A Different Flesh

Preface

WHERE DO:YOU get your ideas?

I've never known a science fiction writer who hasn't been asked that question a good many times. I'm no exception. And, as is true of most of my col eagues, the answers I give often leave guestioners unsatisfied. I've had ideas doing the dishes, taking a shower, driving the freeway. I don't know why they show up at times like those. They just seem to.

Sometimes ideas come because two things that by rights ought to be wildly separate somehow merge in a writer's mind. I had just finished watching the 1984 Winter Olympics when I happened to look at a Voyager picture of Saturn's moon Mimas, the one with the enormous crater that has a huge oentral peak. I wondered what skijumping down that enormous mountain, under that tiny gravity, would be like. A story followed shortly.

And sometimes ideas come because you look for them. Like most science-fiction writers, I read a lot. In late 1984, I was idly wondering how we would treat our primitive ancestor Australopithecus if he were alive today.

What I think of as my story-detector light went on. How would we treat our poor, not-quite-so-bright relations if we met them today. I soon dismissed the very primitive Australopithecus. As far as anyone knows, he lived only in Africa. But Homo crectus, modern man's immediate ancestor, was widespread in the Old World. What if, I thought, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, and what if no modern humans made the same trip later? That what-if was the origin of the book you hold in your hands.

The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians inhabit the New World is differem from ours in several ways. For one thing, the grand fauna of the Pleistocene, mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, glyptodons, what have you, might well have survived to the present day. Sims would be less efficient hunters than Indians, and would not have helped hurry the great beasts into extinction.

Human history starts looking different too. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion.

Central and South America, on the other hand, would have been more difficult: Spanish colonial society was based on the ruins of the American Indian empires. And Spain, without the loot it plundered from the Indians, probably would not have dominated sixteenth-century Europe to the extent it did in our history.

Also, the presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, could not have failed to have a powerful effect on European thought. Where did they come from? What was their relationship to humans? Having these questions posed so forcefully might well have led thinkers toward the idea of evolution long before Darwin. Sims might also make us look rather more careful y at the differences between various groups of ourselves.

To return to Gould's question: how would we treat sims. I fear that the short answer is, not very well. They are enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves. The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.

"The proper study of mankind is man." true enough. Sims can, I hope, help us look at ourselves by reflecting our view at an angle different from any we can get in this world. Come to think of it, that's one of the things science fiction in general can do. That's why it's fun.

Viled Bead Simia quam similis, turpissama hestia, nobis!

[The ape, vilest beast, how like us!] , Ennius, quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum found the new World a very different land from the one they had left. No people came down to the seashore to greet their ships. Before the arrival of European settlers, there were no people in North or South America. The most nearly human creatures present in the Americas were sims.

In the Old World, sims have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Fossils of creatures very much like present-day sims have been found in East Africa, on the island of Java, and in caves not far from Pekin, China. Sims must have crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America during an early glacial period of the Ice Age, when the sea level was much lower than it is now.

At the time when humans discovered the New World, smal hunting and gathering bands of sims lived throughout North and South America.

Their lives were more primitive than those of any human beings, for they knew how to make onty the most basic stone and wood tools, and were not even able to make fire for themselves (although they could use and maintain it if they found it).

Paradoxically, this very primitiveness makes them interesting to anthropologists, who see in them an il ustration of how humanity's ancient ancestors must have lived.

Despite their lack of weapons more formidable than chipped stones and sticks with fire-hardened points, sims often proved dangerous to colonists in the early days of European settlement of the New World.

As they learned to cope with attacks from bands of sims the settlers also had to learn new farming techniques needed for soils and climates different from those of their native lands. Hunger was their constant companion in the early years of the colonies.

Another reason for this was the necessity of bringing al seed grain across the Atlantic until surpluses could be built up. The Americas offered no native equivalent of wheat, rye, or barley for settlers to use.

Sims, of course, knew nothing of agriculture.

Nevertheless, the Spaniards and Portuguese succeeded in establishing colonies in Central and South ; America during the sixteen century.

The first English settlers in What is now the Federated Commonwealths was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1600.

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths, by Ernest Simpson.

Reproduced by permission.

A Different Flesh

AFTER THIRTY MILD English summers, July in Virginia smote Edward Wingfield like a blast from hell. Sweat poured off him as he tramped through the forest a few miles from Jamestown in search of game. It clung, greasily, in the humid heat.

He held his crossbow cocked and ready. He also carried a loaded pistol in each boot, but the crossbow was silent and accurate at longer range, and it wasted no precious powder. The guns were only for emergencies.

Wingfield studied the dappled shadows. A little past noon, he guessed.

Before long he would have to turn round and head home for the colony. He had had a fairly good day: two rabbits, several small birds, and a fat gray squirrel hung from his belt.

He looked forward to fal and the harvest. If al went well this year, the colony would final y have enough wheat for bread and porridge and ale. How he wished, how al the Europeans wished, that this godforsaken new world offered wheat or barley or even oats of its own.

But it did not, so al seed grain had to cross the Atlantic. Jamestown had lived mostly on game and roots for three years now. Lean and leathery, Wingfield had forgotten what a hot, fresh loaf tasted like.

He remembered only that it was wonderful.

Something stirred in the undergrowth ahead. He froze. The motion came again. He spied a fine plump rabbit, its beady black eyes alert, its ears cocked for danger.

Moving slowly and steadily, hardly breathing, he raised the crossbow to his shoulder, aimed down the bolt. Once the rabbit looked toward him.

He stopped moving again until it turned its head away.

He pressed the trigger. The bolt darted and slammed into a treetrunk a finger's breadth above the rabbit's ear. The beast bounded away.

"Hellfire!" Wingfield dashed after it, yanking out one of his pistols.

