Again, Henry Quick did not care.
Half-starved as he was, they still tasted wonderful.
He tried to rol on his side, but even splinted, even beginning to mend, his leg would not let him. His bedsores for could think of no better name for them snarled as his weight came back down on them. He was not going anywhere, even so short a distance, for a while yet. He abandoned the slender dream he'd let grow again of getting back across the mountains before the snow fel .
. The female sim that had been caring for him returned, with what looked like a chunk of log. The old female gave an
excited hoot, pointed to Quick. Seeing him awake, the other sim dropped its burden and dashed over to the maiden plant. This time he took the plant from the sims hand and ate it , before he could be told to. Whatever was in that root was medicine better than most of what the doctors back in Cairo used.
When he had choked it down, he signed Eat?
Yes the female sim echoed, grinning hugely. One of the hatchets from Quick's pack was lying close by. The sim cut the log it had brought in.
Punk flew; the log was old. Two or three more strokes served to split it.
It was ful of at beetle larvae. They squirmed in the dirt.
Youngsters came running up to pop them into their mouths.
the female sim skewered several grubs on a twig, held over the fire, and brought them to Quick. The trapper paused, then sighed. If he was going to live with sims, he d have to live like a sim, and that was that. He screwed his eyes shut, but he ate. Perhaps hunger seasoned the bugs, for he did not find them as disgusting as he thought. Compared to the medicinal root, they were delicious.
The female sim fetched him a cup of water. He wondered many times it had done that while his wits wandered.
Not many human nurses would have been so patient.
The water made his bladder fill up. He did not want to foul himself, not now when he was awake. He called to the sim. When he had its attention, he signed, Fill cup piss from me Not piss on ground here.
boo," the sim said softly, as the subhumans often did a meeting an idea they had not thought of. The sim put the cup between his legs. It took hold of his penis to put tip inside the cup as matter-of-factly as if it were holding his toe. Urinating without fouling himself was one of the pleasures that accompanied healing.
he thought of something. Not drink from this cup, heed This cup, piss only.
“Coo," the female said again.
After al his improvement, the trapper still slept as mum as a young child. He was asleep when the hunting party males returned, a little before sunset. When he woke the next morning, most of them were gone again. The man that had brought him the marten pelt, however, crouched beside him, plainly waiting for him to rouse That waiting was as far as politeness went among sim They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed. Make thing like noise-stick.
Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered.
He would have to learn If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing. Fetch me little tree like that, has signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk.
The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.
Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it. Dead, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.
Face more he was frustrated because he could not make polite expressions of sympathy speech would permit. After some thought, he signed Bad for band.
Bad for band, the female agreed. Toolmaker. All sims use and make tools, of course, but as with people, some were better than others.
The grizzled sim had lived enough to gain a great deal of experience, too. If it had passed on al it knew, the band would indeed suffer.
Henry Quick wondered how much he could help there. what hurt the band would also hurt him.
At the end of the day, he had the trunk of the spruce bare ranches and a notch carved in either end. Good help, he led to the female. It smiled back at him. He realized he had to make a conscious effort to smell it these days, probably, he thought, because by now his own odor was as bad as its.
bout then the males came back. They were smeared in blood but triumphant; they carried a plump doe already cut in pieces. The females and youngsters greeted them with glad cries. The band would feast tonight.
The male that had brought Quick the marten fur ambled over and picked up the would-be bow. It scowled, eyebrows king on the heavy brow-ridges.
Not like noise-stick, it signed ominously. Had it had a sign for fake, it would have signed it.
Not like, the trapper admitted, adding Do like, when the sim grunted a noise redolent of skepticism.
Quick's eye fell on the hind leg from which another male carving chunks.
He had intended to use another bootlace as a bowstring, but he had only two, and the sims , _ would need more bows than that . . . assuming he could make any at all. Sinew might serve in place of leather.
Save, he signed, and then paused, grinding his teeth: he not remember the sign for "sinew." Eventually, by pointing to the tendons in his own wrist and at the back of sims ankles, he put across his meaning. The male gave him a dubious look no butler would have been ashamed of, - but went over to the sim acting as butcher and passed the message along. That male shrugged as if to say the trapper was daft, but eventually set beside him several glistening white lengths, each with bits of flesh still clinging to it.
He did not work on the bow for several days after that.
His fever returned. It was not strong enough to drive him into delirium, but it did leave him shivering and miserable.
He glumly crunched the dusty maiden roots the female sim brought him and wished he felt more like a human being, or even a healthy sim.
Because he was stil aware of his surroundings, he real y noticed then the care the female sim gave him. It fed him, got him water, cleansed him, hauled him from place to place to keep him from lying in his own dung. It might not have been as gentle as a human nurse, but it was more conscientious than most. Not only was this spel of fever less severe than the last had been, it was shorter. Yet even after Quick began to feel better, he kept waking up chilled. Only when he saw the sims also clutching themselves, building thicker piles of bedding, and huddling close to the fire did he understand that the weather was changing. Autumn was drawing near, and hard on its heels would come winter.
The sims did what they could to get ready for it. They brought in stones and brush, which they began to work into a windbreak. As the days went by, it grew thicker and taller and extended all the way around the clearing, with a couple of thin spots through which the sims could push. They also stacked up great heaps of firewood; once the snow started, it would not be so easy to collect. Quick's hatchets helped them there. They could not have cut so much wood with their crude tools alone.