Chapter 52.

Isha smelled water and wet earth and followed her nose. As she picked her way through brush and weeds, she listened to the click and skreek of dry-grass insects around her and the crows in the trees above. Down a dry slope, through greener brush, was water, below her, down a sheer drop. It was a swiftly flowing river that had cut sharply into its old banks.

Her eyes focused on the movement in the river. It seemed alive with things that swam just under the surface, all going upstream. Sleek, fat-bodied things that moved without noise. Her feet moved in place as she thought of herself wading through the water, biting at the things - eating fresh food. But there was no way down from where she stood.

Downstream, an explosion of cawing crows burst from the trees. Isha lowered her ears and dropped into the weeds. When the noise subsided, she rose a little, then a little more, and saw a black shape moving sideways along the opposite bank, coming her direction. She had never seen such a thing - bigger than a human, coarse-haired and black as her pet. It shambled and shuffled, all its attention on the river. Then it paused a moment and suddenly leaped into the water. Out of a thrashing of white water, it lifted his massive head with one of the swimmers in its teeth. The victim flexed its heavy glistening body several times before the animal got it to shore and bit its head off, grunted and snuffled, and began eating the remainder.

The dark animal suddenly raised its head, alert, looking around. Isha dropped deeper into the weeds, but it was not looking toward her - it heard something behind it. It spun around, trampling in the mud what it had caught, and rose up on its back legs, like a man. It spread wide its arms and growled louder than Isha had ever heard any dog ever growl.

And then she saw them - a half dozen of the things she had seen in the street. They had spread out behind the huge dark animal and moved casually, unconcerned about its size or growling threats. They had dog-faces and spidery human-shaped bodies and walked on their back feet and knuckles. When one of them yawned, it showed unnaturally long fangs. Together, without a sound, they moved closer to the huge animal.

It suddenly bounded toward one of the dog-faces, but the smaller animal easily skittered out of reach while another one, unseen, leaped onto the big animal's back, bit him with a ferocious shake of its head, and sprang away, beyond retaliation. The big animal roared in pain and anger and ran at one of them, then at another, swatting with its heavy paws, never once coming close. They drifted out of its reach like leaves moved by wind.

The big animal stood on all fours, head lowered, panting, looking first at one, then at another. Together, the dog-faces moved a few steps closer and the big animal backed away one lumbering step.

With sudden ferocity, one of the dog-faces screamed and threw itself at the big animal's face with its spike-like fangs stabbing through the coarse hair. The huge animal raked the dog-face away, turned and ran toward the river, lunged into it, splashed across to the other side, and climbed up the bank. With a single look back, it lumbered slowly away, into the brush.

Meanwhile, the troop of dog-faces approached the water, lined up, and watched the silver bodies of the water animals as they silently moved upstream like a flashing river within the river. One of them tentatively touched the water, then stood poised, and leaped in. It churned the water and whipped at it with its arms, yet when it came ashore, one of the silver river animals hung stiffly in its jaws, twitching rhythmically.

The dog-face dropped it at the feet of the others and they touched it, sniffed their hands, and then, together, they began to eat it.

Finally catching a trace of their smell and the smell of wet meat and guts, Isha backed away, turned, climbed up the embankment and loped home. She would not come back to this place.

Chapter 53.

The next time the group was together was less than two weeks after Winch broke his arm. Since no one knew Missa or Solomon's birthday, Catrin had arbitrarily set them at November 25th. She suggested that they make it a holiday and call it Thanksgiving for Children, since it was upon the few children, now, that the future depended.

When this was first brought up, Leona said it would be nice to have a big barbecue, however, the last of the meat Martin had stored in the freezers had been eaten several weeks before. "Maybe we could have some fresh meat," she said. "I saw deer of some kind down the street the other day. They're all over the place."

It was a cool evening and they were sitting in Martin and Catrin's living room. Paul was thumbing through a National Geographic and hadn't seemed to hear Leona's suggestion. Winch shrugged. "I guess a barbecue would be good," he said.

"I'm just so tired of canned meat and canned vegetables," she said, warming up to the subject. "Just think of thick juicy steaks smoking over the fire with the sauce turning black on them. And we could freeze what we don't eat and have it for weeks. Wouldn't that be great, Martin?"

"I hadn't been missing the meat," he said, thinking that he would probably be the one that would have to do the killing. "As for freezing it, good gasoline's getting hard to come by."

"Oh, you know some steaks'd be great. You've just forgotten, hasn't he, Catrin."

"What do you think?" Martin asked Catrin.

"I guess it'd be all right. It'd supply us for a week, anyway. It would keep that long."

"Okay," Martin said. "I'll see what I can do tomorrow."

"I could probably dress it out," Winch said. "I saw it done once." But he didn't sound excited.

