She gave me a skeptical look, but slid in. “I spent the morning doing lab work, and the afternoon on a stint at the radio.”
I shook my head. “I understand that we’re short-handed and all that, but it seems rather haphazard to have to depend on you and Susan to handle the radio while you’re not doing lab work. As long as we have people out in the field, we ought—”
“So, how’s the leg?” Mike Gaston boomed from right behind me.
I twisted around to look up at him. “Nathan has me on accelerators, so it should be better by the end of the week.”
He inspected Gilda as though he expected to find my fingerprints on his property. He nodded to her. “Hello.”
She gave him a polite smile, but said nothing in return.
He looked back at me, gesturing at my leg. “You wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for your little buddy.”
I frowned, not sure what he meant.
“What little buddy?”
“Your wallah.”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t just let that thing eat the wallah.”
“The wallah was safe.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that Mike and I were having separate conversations on diverging paths. “Maybe it could climb.”
“Fast enough to catch a wallah? I doubt it. All the wallah had to do was bounce over to the next tree to get away. Besides, the thing’s foot structure was wrong for a climber.”
“I was a little too busy to notice,” I replied testily. “I was more interested in its teeth.”
He snorted. “Just be more careful the next time a wallah wants you to shoot something.” Then he left, leaving me wondering exactly what the hell he’d been getting at.
After sitting around for a few days, the inactivity was getting to me. I’d done enough paperwork to keep a small army of bureaucrats busy for a month, and was beginning to annoy even myself. I hadn’t realized how much I valued my time out in the field until it was taken away from me. So when Adam dropped by my hut to say that they were organizing a picnic, I jumped at the chance to come along. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Six hours later, I was sitting propped against the bole of a tree, my belly full and the late afternoon sunshine warm on my face. Off to one side, I heard a small noise, then a muted wall-ah. I looked up and, sure enough, there was a wallah on a branch looking down at me.
Gilda looked up at him and said, “Your pet’s come to check on you.”
“It’s probably not mine.”
She shrugged. “Might be. It sure is looking at you hard. Do you think it wants something?”
“Dinner probably. Remember that old thing about not feeding stray cats unless you want a pet? This guy never shows up unless it’s dinnertime.”
She gestured at the remains of our picnic. “Will he eat leftovers?”
“I don’t think so. I tried it a couple of times over at Bareback. He wouldn’t come near the stuff. I guess he likes his meat fresh.”
About that time I saw a Wilson’s squirrel-cat just inside the edge of the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, headed more or less our way. I made a long reach and snagged my rifle by the stock where it lay on the ground near me. Pulling it to me, I lifted, aimed…
And died.
Hot pain lanced through my body, seemingly into the tree trunk behind me. My vision swam. I saw double: I saw the barrel of my rifle, yet superimposed over it, I saw the ground coming up. The ground hit me, even as I sat still with my back against the tree. Then the double vision faded, and all I could see was my rifle barrel drooping. I could hear myself gasping tor breath.
“Heath? Heath, are you all right?” Gilda cried.
I could hardly breathe. “God, that hurt,” I whispered hoarsely.
“What happened?” she asked.
“My—”
“His wallah had him,” came Mike Gaston’s voice. “It was controlling him—using him to get something to eat.”
“Mike, stop it. Something happened, and—”
“What happened was that the wallah was hungry. They’re telepathic, just like the animal that bit his leg. The wallah was telling him to shoot it some dinner.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I shot the wallah. When it died, it released Heath.”
“But—”
“Wallahs aren’t like anything on Earth. They’re a new type of animal, halfway between a predator and a scavenger. They eat freshly killed meat, but they can’t do the killing themselves—they’re too small, too weak. So they’ve adapted to use larger, stronger animals to bring down their prey for them. It’s a symbiosis. The animal which does the killing benefits because the wallah brings the prey right to them. Then the wallah gets the leftovers. Since they’re small, they don’t need much, so the predator that kills the animal gets to eat its fill. The wallah simply orchestrates the kill. And Heath here was the best thing it had ever seen. Fresh meat daily. No wonder the wallah tracked after him so faithfully.”
“So you killed it? Why? To prove a point?”
Mike shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s just a wallah.”
“It was his wallah.”
He shook his head. “No… he was its human.”
I gently floated the skitter down onto the crest of Bareback Ridge. It was early morning and the sun was still struggling to clear the horizon. For a long time, I just sat, watching the morning come.
I had brought the wallah with me, wrapped in an old rag. I felt that the least I could do was bring him home to bury him. Not that anyone would know or care, but I felt I owed the poor thing that much.
After a bit I climbed out, went around to the other side of the skitter and got the shovel and the wallah. Stepping carefully—my legs were still none too steady—I made my way down the slope to the place where I’d first seen him.
Digging a hole was harder than I’d anticipated. The pain from my leg slowed me down. After a bit, I had an uneven oval large enough to hold the small body. I knelt down and placed the limp bundle in the ground then began to shovel the dirt back in.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
I looked up to find Gilda watching from a few feet away. Back up the hill, there was another skitter next to mine.
I shrugged. “There’s nothing much to say, I guess. I just thought I’d lay the little guy to rest.”
She stepped closer and used the cuff of her sleeve to dab at my eyes. “I’d never realized you were such a sentimental fellow.”
“I’m not, really. Those are just dew-drops.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “I see.”
I looked down at the wallah. “I’ll be done here in a minute.”
“Take your time. I just got worried when I saw that you’d left early and alone.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to come.”
She smiled gently. “If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.”
“I just…” I began, then stopped, unsure how to express myself.
She cut right to the heart of the matter. “You’re angry with Mike, aren’t you? There’s more to this than just him killing your pet wallah.”
It took me a moment to formulate my thoughts. “He humiliated me, publicly. He proved to all and sundry that I was under the control of an animal not much larger than a cat. I imagine that he thought it was great fun watching me twitch while the wallah was dying.”
She sighed. “Mike only did it because he was jealous. If he wanted to show me how smart and in control he was, it backfired. What he did was cowardly, low, and cruel. I don’t think there’s any more convincing way that he could have shown just how shallow he is.”
That meant… what? I still wasn’t sure where I stood with her. Was there even a chance? “Does that mean you and he—”
She snorted. “No more Mike Gaston for me. Count on it. I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”