“Which clans?” Simmons asked.
“Akaka, Othi-I and Kapata, mostly,” he said. “The Ravens, the Salts, and the Turtles—but there’s word of a new war leader, Swift Lance, and that he’s been Dreaming. And the clans have been Singing his Dreams.”
The No Biscuit sank until it was flying parallel to a series of high east-west ridges and well before their crests. Their feet rose out of the surf to make a series of U-shaped pockets; some of them had small patches of beach between them, and in some water seethed white over rock. Deep forest ran up the canyons, thick with Douglas fir and twisted Monterey pine and redwood. The plane shook, shuddered, buffeted by the updrafts along the steep slopes.
“Great country for hang gliding!” Tully yelled from the rear, and laughed.
“Fasten seat belts, please,” Adrienne replied. “We thank you for the pleasure of your company on Packed in Like Sardines Air, and we will overbook your next flight with no apologies, because you’re just so much inanimate cargo to us. Your luggage may be found in Tibet. Hope to see you again! Better still, send money and stay home!”
The seaplane banked sharply, sideslipped and dropped, then came in out of the west. The water was fairly calm, rippling like a mirror of green malachite before them; the note of the engines changed as Adrienne throttled back, and there was a moment when Tom felt a little lighter than he should. The hull touched the surface, a skip… skip… skip sensation, the seat slapping him in the butt, with a thrumming underneath it like a powerboat at speed as the plywood vibrated to the touch of the water. Then they were on the surface, tall rooster tails of spray arching up on either side; he pitched forward against the belts, then back as the amphibian slowed and the nose came up. Seawater ran down the windows, clearing to give them a view of the shore. In the first passenger seats Sandra and Tully leaned in toward the center and forward to get a glimpse.
To the east a small U-shaped cove sheltered between two outthrust ridges that fell steeply to the sea. Along its southern edge a sheer drop of vertical rock ran from pine-forested height to the sand, and a stream had cut a V-shaped notch in it—a plume of water dropped fifty feet, falling on a narrow strip of beach to mingle with the waves rolling at its foot. Between the northern and southern cliffs the beach tapered inland to meet a narrow canyon, leaving a sheltered delta of coarse golden-brown sand edged with rock walls on both sides, lowest at the apex where it rose to the mountain slopes.
Tom rolled down the window; a gust of wind caught the bottom of the threaded waterfall, tossing the droplets out to sea in a broken rainbow and revealing a shallow cave behind. Then it died down, and the water veiled the cleft in the rock again. The seaplane pitched as it came landward, then slowed as it maneuvered around a rock reef in the middle of the cove’s entrance, white water creaming off the nearly hidden stone. Adrienne slewed the amphibian back toward the center of the beach and chopped the throttles just before the keel touched bottom. They came to rest with a slow shhhhusssssh sound; the plane tilted a little until one of the pontoons touched the surface, and the propellers spun down and stopped.
“Timed it just right,” she said with satisfaction in the sudden blessed silence. “High tide—the plane’ll be secure overnight once we’ve tied off, but easy to float tomorrow.”
By Jesus, Tom thought as he opened the gull-wing door beside him, the quiet like balm on his abused ears. Talk about peaceful…
Silence flowed in through the opening, and the salt breath of the ocean, the iodine tint of seaweed, and pine from the mountain forest looming above them. It was about as hot as this section of the coast ever got in late summer—in the high seventies—and the wind caressed his face like a damp scented towel.
He shaded his eyes and peered into the inner point of the beach, where sand gave way to upward-sloping rock.
“Ah… on second thought, previous occupant still in the room past the checkout time,” he said mildly. “Ah, Adrienne, is that what it looks like?” That part of the sand was shaded by boulders on either side, and an overhanging oak.
“You betcha,” she said softly, popping open her own section of door; that let Tully and Sandra crowd close and look.
There was a partially eaten game carcass lying there, a purebred European boar by its looks; no feral pig had those massive bristly shoulders, black hide, and long upcurving tusks. Crouched above it was…
“A gen-u-wine tiger,” Tully said softly; he had the binoculars, and then passed them forward to his partner. “Big ’un.”
“But is it a Colletta tiger?” Sandra asked impishly.
The beast crouched above its kill, snarling at the humans a hundred yards away. Tom stood, braced one hand like a clamp on the frame of the No Biscuit’s hull and leveled the binoculars with the other. That brought the big cat to within touching range, the fanged mouth close enough to draw a startled oath. Its thick, slightly shaggy fur was a pale gold color marked with black stripes, fading to cream on the belly and throat; the paws looked broad as dinner plates as they worked and slid their claws in and out. From its looks, he judged the weight to be about the same as a small horse.
“Siberian,” he said. “Got to be—too big and not brightly colored enough for a Bengal.”
“Near enough,” Adrienne said. “Manchurian; we got a bunch from the Selang-Arsi for release in this area. Tropical tigers find the winters here a trial, although God knows it’s warmer than the Amur valley; the Bengal type breed like flies in the southern jungles…. We’d better see him off. Hand me that rifle, Sandy, would you?
“Hey!” she shouted, with the weapon in hand. “You there, yes, you—the member of the Future Pelts, Rugs and Trophies of New Virginia—vamoose! Git!”
She slapped a magazine into the rifle, jacked the slide and squeezed off two rounds, a flat crack-crack! It came echoing back from the stony walls of the cliff, and a double spurt of sand erupted not far from the big cat. The shells tinkled down the windscreen and off into the sea foam below the amphibian’s nose; the tiger snarled, a ripping sound clearly audible over the shushing hiss of the waves falling back down the beach. Then it bent and gripped the boar by the middle of its back. Raising its head to keep the dangling legs free, it turned and leaped up the slope, disappearing into the thick undergrowth.
“Mmm… are you sure this is a good place to camp?” Tom said.
He’d never seen a tiger except in a zoo; few had, in a time when more than half the tigers on the planet were captive-bred in the United States. God, that was beautiful, he thought. And it had been weirdly appropriate for the setting—as much so as the vanished saber-tooths that had perished with the glyptodonts and mastodons not long after the first humans came through this way.
“Oh, they don’t bother people, usually,” Adrienne said. “And they avoid the smell of fire—these forests have a natural burn cycle.”
They climbed out of the plane onto the beach, with the No Biscuit moving slightly as they leaped down; with the tide still high it was just barely aground, and it was comparatively easy to swing it around with the tail pointing at the beach. He stretched, something popping in his back, and looked around. Beneath his feet was sand with an occasional pebble; some of the stones felt greasy and had a deep green sheen. He commented on it as they paid out two heavy ropes and tied the amphibian down to convenient boulders, making it secure from anything but a severe storm. The rock he and Adrienne made fast to was suspiciously polished too, and it had an even more suspiciously convenient groove about halfway down.