The next morning, just before sunrise, Martin loaded the clip in a .30-30, left Isha whimpering behind the iron gate, and walked down the street, out toward the country, to an undeveloped area half a mile away, where there were several acres of pasture, a wild-growing grape vineyard, and a weed-filled walnut orchard.

On his way, he saw small gray owls perched on lampposts in front of empty houses, wild house cats carrying dead rodents in their jaws, fading like shadows into bushes and around corners, and birds flitting around inside every tree. All at once, Martin realized he'd never heard so many birds before - hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, chirping, whistling, cawing, in all directions, from all distances. They packed the morning air with their cacophony. Without mankind's trimming, weeding, or spraying, they had returned.

By the time he passed the last house, the sun had risen, and out in the middle of the pasture, he saw two horses standing knee-deep in dew-heavy weeds, grazing peacefully. Over them, a hundred blackbirds swooped and turned, making their wings thin and thicken in their wheeling.

He walked on, the rifle-strap hanging heavy on his shoulder. The vineyard had turned into a jungle. Vines grew between the rows, tying everything into an impassable chaotic meshwork. The weeds grew chest-high. There could be deer in there, he thought, but once he was into it, he wouldn't be able to see five feet, and he'd make terrific noise moving around. If he could move around.

The walnut trees had turned yellow and the fallen leaves were spread atop the high weeds under the trees, making an undulating blanket of gold and brown. Martin shifted the rifle to the other shoulder and waded into it. His enthusiasm was low for the project, but he decided to force effort.

An hour later, he was soaked from the waist down from the wet weeds and he had seen nothing but birds, a couple of rabbits, and a water buffalo. On his way back to the road, he spooked a pig, and it charged through the weeds past him and was gone by the time he got both hands on his rifle. His heart leaped into his throat and his legs felt rubbery for ten minutes.

He was especially glad to be on his way back home. If Leona wanted venison, let her send Paul out to kill it or do it herself.

Two blocks from their homes, a whitetail deer pranced out into the street, stopped and looked back at Martin. It high-stepped back into one of the yards, disappearing behind a tall hedge. It was good-sized with four-point antlers, brownish gray across its back and lighter on its underside.

Martin unslung the rifle, snapped off the safety, and walked more slowly, watching for movement. The deer trotted around the hedge, onto the sidewalk, and turned into the next yard, once more out of sight. Now it was no more than thirty yards away and keeping track of Martin's distance behind it.

They moved like this down the street, toward where Martin lived, the whitetail keeping about three lots between them, not afraid enough to bolt and vanish.

Up ahead, Martin saw Solomon's small figure wander out in the street. Solomon stood there a moment, waved at Martin, but then saw the deer trot out on the sidewalk. He ducked out of sight.

By the time Martin had stalked the deer to within a block of their houses, he saw Winch and Paul appear. They stationed themselves on either side of the street to keep the deer from running further. The animal got one look at them, turned off the street, and jumped a gate into one of the fenced backyards.

Martin ran the length of the three lots as Winch and Paul came toward him, and when he went through the gate he saw that the deer was theirs. The yard had an eight-foot cyclone fence, and Martin stood with the rifle at the only gate.

The deer ran the perimeter of the yard, butted his head into the fence several times, shaking it on his antlers, backed off, leaped at it, hooves clattering on the fence, then fell back. It was on its feet instantly, in the corner, huffing about to go at the fence again.

Close up, the deer was smaller than Martin had thought. It turned and stared at them a moment, fixing its wide brown eyes on Martin.

"Ooh, a big one!" It was Leona, standing behind them. "Kill it!" she whispered loudly.

With its head down, the deer made a half-hearted feint toward them and then tried to jump and the fence again.

"Kill it! Kill it!" Leona cheered, clapping her hands.

The deer ran the length of the fence and turned back and then stopped dead still, its side to them, giving them a perfect target, less than thirty feet away. It turned its head to look at them, nostrils flaring in its glistening black nose, ears cocked forward, as though listening for their verdict.

"What are you waiting for?" Leona demanded.

Martin was figuring something out. Here they were, a few human beings standing on the edge of extinction - soon to be extinct, for all they knew - and he was holding a relic from the old times, being encouraged to kill an animal that knew how to live in this new place better than he did, an animal that would itself have been hunted to extinction, had humans not been held back by laws and penalties. Maybe it was time to do something different.

Martin handed the rifle to Winch. "Here," he said, stepping back, "I don't feel like killing anything."

Winch hefted the rifle and looked at the whitetail, who stood unmoving, presenting a clean shot at its heart. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe killing something for a celebration wouldn't be the right thing to do. Seems like a contradiction, doesn't it." Frowning, he looked up. "Xeng, you want to do it?"

