The Hunter passed an enormous transparent covering, under which the terrarium “Meadow from the Planet Ruzhen” was located. There, in pale blue grass, the funny rambas—giant, amazingly varicolored insects a little like terrestrial grasshoppers—jumped and fought. The Hunter remembered how, twenty years earlier, he had first gone hunting on Ruzhen. He had stayed in ambush for three days, waiting for something, and the enormous iridescent rambas had hopped around him and sat on the barrel of his carbine. There were always a lot of people around the “Meadow,” because the rambas were very funny and very pretty.
Near the entrance to the central pavilion, the Hunter stopped by a railing surrounding a deep round tank, almost a well. In the tank, in water illuminated by violet light, a long hairy animal circled tirelessly—it was an ichthyotherion, the only warmblooded animal to breathe with gills. The ichthyotherion moved constantly—it had swum in those circles one year ago, and five years ago, and forty years ago, when the Hunter had first seen it. The famous Sallier had captured the animal with enormous difficulty. Now Sallier was long dead, and his body reposed somewhere in the jungles of Pandora, while his ichthyotherion still circled and circled in the violet water of the tank.
The Hunter stopped again in the lobby of the main pavilion and sat down in a soft armchair in the corner. The whole center of the bright hall was taken up by a stuffed flying leech—sora-tobu hiru (Martian Wildlife, Solar System, Carbon Cycle, Type—Polychordate, Class—Pneumatoderm, Order, Genus, Species—sora-tobu hiru). The flying leech was one of the oldest exhibits of the Capetown Museum of Exozoology. This loathsome monster had been holding its maw, like a multijawed power shovel, agape in the face of everyone who had come into the pavilion for a century and a half. Thirty feet long, covered with shiny hard hair, eyeless, noseless. The former master of Mars.
Yes, those were the times on Mars, thought the Hunter. Times you won’t forget. Half a century ago these monsters had been almost completely exterminated. Then suddenly they started multiplying again, and started preying on the lines of communication between the Martian bases, just like in the old days. That was when the famous global hunt was organized. I bumped along in a crawler and couldn’t see a thing through the dust clouds the crawler treads had raised. Yellow sand tanks crammed with volunteers were darting along to my left and my right Just after one tank came out onto a dune, it suddenly overturned, and people spilled out of it every which way—and just then we came out of the dust, and Elmer grabbed my shoulder and started yelling, and pointing ahead. And I saw leeches, hundreds of leeches, whirling on the saline flat in the low place between the dunes. I started firing, and other people began shooting too, and all the while Elmer was fooling with his homemade rocket launcher, and he just couldn’t get it working. Everyone was shouting and swearing at him, even threatening him, but no one could move away from his carbine. The ring of hunters closed up, and we already could see the flashes of fire from the crawlers on the other side, and right then Elmer shoved the rusty pipe of his cannon between me and the driver, and there was a terrible roar and thunder, and I collapsed onto the floor of the crawler, blinded and deafened. Thick black smoke covered the saline flat, all the vehicles stopped, and the people stopped shooting and only yelled and waved their carbines. In five minutes Elmer had used up his ammunition supply, and the crawlers pushed on across the flat, and we started wiping out anything that remained alive after Elmer’s rockets. The leeches darted between the vehicles, or got crushed under the tracks, and I kept shooting and shooting and shooting—I was young then, and I really liked shooting. Unfortunately I was always an excellent shot—I never missed. And unfortunately I didn’t confine my shooting to Mars and to disgusting predators. It would have been better if I had never seen a carbine in my life.
He got up, went around the stuffed flying leech, and plodded along the galleries. Obviously he looked bad, for many people were stopping and staring at him anxiously. Finally one girl went up to him and timidly asked whether there was something she could do.
“Come now, my girl,” said the Hunter. He forced himself to smile, and he stuck two fingers in his chest pocket and drew out a beauty of a shell from Yaila. “This is for you,” he said. “I brought it from quite a way off.”
She smiled faintly and took the shell. “You look very bad,” she said.
“I’m no longer young, child,” said the Hunter. “We old people rarely look good. Too much wear on the soul.”
Probably the girl didn’t understand him, but then he did not want her to. He stared over her head and went on. Only now he threw back his shoulders and tried to hold himself erect, so that people would not stare at him any more.
All I need is to have little girls feeling sorry for me, he thought. I’ve come completely unstuck. Probably I shouldn’t come back to Earth any more. Probably I should stay on Yaila forever, settle on the edge of the Thousand Swamps and set out traps for ruby eels. No one knows the Thousand Swamps better than I—and that would be just the place for me. There’s a lot there to keep a hunter who won’t fire a gun busy.
He stopped. He always stopped here. In an elongated glass case, on pieces of gray sandstone, stood a wrinkled, unprepossessing, grayish stuffed lizard, with its three pairs of rough legs spread wide. The gray hexapod evoked no emotions from the uninformed visitors. Few of them knew the wrinkled hexapod’s wonderful story. But the Hunter knew it, and when he stopped here he always felt a certain superstitious thrill at the mighty power of life. This lizard had been killed ten parsecs from the sun, its body had been prepared, and the dry stuffed carcass had stood for two years on this pedestal. Then one fine day, before the eyes of the museum visitors, ten tiny quick-moving hexapods had crawled from the wrinkled gray hide of their parent. They had immediately died in Earth’s atmosphere, burned up from an excess of oxygen, but the commotion had been frightful, and the zoologists did not know to this day how such a thing could have happened. Life was indeed the only thing in existence that merited worship…
The Hunter wandered through the galleries, switching from pavilion to pavilion. The bright African sun—the good, hot sun of Earth—shone down on beasts born under other suns hundreds of billions of miles away, beasts now sealed in vitriplast. Almost all of them were familiar to the Hunter-he had seen them many times, and not only in the museum. Sometimes he stopped in front of new exhibits, and read the strange names of the strange animals, and the familiar names of the hunters.
“Maltese sword,”
“speckled zo,”
“great ch’i-ling,”
“lesser ch’i-ling,”
“webbed capuchin,”
“black scarecrow,”
“queen swan”… Simon Kreutzer, Vladimir Babkin, Bruno Bellar, Nicholas Drew, Jean Sallier fils. He knew them all and was now the oldest of them, although not the most successful. He rejoiced to learn that Sallier fils had at last bagged a scaly cryptobranchiate, that Vladimir Babkin had gotten a live glider slug back to Earth, and that Bruno Bellar had at last shot that hooknose with the white webbing that he had been hunting on Pandora for several years.
In this way he arrived at Pavilion Ten, where there were many of his own trophies. Here he stopped at almost every exhibit, remembering and relishing. Here’s the flying carpet, also known as the falling leaf. I tracked it for four days. That was on Ruzhen, where it rains so seldom, where the distinguished zoologist Ludwig Porta died so long ago. The flying carpet moves very quickly and has very acute hearing. You can’t hunt it in a vehicle—it has to be tracked day and night, by searching out faint, oily traces on the leaves of trees. I tracked this one down once, and since that time no one else has, and Sallier père used to get on his high horse and say that it was a lucky accident. The Hunter ran his finger with pride across the letters cut into the descriptive plaque: “Acquired and Prepared by Hunter P. Gnedykh.” I fired four times and didn’t miss once, but it was still alive when it collapsed on the ground, breaking branches off of the green tree trunks. That was back when I still carried a gun.