“Maybe we should have started traveling by night before we crossed the San Fernando,” he said, uncorking his canteen and taking a long draft of warm water.
The mountains to the north were close, blue in the bright sunlight and rising in height from west to east; columns of smoke stood out in several places, marks of the brushfires to be expected at this season. Luckily they hadn’t run into any on the flat floor of the basin, nor into any of the occasional hunting parties who traveled here from the settled zones. They’d made good time across the open prairie with its groves of oaks, and its teeming herds of antelope and ostrich and bison, wild horses and feral cattle and innumerable birds. He could see all those right now, and more: particularly the circling buzzards, and probably condors, not far to the north.
“We’d have lost time, and it’s not as hot here as it will be in the Mohave,” she said. “Plus there’s usually nobody around here except…” She paused. “Oooops.”
As usual, Jim Simmons and Kolo had been riding point; they’d pushed on ahead to investigate what had brought so many carrion eaters together. Judging from the dust, they were coming back quickly.
Simmons reined in; his face looked a little strained. “Indians—Nyo-Ilcha,” he said. “Sun Clan of the Mohaves. They’ve all got peace brassards, and a helicopter visited them yesterday to make sure they weren’t involved in the attack on our rebel friends—pardon me, on the harmless hunting party with the sniper’s posts above the Glendale Narrows.”
Adrienne looked at Tom: “They probably won’t attack us,” she said. “Too many guns with us, and it’s too close to civilization. Plus they value permission to come hunt here—a lot of game migrates south over the mountains in summer.” She turned back to Simmons. “How many?”
“About thirty warriors, and a dozen women for the skinning and drying. Ah…” He looked embarrassed.
“Yes, I’d better hang back while you talk with them,” she said sourly.
He nodded. “And I think I know exactly how to put them into a good mood,” he said. “They’re here for meat.” He unslung his scope-sighted rifle. “My grandfather was always boasting about that record tusker he got back when we were in Kenya. Pity the old bastard’s dead.”
Tom felt an irrational pang as the Scout rode a hundred yards closer and dismounted. Hell, it’s not an endangered species this side of the Gate, he thought. Not in Africa, and not here either.
It knew what a man with a gun was, too; it turned and trumpeted again as soon as Simmons got close, tossing its head from side to side and flapping its ears. Then its head went down and its tail went up, sure sign of a charge. The flat crack of Simmons’s rifle sounded at the same instant—aimed at the third corrugation down on the trunk, the precise spot that would send a bullet through the vast spongy bulk of the skull and into the brain.
The elephant took three more steps and then stopped. The bullet hole was invisible at this distance, and the trickle of blood almost so. It swayed and crumpled forward, vast columnar legs buckling at the knee, then slumped to the ground with a thud that shook the earth and made his horse dance sideways.
“You don’t need an elephant gun for elephant,” Simmons said a bit smugly. “Any mankiller with a full metal jacket will do, if you get a brain shot.”
Tom rode out with Simmons to meet the Nyo-Ilcha warriors—or hunters, he supposed—as they rode up in a cloud of dust colored ruddy by the setting sun.
Damned if I’m going to miss the chance of seeing some really wild Indians, he thought. A couple days of travel had put the brief, nasty fight at the pass behind him, mentally as well as physically. It would be fascinating to get out on the plains and see what’s happened there, too.
There were about thirty of them, as the Scout had said, ranging from teens to wrinkled middle age. All of them looked tough as rawhide as they came closer, tall, leanly muscular men with broad, high-cheeked, narrow-eyed faces; their brown skins were weathered from a lifetime of desert sun and alkali wind. They were healthy-looking despite the horrible smallpox scars some bore and the occasional missing eye or finger, giving off a palpable sense of carnivore vigor.
I suppose any weaklings die pretty quick, out in the deep desert, he thought.
A few were lighter-skinned and narrower-faced than the other tribesmen, and one had brown hair and blue eyes; he remembered what Adrienne had said about white renegades joining them, as well as the remnants of the coastal tribes.
You’d have to be pretty desperate to join this bunch, or crazy, he mused. It’s not like back in colonial times in FirstSide America.
Plenty of white settlers had “gone native” then, but they hadn’t been leaving flush toilets and TV—not to mention modern dentistry and medicine. An eighteenth-century Iroquois shaman was probably less of a risk to your health than an eighteenth-century European medico; at least he wouldn’t bleed, blister and purge you to death.
All the Nyo-Ilcha wore their long hair twisted into twenty or thirty rope-like braids; ornaments of shell or silver and turquoise hung from their ears, or were stuck through the septum of the nose; many were tattooed in jagged patters of red and white and black. The overall effect reminded him of some old-style shock-rock musicians; or shock-rock musicians crossed with demons, because these guys weren’t kidding or playing for effect. This was what they wore every day, and they really were this bad.
Some wore helmets as well, made from the tanned head-skins of animals stretched on wicker frames, with the hide trailing down their backs—heads of wolf, bear, bison, leopard, lion… and one that had him boggling for a moment until he realized it was a kangaroo, which was a bogglement in itself.
They went bare to the waist otherwise, apart from blankets slung around their shoulders; everyone wore leather pants and moccasins, and from the rank old-sweat-and-leather way they smelled, they didn’t waste water on washing much. Their horses were tall, good-looking beasts, rougher-coated than the New Virginians’ but of the same breeds, and a herd of remounts was nearby under the guard of several youths. Every man was festooned with weapons: big steel knives, tomahawks, war clubs that looked like giant potato mashers, round shields of painted hide slung at the cruppers of their simple pad saddles. About half had trade muskets resting across their thighs. Those were simple weapons, replica smoothbore flintlocks, but the stocks had been decorated with bits of semiprecious stone or bone or shell. The other half carried bows, and his eyes widened again at their shape—backed with horn and reinforced with sinew, the powerful double-curved Turco-Mongol type he’d seen in museums and sporting events in Central Asia. He whispered a question to Simmons.
“Some demented renegade taught them,” the Scout answered, sotto voce. “He belonged to a bunch of burks FirstSide who liked to play at middle ages; the bloody things are a menace, believe me. Fortunately they’re not easy to make or use.”
Tom hoped the tufts of hair on the ten-foot lances every third or fourth man carried were from animals, but he didn’t think so—any more than the filed-down butcher knives used for points were ornamental. From the looks he was getting, he was pretty sure any of them would make a welcome addition. He’d been on the receiving end of enough silent hatred for Uncle Sam abroad to recognize it here, and the Indians weren’t being particularly subtle about it—some were fingering their knife hilts, hopefully an unconscious gesture.