He almost tripped over the outflung branch of a grapevine. The vine's main stock was as big around as his calf. Virginia grapes, and the rough wine the colonists made from them, were among the few things that helped keep Jamestown bearable.

The panic-stricken rabbit, instead of diving into the bushes for cover and losing itself there, burst past a screen of brush into a clearing.

"Your last mistake, beastly" Wingfield cried in triumph. He crashed through the brush himself, swinging up the gun as he did so.

Then the rabbit was almost to the other side of the clearing.

He saw it thrashing in the grass there. Wingfiel paused, puzzled: had a ferret torn out it’s throat as it scampered along, oblivious to everything but its pursuer?

Then his grip tightened on the trigger, for a sim emerged from a thicket and ran toward the rabbit.

It had not seen him. It bent down by the writhing beast if smashed in the rabbit's head with a rock. Undoubtedly it had used another to bring the animal down; sims were deadly accurate throwing sharpened stones.

Wingfield stepped into the clearing. The colony was too hungry to let food go.

The sim heard him. It rose, clutching the bloody rock in a large, knobby-knuclcled hand. It was about as tall as the Englishman, and naked but for its own abundant hair. Its long, chinless jaw opened to let out a hoot of dismay Wingfield gestured with the pistol. Sims had no fore heads to speak of above their bone-ridged brows, but they had learned the colonists' weapons slew at a distance greater than they could cast their rocks. Usually, these days they retreated instead of proving the lesson over again.

This one, though, stood its ground, baring broad, yellow teeth in a threatening grimace. Wingfield gestured again, more sharply, and hoped he seemed more confident than he felt. If his first shot missed, or even wounded but failed to kill, he would have to grab for his other gun while the sim charged, and pistol-range was not that much more than a stone's throw.

Then the bushes quivered on the far side of the clearing, and a second sim came out to stand behind its fel ow. This one carried a large, sharp-edged rock ready to hurl. It shook its other fist at Wingfield, and shouted angrily.

It was the Englishmans turn to grind his teeth. If both sims rushed him, he would never have the chance to reload either a pistol or his crossbow. The odds of stopping them with Just two shots were not worth betting his life on, not for a rabbit. And if they did kil him, they would not content themselves with the game he carried. They would eat him too. Raising the pistol in a final warning, he drew back into the woods. The sims mocking cries followed him. He hated the filthy animals . . . if they were animals. Close to a century had passed since the Spaniards brought the first pair back to Cadiz from their coastal fortress of Veracruz. Churchmen and scholars were still arguing furiously over whether sims were mere brute beasts or human beings.

At the moment, Wingfield was ready to hate them no matter what they were.

He found the tree where he had shot at the rabbit the sims were now doubtless gulping down raw. He managed to cut himself while he was digging out the crossbow bolt with his knife. That did nothing to improve his temper. Had he shot straight in the first place, he would not have put himself in the humiliating position of backing down from sims.

Thinking such dark thoughts, Wingfield turned back toward Jamestown. He scratched at his nose as he walked along, and felt skin peel under his nails. One more annoyance, he was too fair not to burn in this climate, but found wearing a hat equal y intolerable.

On his way home, he knocked over a couple of quail and one of the native beasts that looked like giant, wide-faced rats but tasted much better.

That improved his mood, a little. He was still grumbling when Allan Cooper hailed him from the edge of the cleared ground.

Thinking of the guard's misery made him ashamed of his own bad temper.

Cooper wore a gleaming back-and breast with thick padding beneath; a heavy, plumed morion sat on his head. In that armor, he had to be steaming like a lobsoer boiled in its own shel . Yet he managed a cheery brave for Wingfield. "Good bag you have there," he called.

"It should be better, by one hare," Wingfield replied, pique flaring again. He explained how he had lost the beast to the sims.

"Aye, well, no help for such things sometimes, not two on one," Cooper sighed, and Wingfield felt relief at having his judgment sustained by a professional soldier. The guard went on, "The thieving devils are robbing us again, too. Henry Dale came in empty-handed this afternoon, swearing foul enough to damn himself on the spot."

"If swearing damns a man, Henry was smelling brimstone long years ere this," Wingfield observed.

Cooper laughed. "You speak naught but the truth there, though I don't blame him for his fury this time. Sims are worse than foxes ever were, foxes have no hands." He hefted his matchlock musket. "Without guns, we'd never keep them from our own animals. And how often have they raided the henhouse?"

"Too many times." Wingfield turned to a less goomy subject.

"How is Cecil?"

"Doing splendidly," Cooper said, his voice ful of pride. "The lad will be three months tomorrow." Cecil Cooper was Jamestown's oldest child; the first ship carrying women had reached Virginia only a year before.

Wingfield had a daughter, Joanna, only a few weeks younger than the guard's son.

He left Cooper and walked down the muddy path through the fields.

Several rows of thatch-roofed cabins stood by the log stockade that mounted cannon. On the other side of the fortress were longer rows, of graves. More than half of the orginal three shiploads of colonists had died from starvation or disease. A couple of the newest burials were pathetically smal : even back in England, so many infants did not live to grow up, and life was far harsher here.

But the marker that grieved Wingfield most was one of the oldest, the one showing where Captain John Smith lay. Always eager to explore, he had set about learning the countryside from the day the English landed, until the sims killed him, three months later. Without him, the settlement seemed to have a lesser sense of drive, of purpose.

Still, it went on, as people and their works do. Several colonists swung the gates of the fortress open, so others could drive in the pigs, goats, and oxen for the night to protect them from the sims and other predators. The pigs and goats, which ate anything they came across, throve in this new land. The oxen had the same gaunt look as most of the colonists.

Wingfield's cabin was in the outer row, closest to the forest.

