Hunter's Run(14)

"You have other needs?"

"I'll need to find fresh water to drink," Ramón said. "And some food to eat."

"Complex chemical compounds which can be harvested of their potential to facilitate flow and prevent pooling," Maneck said. "This is mehiban. How will you manufacture this?"

"Manufacture? I'm not going to make it. I'm going to catch it. Hunt for it. What is it you devils do?"

"We consume complex chemical compounds. These are ae euth'eloi. Made things. But the oekh I have would not nourish you. How do you obtain food? I will allow you to procure it for yourself."

Ramón scratched his arm and shrugged.

"Well, I'm going to kill something. I'd try making a sling, maybe killing a flatfur or dragonjay, but I've got this fucking thing in my neck. You wouldn't want to take it out of me, just long enough I can show you how this is done?"

Maneck stood unresponsive as a tree.

"Didn't think so, monster. It's trapping, then. It might take a little longer, but it will do. Come on."

In fact, the fastest and easiest thing would have been to gather up sug beetles as he had the other night. He had seen a few even this deep under the forest canopy. Or a half hour of gathering would have gotten him enough mianberry to make a small meal; this far north, you could pick them off the trees by the handful. Feeding off the land wasn't hard. The amino acids that had built up the biosphere of S?o Paulo were almost all identical to those on Earth. But that would have been simple, and would have allowed them to move quickly on to whatever the next phase of their hunt would be. So, instead, Ramón taught the alien how to trap.

His equipment had, of course, been destroyed with his van. If the thought had truly been that he should catch his dinner easily and well, that would have enraged him. Since his intention now was to stall, it only made him peevish. The bastard things had destroyed his van, after all.

Ramón scrounged through the underbrush for the raw material of a snare: whipvine, a few longish sticks seasoned enough to break but green enough to bend first, a handful of S?o Paulo's nut equivalent-a sticky bole that smelled of honey and resin-to act as bait. He was annoyed to find that all this hurt his fingers, which had been as tough as old leather; the syrup bath in which the aliens had soaked him must have melted away the calluses on his hands as well, leaving his fingers ill-prepared for real work. Through it all, Maneck watched in silence. Ramón found himself explaining the process as he went. The pressure of the thing's unspeaking regard made him jumpy.

When at last Ramón had the snares in place, he led Maneck back into the underbrush to wait for some unsuspecting animal to happen by. It was unlikely to take long; the animals this far north were naive, unfamiliar with traps, never having been hunted by humans before, and so were easy to catch. Still, he would stall for as long as he could before checking the traps.

They sat well in among the branches, Maneck watching him with what seemed sometimes like profound curiosity, sometimes like impatience, but was likely an emotion Ramón had never felt or heard named.

"The food-thing comes to you to be ended?" Maneck said in its sad, sonorous voice.

"Not if you keep making a fucking racket," Ramón whispered. "It isn't as if we're getting its consent first."

"It is unknowing? This is niedutoi?"

"I don't know what that means," Ramón said.

"Interesting," Maneck said. "You understand purpose, and killing, but not niedutoi. You are a disturbing creature."

"That's what they tell me," Ramón said.

"Under what circumstances do you kill?"

"Me?"

Maneck was silent. Ramón felt a stab of annoyance at the thing for spoiling the hunt, even as he reminded himself that it was all a play for time. He sighed.

"Men kill for all sorts of reasons. If someone's going to kill you, you kill them first. Or if they're fucking your wife. Or sometimes men will be so poor they have to rob someone for money. That can go too far. Or if someone declares war, then soldiers go and kill each other. Or sometimes  …  sometimes you just walk into the wrong bar and start acting like a cabrón where the wrong bastard can hear you, and he kills you for it."

For a moment, he was back in the El Rey. He couldn't recall anymore what precisely it was the European had said that started things. The details were all misty and uncertain, like a half-remembered dream. There had been a pachinko machine, its tiny steel balls bouncing crazily against the network of pins. And a woman with straight, black hair. It hadn't been anything the man had said to Ramón. No one had liked the pendejo. Everyone had wanted to crack the man's ass the other way, but Ramón had been the one to do it.

