wanted him. The first time, he choked on a piece of meat and had to struggle to spit it out.
After that, the sim gave him only soft, pasty food. He watched it chewing meat and fruit before passing them on b to him, as if he were a just-weaned infant. He knew he should have been disgusted, but he lacked the strength. He did not spit out the food, either.
Quick heard deep, racking coughing, and marveled that , his lungs and throat were not raw. Only gradually, over a couple of days, did he realize he was not the one coughing.
A little after that, the noise stopped, or he stopped noticing it; he did not figure out which until much later.
He remembered the female shaking him back into foggy awareness of the world around him. It held a plant in front l of his face, a plant with downy, gray-green leaves, each cut go into blunt lobes and teeth.
The flower heads held many smal , tubular, pinkish-white flowers. They were sere and , brown now, well past their peak. Dusty maiden, the plant is was called, one of the thousands of little nondescript shrubs that grew in the woods.
He laughed foolishly; he was a good way past his peak too, he thought.
"Not quite ready for flowers, though," he said out loud. The sense of the words brought him closer to real consciousness. He was not far from being ready for flowers, and knew it.
the female held the root against his lips. Eat, it signed over and over until he opened his mouth. It thrust the root he gagged, bit down. Dirt crunched between his teeth as did the root. It tasted horrid. When he tried to spit it out, the female
sim held a hand over his mouth and would not him. It kept signing Eat.
With no other choice, he did. tears of rage and weakness filled his eyes.
The next thing he remembered was thinking it had started to rain.
But when he opened his eyes, the sun was shining. Yet he was wet.
Sweat covered every inch of his body. It dripped from his nose and trickled through his damp and matted hair. He put a hand to his forehead.
It was cooler. His fever had broken. He drifted away again, but something closer to natural sleep than to the oblivion which he had wandered before.
When he woke again, the female sim was trying to feed him another plant like the last one, but even more beraggled. This time, the sim broke off the root and forced it , into his mouth, the taste was just as bad as he remembered, but, gagging, he got the thing down. After he had swallowed, the female brought him a cup of water and held this while he drank it. He did not think the cup was the one he had made.
He had another sweating spell during his next sleep, and stayed awake some little while when he came out of it. The same sim seemed to have taken over his nursing. It greeted him with yet another dusty maiden plant. He no longer tried to fight its ministrations. Enough of his wits were back for him to realize that, however acrid and revolting the plant it was giving him tasted, they were doing him good. He came awake again at dawn, thinking how hungry he was. He tried to raise himself up on an elbow. The effort left him gasping before he finally succeeded. But no matter how weak he was, he was at last in command of his faculties once more.
He took stock of himself, looking down the length of his body. He whistled, soft and low. "No wonder I'm hungry," said out loud, his voice a rusty croak. The fever had melted the flesh from his bones.
Every rib was plainly visible (he had no idea when the sims had taken off his tunic, and his legs were bird-scrawny.
The splints, he saw with relief, were still on his right calf, it ached fiercely, but now the pain was at a level he could bear.
Yellow serum oozed from the scab where the bone had stabbed through his skin, yet his right leg felt not much warmer than the other one.
Despite the splints, the leg had a kink in it that had not been there before.
He did not care. He was healing. A limp, even a cane the rest of his life, would be a smal price to pay. He marveled that he was alive at al .
Because the agony in his leg had diminished, he was abler to take stock of his other bodily shortcomings, which were considerable.
He felt raw, running sores on his back and buttocks, not surprising when he had been lying there so long. There were more on the insides of his thighs, from imperfectly cleaned wastes. But he was not lying in a great stinking pool of his own filth. The sims must have dragged him from spot to spot in their clearing. He had no memory of it.
Most of the subhumans were already out looking for food.
one of the old females that kept an eye on the kids while their parents foraged walked in front of him. Food, he signed.
The old female fell back a pace. "Hoo!" it said in surprise; he must have been an inert lump so long that the sims no longer expected anything else from him. The old female brought him some berries. They were the unripe and overripe ones none of the subhumans had wanted.