Smoke rose from the chimney as he approached. The door stood open, to let in what air would come.

Hearing her husband's step, Anne Wingfield came out to greet him.

He hugged her close, so glad she had chosen to spend her life with him.

She had had her pick of suitors, as was true of all the women in Virginia; men outnumbered them four to one.

She exclaimed in pleasure at how much game he had brought home.

Back in London, she would have been nothing special to look at: a rather husky, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, with strong features, if anything, handsome rather than pretty. On this side of the Atlantic, though, she was by definition a beauty.

"And how is Joanna?" Wingfield asked as his wife skinned and disjointed his two rabbits and tossed the meat into the stewpot. The rabbits shared it with a small piece of stale venison from a couple of days before and a mess of wild onions, beechnuts, mushrooms, and roots.

The smell was heavenly.

"Asleep now, " Anne said, nodding toward the cradle, "but very well. She smiled at me again this morning."

"Maybe next time she will do it in the night, so I may see it too."

"I hope she will."

While they waited for the rabbits to cook, they dealt with the rest of Wingfield's catch, cutting the meat into thin strips and setting them on racks over the fire to dry and smoke. After what seemed an eternity, Anne ladled the stew into wooden bowls. Wingfield licked his clean.

Though matters were not so grim as they had been the first couple of dreadful winters, he was always hungry.

"I would have had another cony, but for the sims," he said, and told Anne of the confrontation.

Her hand jumped to her mouth. "Those horrid beasts.

They should al be hunted down and slain, ere they harm any more of our good Englishmen. What would I have done here, alone save only for Joanna, had they hurt you?"

"No need to fret over might-have-beens; I'm here and hale," he reassured her, and got up and embraced her for good measure. "As for the sims, if they be men, slaying them out of hand so would burden us with a great weight of sin when we are cal ed to the Almighty."

"They are no creatures of His," Anne returned, "but rather of the Devil, the best he could do toward making true humankind."

"I've heard that argument before. To me it smacks of the Manichean heresy. Only God has the power to create, not Satan."

"Then why did He shape such vile parodies of ourselves, His finest creatures? The sims know nothing of farming or weaving or any useful art. They cannot even set fires to cook the beasts they run down like dogs."

"But they know fire, though I grant they cannot make it. Yet whenever lightning sets a blaze, some sim will play Prometheus and seize a burning brand. They keep the flames alive as long as they may, till they lose them from rain or sheer recklessness."

Anne set hands on hips, gave Wingfield a dangerous look. "When last we hashed this over, as I recol ect, 'twas you who reckoned the sims animals and I the contrary. Why this reversal?"

"Why yours, save your concern for me?" he came back. "I thank you for't, but the topic's fit to take from either side. I tell you frankly, I cannot riddle it out in certain, but am changeable as a weathervane, ever thinking now one thing, now the other."

"And I, and everyone," Anne sighed. "But if they put you in danger, my heart cannot believe them true men, no mater what my head might say."

He reached out to set his fingers gently on her arm. The tender gesture was spoiled when a mosquito spiraled down land on the back of his hand.

The swamps round al Jamestown bred them in throngs worse than any he had known in England. He swatted at the bug, but it flew off before the deathblow landed.

Outside, someone struck up a tune on the mandolin, and someone else joined in with a drum. Voices soared in song. The settlers had only the amusements they could make for themselves. Wingfield looked out, saw a torchlit circle dance forming. He bobbed his head toward his wife. "Would it please you to join them?"

"Another time," she said. "Joanna will be waking soon, and hungry. We could step outside and watch, though."

Wingfield agreed at once. Any excuse to get out of the hot, smelly cabin was a good one.

Suitors were buzzing as avidly as the mosquitoes round the few young women who had not yet chosen husbands.

Some of those maids owned distinctly fragile reputations.

With no others to choose from this side of the sea, they were courted nonetheless.

"Oh, my dear, what would you have me do?" cried a roguish lad, as she turned herback on him.

"Go off to the woods and marry a sim?" Laughter rose, hearty from the men who heard him, half-horrified squeals from the women.

"Al an Cooper says the Spaniards do that, or anyway - cohabit,"

Wingfield told Anne. Spain held a string of outposts down to Magel an's Strait and then up the western coast of South America, to serve her galleons plying the rich trade with the Indies.

"Have they not read Deuteronomy?" Anne exclaimed, her lip curling in disgust. Then curiosity got the better of her and she whispered, "Can there be issue from such unions?"

"In truth, I don't know. As Al an says, who's to tell the difference betwixt the get of a Spanish sire and that of a sim?"

Anne blinked, then burst into giggles at the bawdy slander against England's longtime foe.

Before long, both she and her husband were yawning.

The unnremitting labor of building the colony left scant energy for leisure or anything else. Still, Wingfield hesitated before he blew out the last lamp in the cabin. He glanced toward Anne, and saw an answering flush rise from her throat to her cheeks. She was recovered now from the ordeal of childbirth. Perhaps tonight they might start a son He was about to take Anne in his arms when Joanna let out a yowl. He stopped short. His wife started to laugh. She bared a breast. "Let me feed her quickly, and put her back to sleep. Then, why, we shall see what we shall see."

"Indeed we shall." Wingfield lay down on the lumpy straw-stuffed bed to wait. He knew at once he had made a mistake, but fell asleep before he could do anything about it.

Anne stuck out her tongue at him when the sun woke him the next morning.

She skipped back when he reached for her. "This even," she promised.

"We have too much to do of the day to waste it lying abed."

He grimaced. "You have a hateful way of being right."

He scrambled into trousers and boots, set a plumed hat on his head to shield him from the sun. The plume was a bright pheasant's feather from England, now sadly battered.