Xeng looked appalled. "Oh no, oh no!" He waved his hands in front of his face. "I never eat that kind of meat. Only fish. Just sometimes."

"Jan-Lou?" Winch said.

"Not in a million years."

"Catrin?"

She folded her arms and shook her head no. "I've seen too many things die." She turned and walked away. Xeng and Jan-Louise followed her.

"You do it, Paulie," Leona said. "Give it to Paul."

Winch handed him the rifle. "You know how to use it?"

Paul looked uncomfortable but he took the rifle. "Yeah, pull the trigger." He held it clumsily, shifting around in his hands, and looked at Leona and then at Martin.

"If you want it," Martin said, "you'll have to kill it."

The deer stood in the same place, breathing a little easier now, its wood-colored eyes bright and wide.

Paul hesitated longer than Leona could bear. "Give me that," she snapped, pulling the rifle out of his hands. She held it to her shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger three times, fast.

The deer jumped at the noise and at the shock of being hit. The first bullets went high through its thighs, damaging its spine. Its back legs collapsed as Leona fired away, shooting it in its side, through its stomach, high in its shoulder, once in its head, snapping it sideways against the fence, finally emptying the clip.

The deer lay there, still alive, wheezing through its mouth, bleeding from half a dozen wounds.

Quivering with rage, Martin calmly took the rifle out of her hands, loaded a single cartridge, walked over and shot the deer through the heart. Walking back to the others, he saw Leona had a proud half-smile on her face. Winch looked a little pale.

"Now you can dress it out for us," she said to Winch. "We can have it tomorrow."

Winch was shaking his head. "No, I don't think so. I don't want anything to do with it."

Together, he and Martin went out the gate and left Paul and Leona behind.

"What do you mean?" Leona was saying after them. "What do you mean? This is for all of us! You said you'd dress it out!"

Halfway back to their houses, Winch grumbled, "You suppose we're a bunch of wimps, Martin? It used to be very manly to kill something larger than oneself."

"I would've felt like a coward, shooting that animal."

They walked in silence, the rifle strap weighing heavily on Martin's shoulder.

Finally, "I don't think I want to kill anything anymore," Winch said.

Chapter 54.

Two days later, when they celebrated Solomon and Missa's birthdays, they filled Martin and Catrin's house with food. Winch brought over a small cauldron of hot and sweet chili - without meat. Winch set it on the full table in the living room, he announced, "And I have a big surprise for everyone later. A big one!"

Missa begged to know, but Winch airily refused even a clue. Solomon grinned and his eyes nearly glowed with excitement.

Xeng had prepared a strange concoction of noodles, cabbage, and canned lychee fruit. Cans of peaches, applesauce and grapes had been dumped in crystal bowls and topped with fresh mint. Catrin had put together an immense fresh salad, and from the kitchen, the house was filled with the smell of hot apple and berry cobblers.

Martin had opened soda for the children and three bottles of wine for the adults. Winch got car flares from an auto supply store and in the backyard set up ten for Solomon and six for Missa. "And this is not the surprise!" he told the children. "It's something else!"

Everyone was there except Leona. Paul moped from room to room, saying little.

"Is she all right, Paul?" Catrin asked him.

"She's, um.... No." His head was bowed deeply and he picked at his fingernails. "She's, well, going to have a baby."

"She's pregnant?" Now Catrin looked troubled. "Martin? Paul says Leona's pregnant."

"She's afraid she'll die," Paul murmured.

"But we have a doctor," Martin said.

"Xeng," Paul muttered.

Martin held his tongue at this comment but he decided not to let it go by. To Catrin he said, "We all need to discuss Xeng's practice and she needs to be here."

She nodded. "I'll talk to her about her pregnancy."

Martin took Paul aside. "Paul," he said, "I don't know what your problem is with Xeng, but Winch would have a useless arm if it wasn't for him. What if it had been you instead of Winch?"

"Well, Xeng is a, you know, not a Christian."

"What does that have to do with fixing an arm or delivering a baby?"

"He's not like us. He doesn't have our values."

"You mean he doesn't know right from wrong or that he doesn't respect people? I hadn't noticed that. Had you?"

Paul kept looking down at his hands and shrugged. "He's different," he mumbled.

"You're acting like someone back in the old world. You can't afford to do that." Paul stood there not looking at him, remote, and it seemed to Martin that his words were having no effect. With his finger, he poked Paul twice in the chest, hard. Paul looked up then. Sternly Martin said, "Let's hope, if you get sick, Xeng doesn't share your values, because if he did, he'd let you die. Because you're different."

Then he walked away, feeling Paul's eyes watching after him. Once again, Paul had provoked Martin into making threats. This didn't sound like the old Martin.