At last the thickening twilight made Wingfield stop "We'll soon lose the trace," he said, smacking fist into palm, yet I misdoubt the sims push on stil . What to do. Again Caleb Lucas came to the rescue. "Look there between the two pines. Is't not a pil ar of smoke, mayhap marking one of the sims' nests?"
"Marry, it will" Wingfield turned to Allan Cooper, the most experienced of them at such estimations. "How far away do you make it?"
The guard's eyes narrowed as he thought. "The sims favor large blazes, as being less likely to go out. Hmm perhaps two, two-and-a-half miles, too far to reach before dark.
"Al the better," Dale said. "I'd liefer come on the accursed creatures with them unawares."
It was too dark to see his face reappear, but his whisper was smug: "The bugs’s there, just so.
Here, hands and knees now, after me, and he'll never be the wiser.
"That were so in any case," Dale retorted, but he lowered himself with the others.
Again Wingfield caught the thick, warm stench from the sim It never sensed him or his comrades, who crawled past downwind, another proof Cooper knew his business. The Englishmen peered through a last thin screen of bushes at the band of sims.
Perhaps twenty-five were there. Several slept close to the fire.
From time to time, a grizzled male threw a fresh branch onto it; the sim would let it get low, but never close to going Along with the odors of smoke and sim, the air stil held the faint flavor of roasoed, or rather burnt, meat. Bones from small game lay about. Every so often a sim would pick one up and gnaw on it.
The sims ate anything. A female turned over stones and popped the grubs and crawling things it found into its mouth or handed them to the toddling youngster beside it.
The firekeeper grabbed moths out of the air with praniced skil , crunching them between its teeth.
Another, younger, male was using a hammer made from a piece of antler to chip flakes from a rock it held between its knees.
Wingfield studied the sims with growing disappointment. None bore a knife wound, and he saw no sign of Joanna. The three or four infants in the band all bore a finer coat of the dark brown hair that covered their elders. One was nursing at its mother's breast and fell asloep in its arms. The female sim set it down on a pile of leaves. It woke up and started to yowl. The mother picked it up and rocked it til it was quiet again.
Allan Cooper let out the ghost of a chuckle. "Looks familiar, that."
"Aye," Wingfield whispered back. "We may as well be off. We've not found here what we sought."
To his surprise, Henry Dale said, "Wait." He had been watching a pair of sims grooming each other, hands scurrying through hair after ticks, fleas, and Iioe. The scratchings and pickings had gradually turned to caresses and nuzzlings. Then the sims coupled by the fire like dogs, the male behind the female. The rest of the band paid no attention.
"Shameless animals," Dale muttered, but he watched avidly until they were through.
He was, Wingfield recalled, unwed, and with his temper had enjoyed no luck among the single women at the settlement. Unslaked lust could drive a man to madness; Wingfield remembered the sinful longing with which his own eyes had fol owed a pretty cabin boy aboard the Godspeed.
But even if sure the prohibitions in Deuteronomy did not apply, he would have let sim females alone forever, no matter what vile rumor said Spaniards did. One could close one's eyes to the ugliness, hold one's nose against the stench, but how, in an embraoe, could one keep from noticing the hair . . .?
The sound of the edge of a hand striking a wrist and a harsh whispered curse snapped Wingfield from his lascivious reverie. "Be damned to you right back, Henry!" Caleb Lucas said hotly. "Edward said no kil ings whilst his daughter remains stolen, and if you come to his aid you can do his bidding."
Dale picked up his pistol, which by good luck had fal en on soft grass and neither made a betraying noise nor discharged. "The filthy creatures all deserve to die," he growled, barely bothering to hold his voice low.
His face was pitiless as a wolf's. Wingfield abruptly realized Dale had never expected to find Joanna alive, but was along only for revenge. If by some stroke of fortune they should come across the baby, his comrade might prove more dangerous to her than the sims.
All he said, though, was, "My thanks, Caleb. Away now, quick as we can.
Come morning we'll hash out what to do Cooper led them away from the sims by the same route they had taken in; again they passed by the lone watcher close enough to catch its reek. They camped without fire, which would have brought sims at a run. After gnawing leathery smoked meat, they divided the night into four watches and seized what uncomfortable, bug-ridden sleep they could.
When morning came, they took council. "It makes no sense," Henry Dale complained. "Where was the sim you fought, Edward.
None of the beasts round their blaze showed the knifemark you said you set in him."
"I thought the same, and again find myself without answer," Wingfield said; if Dale was willing to let last night's quarrel lie, he did not intend to bring it up himself.
"Hold, I have a thought," Caleb Lucas said. Somehow he managed to seem fresh on scanty rest. "When we spied the sims' fire, we bared straight for it, and gave no more heed to the track we'd fol owed. Could we pick it up once more.
"The very thing!" Al an Cooper exclaimed. " 'Sblood, we're stupider than the sims, for we acted on what we thought they'd done when the truth was laid out before us, had we only the wit to look on it."
"Shorn of the windy philosophizing, the point is well taken," Dale said.
Before Cooper had time to get angry, Wingfield said hastily, "Could you find the spot where we saw the smoke Al an?"
"Maybe his royal highness there would sooner lead us," the guard snapped. Dale opened his mouth to reply, but Wingfield glared at him so fiercely that he shut it again. At length Cooper said, "Yes, I expect I can."
He proved good as his word, though the trip was necessarily slow and cautious to avoid foraging sims When the Englishmen returned to the place by the two pines, they cast about for the trace they had pursued the day before.
Cooper found it first, and could not help sending a look of satisfaction at Henry Dale's back before he summoned his companions.
They eagerly followed the track, which, to their growing confusion, ran in the same direction they had previously chosen.
"Cooper, we've already seen the brutes did not come this way," Dale said with an ominously false show of patienoe.
"No, all we've seen is that they did not reach the band. Tracks have no flair for lying." Cooper held his course Dale, fuming, had no choice but to follow. A few minutes later, the guard stiffened. "Look here, all of you. Of a sudden, they spun on their heels and headed northeast"
"Why, I wonder?" Wingfield said. He glanced toward the column of smoke from the sims' fire, pointed. "They could easily see that from here."
"What does it matter?" That was Henry Dale. "Let's hunt down the beasts and have done with this pointless chatter."
"Pointless it is not," Wingfield said, "if it will help us in the hunting. Were you coming to a camp of your friends, Henry, why would you then avoid it?"
"Who knows why a sim does as it does, or cares? If it amuses you to enter the mind of an animal, go on, but ask me not to partake of your fatuity."
"Hold, Henry," Cooper said. "Edward's query is deserving of an answer.
In war, now, I'd steer clear of a camp, did it contain the enemy."
"Are sim bands nations writ in small?" Dale scoffed.
"I tell you honestly, I do not know for a fact," Cooper replied.
"Nor, Henry, do you." Dale scowled. Cooper stared him down.
The country rose as they traveled away from the James.