Soon he would have to replace it with a dul er turkey tail feather.

He was finishing a bowl of last night's stew, strong but stil eatable, when someone knocked on the cabin door.

"There, you see?" Anne said.

"Hush."

He opened the door. Henry Dale came in. He was a short, fussy man whose ruddy complexion and tightly held jaw gave clues to his temper.

After dipping his head to Anne, he said, "Edward, what say we set a few snares today, mayhap, if fortune favors us, in spots where no knavish sims will come on them to go a-poaching"

"Good enough. Allan Cooper told me how you were robbed yesterday."

Anne's presence plainly was the only thing keeping Dale from exploding with fury. He limited himself to a single strangled, "Aye." After a few moments, he went on, "Shall we be about it, then?"

Wingfield checked his pistols, tucked a bundle of cross bow bolts into his beltpouch, nodded. After a too brief embrace with his wife, he followed Dale out into the bright morning.

Colonists were already weeding, hoeing, waoering in the fields.

Caleb Lucas shooed a goat away from the fresh, green stalks of wheat, speeding it on with a kick that brought an indignant bleat from the beast. "And the very same to you," Lucas cal ed after it. "Damned impudent beast, you can find victuals anywhere, so why thieve your betters' meals?"

"Belike the foolish creature thinks itself a sim," Dale grunted, watching the goat scurry for the edge of the woods, where it began browsing on shoots. "It lacks the accursed losels' effrontery, though, for it will not turn on its natural masters. The sims, now, those whoreson, beetle headed, flap-ear'd stinkards, "

Without pausing but to draw breath, he continued in that vein until he and Wingfield were surrounded by forest. As had Anne's remarks the night before, his diatribe roused Wingfield's contentious nature.

"Were they such base animals as you claim," he said, "the sims would long since have exterminated one another, and not been here for us to find on our landing."

Dale gave him a look filled with dislike. "For all we know, they Wel nigh did. 'Twas not on us they began their habits anthropophagous."

"If they were eating each other, Henry, and you style them

'anthropophagous,' does that not make men of them?" Wingfield asked mildly. His companion spluttered and turned even redder than usual.

A robin twittered among the leaves. So the colonists named the bird, at any rate, but it was not the redbreast of England. It was big and fat and stupid, its underparts the color of brick, not fire. It was, however, easy to kill, and quite tasty. There were other sounds in the woods, too.

Somewhere far off, Wingfield heard the deep-throated barking cries of the sims. So did Henry Dale. He spat, deliberately, between his feet.

"What men speak so?" he demanded. "Even captured and tamed, as much as one may tame the beasts, they do but point and gape and make dumb show as a horse will, seeking to be led to manger."

"Those calls have meaning to them," Wingfield said.

"Oh, aye, belike. A wolf in a trap will howl so piteously it frightens its fellows away. Has he then a language?"

Having no good answer to that, Wingfield prudently kept silent.

As the two men walked, they looked for signs to betray the presence of smal game. Dale, who was an able woodsman when amiable, spotted the fresh droppings that told of a woodchuck run. "A good place for a snare," he said.

But even as he was preparing to cut a noose, his comrade found a track in the soft ground to the side of the run: the mark of a large, bare foot. "Leave be, Henry," he advised. "The sims have been here before us."

"What's that you say?" Dale came over to look at the footprint.

One of the settlers might have made it, but they habitual y went shod.

With a disgusoed grunt, Dale stowed away the twine. "Rot the bleeding blackguards! I'd wish their louse-ridden souls to hell, did I think God granted them any."

"The Spaniards baptize them, 'tis said."

"Good on them" Dale said, which startled Wingfield until he continued,

"A papist baptism, by Jesus, is the most certain highroad to hell of any I know."

They walked on. Wingfield munched on late ripening wild strawberries, larger and sweeter than any that grew in England. He spotted a woodchuck ambling from tussock to tussock. This time he aimed with special care, and his shot knocked the beast over. Dale grunted again, now in approval. He had bagged nothing more than a couple of songbirds.

They did find places to set several new snares: simple drag nooses, hanging snares made from slip nooses fasened to the ends of saplings, and fixed snares set near bushes.

The latter were especially good for catching rabbits.

They also visited the snares already set. A horrible stench announced that one of those had taken a black-and-white New World polecat. Skinned and butchered to remove the scent glands, the beast made good eating.

Wingfield and Dale tossed a copper penny to see who would have to carry it home. Wingfield lost.

Two traps had been sprung but held no game. There were fresh sim footprints around both. Dale's remarkes were colorful and inventive.

The Englishmen headed back toward Jamestown not long after the sun began to wester. They took a route different from the one they had used on the way out: several traps remained to be checked.

A small, brown-and-white-striped ground squirrel scurried away from Wingfield's boot. It darted into a clump of cockleburs. A moment later, both hunters leaped back in surprise as the little animal was flung head-high, kicking in a noose, when a bent sapling suddenly sprang erect.

"Marry" Dale said. "I don't recall setting a snare there."

"Perhaps it was someone else. At al odds, good luck we happened along now." Wingfield walked over to retrieve the ground squirrel which now hung limp. He frowned as he undid the noose from around its neck. "Who uses sinew for his traps?"

"No one I know," Dale said. "Twine is far easier to work with."

"Hmm." Wingfield was examining the way the sinew was bound to the top of the sapling. It had not been tied at al , only wrapped around and around several twigs until finaly in place. "Have a look at this, will you, Henry?"

Dale looked, grunted, turned away. Wingfield's voice pursued him:

"What animals make traps, Henry?"

"Aye, well, this is the first we've seen, in all the time we've been this side of the Atlantic. I take that to mean the sims but ape us, as a jackdaw will human speech, without having the divine spark of wit to devise any such thing for themselves. Damn and blast, man, if a dog learns to walk upon his hinder feet, is he then deserving of a seat in Parliament?"