Why did you kill him?

Ramón shivered. Maneck's steady gaze seemed to peer into his soul, as if every truth and lie in Ramón's long, sorry life were written on his face. A sudden rush of shame possessed him.

"You have declared war on the food-thing," Maneck intoned and Ramón's sudden guilt vanished. Maneck no more understood him than a dog could read a news feed. With an act of will, he refrained from laughing.

"No," Ramón said. "It's just an animal. I need food. It is food. It's not killing, only hunting."

"The food-thing is not killed?"

"Yes, okay. Fine. You kill animals to eat them if you need food," Ramón said. Then, a moment later: "And also if they're fucking your wife."

"I understand," the alien said and lapsed into silence.

They waited as the sun rose higher in the perfect blue sky. Maneck ate some of his oekh, which turned out to be a brown paste the consistency of molasses with a thick, vinegary scent. Ramón scratched at the place in his neck where the sahael anchored in his flesh, and tried to ignore the emptiness of his belly. The hunger grew quickly, though, and, in spite of his good intentions about stalling as long as he could, it was less than two hours later that he rose and walked out to check his catch-two grasshoppers (almost identical to the locusts of Earth, but warm-blooded and able to nurse their young from tiny, fleshy nipples at the joints of their carapace), and a gordita, one of the fuzzy round marsupials that the colonists called "the little fat ones of the Virgin." The gordita had died badly, biting itself in its frenzy. Its spiky fur was already black with thick, tarry blood. Maneck looked on with interest as Ramón removed the animals from the snares.

"It is difficult to think of this as having anything to do with food," it said. "Why do the creatures strangle themselves for you? Is it their tatecreude?"

"No," Ramón said as he strung the bodies on the length of carrying twine. "It's not their tatecreude. It's just something that happened to them." He found himself staring at his hands as he worked, and, for some reason, his hands made him uneasy. He shrugged the feeling away. "Don't your people hunt for food?"

"The hunt is not for food," Maneck said flatly. "The hunt is wasted on creatures such as these. How can they appreciate it? Their brains are much too small."

"My stomach is also too small, but it will appreciate them ." He stood up, swinging the dead animals over his shoulder.

"Do you swallow the creatures now?" Maneck asked.

"First they must be cooked."

"Cooked?"

"Burned, over a fire."

"Fire," Maneck repeated. "Uncontrolled combustion. Proper food does not require such preparation. You are a primitive creature. These steps waste time, time which might be better used to fulfill your tatecreude. Ae euth'eloi does not interfere with the flow."

Ramón shrugged. "I cannot eat your food, monster, and I cannot eat these raw." He held the carcasses up for inspection. "If we are to get on with me exercising my function, I need to make a fire. Help me gather sticks."

Back at the clearing, Ramón improvised a bow-starter and started a small cook fire. When the flames were crackling well, the alien turned to look at Ramón. "Combustion is proceeding," it said. "What will you do now? I wish to observe this function ‘cooking.'"

Was that an edge of distaste in the alien's voice? He suddenly had a flash of how odd the process must seem to Maneck: catching and killing an animal, cutting its pelt off and pulling out its internal organs, dismembering it, toasting the dead carcass over a fire, and then eating it. For a moment, it seemed a grotesque and ghoulish thing to do, and it had never seemed like that before. He stared down at the gordita in his hand, and then at his hand itself, sticky with dark blood, and the subtle feeling of wrongness he'd been fighting off all morning intensified once again. "First I must skin them," he said resolutely, pushing down the uneasiness, "before I can cook them."

"They have skin already, do they not?" Maneck said.

Ramón surprised himself by smiling. "I must take their skin off. And their fur. Cut it off, with a knife, you see? Way out here, I'll just throw the pelts away, eh? Waste of money, but then grasshopper pelts aren't worth much anyway."

Maneck's snout twitched, and it prodded at the grasshoppers with a foot. "This seems inefficient. Does it not waste a large portion of the food, cutting it off and throwing it away? All of the rind."