"More than some who have them now," Wingfield observed.

Both men laughed. Dale reached for the ground squirrel tossed it into the bag with the rest of the game he carried. His crooked teeth flashed in a rare grin. "It does my heart good to rob the vermin this once, instead of the other way round."

His good humor vanished when he and Wingfield returned to the settlement. They found not only Allan Cooper and the other three guards armed and armored, but also a double handful more men. That morning a sim had burst out of the woods, smashed in a goat's skull with a rock, flung the animal under an arm, and escaped before the startled Englishmen could do anything.

"I shot, but I missed," Cooper raid morosely.

"It's a poor trade for a ground squirrel, Henry," Wingfield remarked.

His hunting partner's scowl was midnight black. "The mangy pests grow too bold. Just the other night they slaughtered a hound outside the stockade, hacked it to pieces with their stones, and were eating the flesh raw when at last the sentry came round with his torch and spied them. He missed, too," Dale finished, with a sidelong look at Cooper.

"And would you care to draw a conclusion from that?" the guard asked.

His hand caressed the hilt of his rapier.

Henry Dale hesitated. As a gentleman, he was trained to the sword. But liverish temper or no, he was not a fool; Cooper had learned in a harsher school than his, and survived. At last Dale said, "I draw the same conclusion as would any man of sense: that our best course is to rid ourselves of these pestiferous sims forthwith, as wolves and other vicious creatures have long been hunted out of England."

"I hold to war, Henry, on being attacked, but not to murder," Cooper said. "Mind, we must seem as outlandish to them as they to us."

"Killing a sim is no more murder than butchering a pig," Dale retorted.

The endless debate started up again.

Having no desire to join in another round, Wingfield took his share of the game back to his cabin. Anne was changing Joanna's soiled linen.

She looked up with a wan smile. "There's no end to't."

The baby kicked her legs and smiled toothlessly at her father. He felt his own tight expression soften.

He plucked the songbirds, skinned the polecat, set the hide aside to be tanned. He gutted the birds and tossed their little naked bodies into the stewpot whole. He threw the offal outside for the pigs or dogs to find. The black and white polecat required more skil ful butchery, for it had to be cut into pieces before the scent glands were removed.

"Thank you, dear." Anne rocked Joanna in her arms. "She's getting hungry, aren't you, sweet one? What say I feed you now, so you let us eat in peace afterwards. Can you tend to the stew, Edward?"

"Of course." He stirred the bubbling contents of the pot with a wooden spoon. Now and again he tossed in a dash of dried, powdered herbs or a pinch of grayish sea-salt Joanna nursed lustily, then fel asleep. The stew began to smell savory. Anne was about to ladle it into bowls when the baby wet herself and started crying again. Her mother gave Wingfield a look of mingled amusement and despair.

"Go on with what you were about,*' he told her. "I'll tend to Joanna."

Anne sighed gratefully. Wingfield tossed the soggy linen into the pile with the rest for tomorrow’s washing. He found a dry cloth, wrapped the baby's loins, and set her in her cradle. Anne rocked it while they ate.

Joanna tolerated not being held, but showed no interest in going back to sleep.

She squawked indignantly when Anne made the mistake of trying to turn her onto her belly, and remained irritated enough to stay awake even after her mother picked her up.

Her fussy cries rang loud in the small cabin. After a while, Wingfield thrust a torch into the fire. "Let's walk her about outside," he suggested. "That often seems to calm her."

Anne agreed at once. She rocked the baby in her arms while her husband held the torch high so they would not stumble in the darkness.

With his free hand, he batted at the insects the torch drew.

The James River splashed against the low, swampy peninsula on which Jamestown sat, and murmured as it flowed by unimpeded to the south.

Above it, on this clear, moonless night, the Milky Way glowed like pale mist among the stars of the Scorpion and the Archer.

Elsewhere, but for silver points, the sky was black.

Even blacker against it loomed the forest to the north. Suddenly Wingfield felt how tiny was the circle of light his torch cast: as tiny as the mark the English had made on this vast new land. The comparison disturbed him.

From the edge of the forest came the cries of sims, calling back and forth. Wingfield wondered how much meaning lay behind them. Those bestial ululations could hardly be true speech, Henry Dale was right there, but they were much more varied, more complex, than a wolfpack's howls.

Anne shivered, though the night was warm. "Let us go back. I take fright, hearing them so close."

"I mislike it also," Wingfield said, turning round. "We are not yet here in numbers enough to keep them from drawing nigh as they wish.

Be glad, though, you were stil in dear England those first two years, when they thought us and ours some new sort of prey for their hunting."

He touched the knife on his belt. "We've taught them better than that, at any rate."

"I've heard the tales," Anne said quietly.

Wingfield nodded. As was the way of things, though, not all the tales got told. He had been one of the men who brought John Smith's body back for burial. He knew how little of it rested under its stone, awaiting the resurrection.

To his mind, the sims' man-eating habits gave strong cause to doubt they had souls. If one man devoured another's flesh, to whose body would that flesh return come the day of judgment? As far as he knew, no learned divine had yet solved that riddle.

Such profitless musings occupied him on the way back to the cabin.

Once inside, Anne set Joanna back in the cradle. The baby sighed but stayed asleep; she probably would not rouse till the small hours of the morning.

The embers in the fireplace cast a dying red glow over the single room.

Wingfield stripped off his clothes; in the sultry Virginia summer, nightwear was a positive nuisance.

Anne lay down beside him. He stroked her smooth shoulder. She turned toward him. Her eyes were enormous in the dim light. "Here it is, evening," he said, at the same time as she was whispering, "This even, is it not?" They laughed until he silenced her with a kiss.

Afterwards, he felt his heart slow as he drifted toward slumber.

He was hotter than he had been before, and did not mind at all; the warmth of the body was very different from that of the weather. He did not know why that was so, but it was. Anne was already breathing deeply and smoothly. He gave up thought and joined her.

He was never sure what exactly woke him, some hours later; he usual y slept like a log til morning. Even Joanna's cries would not stir him, though Anne came out of bed at once for them. And this noise was far sofoer than any the baby made.

Maybe what roused him was the breeze from the open cabin door.

His eyes opened. His hand went for his knife even before he consciously saw the two figures silhouetted in the doorway.

Thieves, was his first thought. The colonists had so few goods from England that theft was always a problem, the threat of the whipping-post Not withstanding.

Then the breeze brought him the smel of the invaders. The Englishmen bathed seldom; they were of often rank. But this was a thicker, almost cloying stench, as if skin and water had never made acquaintance. And the shape of those heads outlined against the night. Ice ran through Wingfield. "Sims!" he cried, bounding to his feet.

Anne screamed. The sims shouted. One sprang at Wingfield. He saw its arm go back, as if to stab, and knew it must have one of its sharpened stones to hand. That could let out a life as easily as his own dagger.

He knocked the stroke aside with his left forearm, and felt his hand go numb; the sims were devilish strong. He thrust with his right and felt his blade bite flesh. The sim yammered. But the wound was not mortal.

The sim grappled with him. They rol ed over and over on the dirt floor, each grabbing for the other's weapon and using every fighting trick he knew. The sim might have had less skil than Wingfield, but was physically powerful enough to make up for it.

A tiny corner of Wingfield's awareness noticed the other sim scuttling toward the hearth. He heard Anne shriek, "Mother Mary, the baby!" Bold as a tigress, she leapt at the sim, her hands clawed, but it stretched her senseless with a backhand blow.

At almost the same moment, the sim Wingfield was battling tore its right arm free from the weakened grasp of his left. He could not ward off the blow it aimed, but partially deflected it so that the flat front of the stone, rather than the edge, met his forehead. The world flared for a moment, then grayed over.

He could not have been unconscious long. He was already aware of himself, and of the pounding anguish in his head, when someone forced a brandy bottle into his mouth. He choked and sputtered, spraying out most of the fiery liquid.

He tried to sit; hands supported his back and shoulders. He could not understand why the torch Caleb Lucas held was so blurred until he raised his arm to his eyes and wiped away blood.

Lucas offered the brandy again. This time Wingfield got it down.

Healing warmth spread from his middle. Then he remembered what had happened with one sim while he fought the other, and he went cold again.

"Anne!" he cried.

He looked about wildly, and moaned when he saw a blanket-covered form on the floor not far from him. "No, fear not, Edward, she is but stunned,"

said Allan Cooper's wife Caite, a strong, steady woman a few years older than Anne. "We cast the bedding over her to hide her nakedness, no more."

"Oh, God be thanked!" Wingfield gasped.

"But, " Cooper began, then looked helplessly at his wife, not sure how to go on. He seemed to make up his mind. He and Lucas bent by Wingfield. Together, they manhandled Wingfield to his feet, guided his stumbling steps over to Joanna's cradle.

He moaned again. It was empty.

Anne sat on a hard wooden chair, her face buried in her hands.

She had not stopped sobbing since she returned to her senses. She rocked back and forth in unending grief. "God, God, God have mercy on my dear Joanna," she wailed.

"I will get her back," Wingield said, "or take such a vengeance that no sim shal dare venture within miles of an Englishman ever again."

"I want no vengeance," Anne cried. "I want my darling babe again."

The colonists' first efforts at pursuit had already failed. They had set dogs on the sims' trail less than an hour after`

the attack. With the blood Wingfield had drawn, the trail had been fresh and clear. Only for a while, though: the ground north of Jamestown was so full of ponds and streams that the dogs lost the scent.

Further tracking had to wait for daylight and with every passing minute, the sims took themselves farther away.

"Why?" Anne asked. The question was not directed at anyone.

"Why should even such heartless brutes snatch up a defenseless babe?

What are they doing to her?"

Wingfield's imagination conjured up a horde of possibilities, each worse than the one before. He knew he could never mention even the least of them to his wife.

But her first agonized question puzzled him as well. He had never heard of the sims acting as they had that night. They kil ed, but they did not capture he felt heartsick anew as he worked out the implications of what Caleb Lucas said, "I fear me they but sought special y tender flesh." He spoke softly, so Anne would not hear.

Wingfield shook his head. The motion hurt. "Why take so great a risk for such small game?" He gritted his teeth at speaking of Joanna so, but went on "They would have gained more meat by waiting until one of us stepped outside his cabin to ease himself, striking him down, and making away with him. If they had been cunning, they might have escaped notice till dawn."

"Wherefore, then?" Lucas asked. Wingfield could only spread his hands.

"What do you purpose doing now?" Al an Cooper added.

"As I told Anne," Wingfield said, rising. His head stil throbbed dreadfully and he was wobbly on his feet, but purpose gave his voice iron. "I will search out the places where the sims encamp in their wanderings, and look for traces of Joanna. If God grant I find her living, I'll undertake a rescue. If it be otherwise, "

Henry Dale stuck his head in the cabin door. His lips stretched back in a savage grin. ", Then kill them all," he finished for Wingfield. "

'Twere best you do it anyhow, at first encounter."

"No," Wingfield said, "nor anyone else on my behalf, I pray you.

Until I have oertain knowledge my daughter is dead, I needs must act as if she yet lives, and do nothing to jeopardize her fate. A wholesale slaughter of sims might well inflame them al ."

"What cares one pack of beasts what befalls another?" Dale asked scornful y.

Allan Cooper had a comment more to the point."Should you fare forth alone, Edward, I greatly doubt you'd work a wholesale slaughter in any case, more likely the sims would slay you."

That set off fresh paroxysms of weeping from Anne. Wingfield looked daggers at the guard. "I can but do my best. My hunting has taught me somewhat of woodscraft, and bul et and bolt strike harder and farther than stones." He spoke mostly for his wife's benefit; he knew too well Cooper was probably right. Still, he went on, "You'd try no less were it your Cecil."

"Oh, aye, so I would," Cooper said. "You misunderstand me, though. My thought was to come with you."

"And I," Henry Dale said. Caleb Lucas echoed him a moment later.

Tears stung Wingfield's eyes. Anne leapt from her chair and kissed each of his friends in turn. At any other time that would have shocked and angered him; now he thought it no less than their due.

Yet fear for his daughter forced expedience from him. He said; "Henry, I know your skill amongst the trees. But what of you, Al an? Stealth is paramount here, and clanking about armored a poor preparation for't."

"Fear not on my score," Cooper said. "Or ever I took the royal shilling, I had some nodding acquaintanoe with the Crown's estates and the game on them." He grinned slyly.

Wingfield asked no more questions; if Cooper had made hisliving poaching, he would never say so straight out.

"What will the council say, though, Allan?" Dale demanded.

"They will not take kindly to a guardsman baring off at wild adventure."

"Then damnation take them," Cooper replied. "Am I not a free Englishman, able to do as I will rather than harken to carping fools? Every subject's duty is to the king's; but every subject's soul is his own."

"Wel spoken! Imitate the action of the tiger!" cried Caleb Lucas, giving back one quote from Shakespeare for another.

The other three men were careful y studying him. Wingfield said, "You will correct me if I am wrong, Caleb, but is't not so your only forays into the forest have been as a lumberer?"

The young man gave a reluctant nod. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dale forestalled him: "Then you must stay behind. Edward has reason in judging this a task for none but the woodswise."

Wingfield set a hand on Lucas's shoulder. "No sense in anger or disappointment, Caleb. I know the offer came in al sincerity."

"And I," Anne echoed softly. Lucas jerked his head in acknowledgment and left.

"Let's be at it, then," Cooper said. "To our weapons, then meet here and away." Wingfield knew the guard had no hope of finding Joanna alive when he heard Cooper warn Henry Dale, "Fetch plenty of powder and bullets." Dale's brusque nod said the same.

Before noon, the three men reached the spot where the dogs had lost the sims' scent. As Wingfield had known it would, the trail led through the marshes that made up so much of the peninsula on which Jamestown lay. By unspoken consent, he and his companions paused to rest and to scrape at the mud clinging to their boots.

His crossbow at the ready, Wingfield looked back the way he had come, then to either side. For some time now, he had had a prickly feeling of being watched, though he told himself a sim would have to be mad to go so near the English settlement after the outrage of the night before.

But Cooper and Dale also seemed uneasy. The guard rubbed his chin, saying, "I like this not. I’m all ajitter, as I've not felt since the poxy Spaniards snuck a patrol round our flank in Holland."

"We'd best push on," Henry Dale said. "We'll cast about upstream and down, in hopes of picking up tracks again.

Were things otherwise, I'd urge us separaTe, one going one way and two the other, to speed the search. Now", he bared his teeth in frustration, "'twere better we stayed in a group. The bushes quivered, about fifteen paces away. Three weapons swung up as one. But instead of a sim bursting from the undergrowth, out came Caleb Lucas. "You young idiot! We might have shot you!" Cooper snarled. His finger was tight on the trigger of his pistol; as a veteran soldier, he always favored firearms.

Lucas was even filthier than the men he faced. His grin flashed in his mud-spattered face. "Send me back now if you dare, my good sirs.

These past two hours I've dogged your steps, betimes close enough to spit, and never did you tumble to it. Have I not, then, sufficient of the woodsman's art to accompany you farther?"

Wingfield removed the bolt from his bow, released the string. "I own myself beaten, Caleb, for how should we say you nay? The damsels back in town, though, will take your leaving hard."

"They'll have plenty to company them whilst I'm gone, and shall be there on my return," Lucas said cheerfully.

"And in sooth, Edward, are we not off to rescue a fair young damsel of our own?"

"Not wondrous fair, perhaps, since the little lass favors me, but I take your meaning." Wingfield considered. "We'll do as Henry proposed before your eruption, and divide at the streambank.

Caleb, you'll come with me this way Henry and Allan shal take the other. Half a mile either way, then back here to meet. A pistol-shot to signal a find; otherwise we go on as best we can.

Agreed?"

Everyone nodded. A sergeant to the core, Cooper mutted, "As well I don't have Caleb with me I want a man to do as he's told." Unabashed, Lucas came to such a rigid parody of attention that the others could not help laugh.

Caleb and Wingfield hurried along the edge of the creek, their heads down.

Herons and white-plumed egrets flapped away; frogs and turtles splashed into the turbid water. "There!" Lucas said.

His finger stabbed forth. The print of a bare foot was pressed deeply into the mud.

"Good on yout" Wingfield clapped him on the back drew out one pistol, and fired it into the air. He reloaded in the few minutes before Dale and Cooper came trotting up.

Dale, who was red as a tile, grunted when he spied the footprint.

"The brutes did not slip far enough aside, eh, my hearties? Well, after them!"

The trail ran northwest, almost paral eling the James River but moving slowly away. It became harder to follow as the ground grew drier. And the effort of sticking to it meant the four trackers had to go more slowly than the sims they pursued.

By evening, the Englishmen were beyond the territory they knew well.

Explorers had penetrated much farther into the interior of America, of course, but not all of them had come back, and with the colony's survival hanging by so slender a thread, exploration for its own sake won scant encouragement.

At last the thickening twilight made Wingfield stop "We'll soon lose the trace," he said, smacking fist into palm, yet I misdoubt the sims push on stil . What to do. Again Caleb Lucas came to the rescue. "Look there between the two pines. Is't not a pil ar of smoke, mayhap marking one of the sims' nests?"

"Marry, it will" Wingfield turned to Allan Cooper, the most experienced of them at such estimations. "How far away do you make it?"

The guard's eyes narrowed as he thought. "The sims favor large blazes, as being less likely to go out. Hmm perhaps two, two-and-a-half miles, too far to reach before dark.

"Al the better," Dale said. "I'd liefer come on the accursed creatures with them unawares."

It was too dark to see his face reappear, but his whisper was smug: "The bugs’s there, just so.

Here, hands and knees now, after me, and he'll never be the wiser.

"That were so in any case," Dale retorted, but he lowered himself with the others.

Again Wingfield caught the thick, warm stench from the sim It never sensed him or his comrades, who crawled past downwind, another proof Cooper knew his business. The Englishmen peered through a last thin screen of bushes at the band of sims.

Perhaps twenty-five were there. Several slept close to the fire.

From time to time, a grizzled male threw a fresh branch onto it; the sim would let it get low, but never close to going Along with the odors of smoke and sim, the air stil held the faint flavor of roasoed, or rather burnt, meat. Bones from small game lay about. Every so often a sim would pick one up and gnaw on it.

The sims ate anything. A female turned over stones and popped the grubs and crawling things it found into its mouth or handed them to the toddling youngster beside it.

The firekeeper grabbed moths out of the air with praniced skil , crunching them between its teeth.

Another, younger, male was using a hammer made from a piece of antler to chip flakes from a rock it held between its knees.

Wingfield studied the sims with growing disappointment. None bore a knife wound, and he saw no sign of Joanna. The three or four infants in the band all bore a finer coat of the dark brown hair that covered their elders. One was nursing at its mother's breast and fell asloep in its arms. The female sim set it down on a pile of leaves. It woke up and started to yowl. The mother picked it up and rocked it til it was quiet again.

Allan Cooper let out the ghost of a chuckle. "Looks familiar, that."

"Aye," Wingfield whispered back. "We may as well be off. We've not found here what we sought."

To his surprise, Henry Dale said, "Wait." He had been watching a pair of sims grooming each other, hands scurrying through hair after ticks, fleas, and Iioe. The scratchings and pickings had gradually turned to caresses and nuzzlings. Then the sims coupled by the fire like dogs, the male behind the female. The rest of the band paid no attention.

"Shameless animals," Dale muttered, but he watched avidly until they were through.

He was, Wingfield recalled, unwed, and with his temper had enjoyed no luck among the single women at the settlement. Unslaked lust could drive a man to madness; Wingfield remembered the sinful longing with which his own eyes had fol owed a pretty cabin boy aboard the Godspeed.

But even if sure the prohibitions in Deuteronomy did not apply, he would have let sim females alone forever, no matter what vile rumor said Spaniards did. One could close one's eyes to the ugliness, hold one's nose against the stench, but how, in an embraoe, could one keep from noticing the hair . . .?

The sound of the edge of a hand striking a wrist and a harsh whispered curse snapped Wingfield from his lascivious reverie. "Be damned to you right back, Henry!" Caleb Lucas said hotly. "Edward said no kil ings whilst his daughter remains stolen, and if you come to his aid you can do his bidding."

Dale picked up his pistol, which by good luck had fal en on soft grass and neither made a betraying noise nor discharged. "The filthy creatures all deserve to die," he growled, barely bothering to hold his voice low.

His face was pitiless as a wolf's. Wingfield abruptly realized Dale had never expected to find Joanna alive, but was along only for revenge. If by some stroke of fortune they should come across the baby, his comrade might prove more dangerous to her than the sims.

All he said, though, was, "My thanks, Caleb. Away now, quick as we can.

Come morning we'll hash out what to do Cooper led them away from the sims by the same route they had taken in; again they passed by the lone watcher close enough to catch its reek. They camped without fire, which would have brought sims at a run. After gnawing leathery smoked meat, they divided the night into four watches and seized what uncomfortable, bug-ridden sleep they could.

When morning came, they took council. "It makes no sense," Henry Dale complained. "Where was the sim you fought, Edward.

None of the beasts round their blaze showed the knifemark you said you set in him."

"I thought the same, and again find myself without answer," Wingfield said; if Dale was willing to let last night's quarrel lie, he did not intend to bring it up himself.

"Hold, I have a thought," Caleb Lucas said. Somehow he managed to seem fresh on scanty rest. "When we spied the sims' fire, we bared straight for it, and gave no more heed to the track we'd fol owed. Could we pick it up once more.

"The very thing!" Al an Cooper exclaimed. " 'Sblood, we're stupider than the sims, for we acted on what we thought they'd done when the truth was laid out before us, had we only the wit to look on it."

"Shorn of the windy philosophizing, the point is well taken," Dale said.

Before Cooper had time to get angry, Wingfield said hastily, "Could you find the spot where we saw the smoke Al an?"

"Maybe his royal highness there would sooner lead us," the guard snapped. Dale opened his mouth to reply, but Wingfield glared at him so fiercely that he shut it again. At length Cooper said, "Yes, I expect I can."

He proved good as his word, though the trip was necessarily slow and cautious to avoid foraging sims When the Englishmen returned to the place by the two pines, they cast about for the trace they had pursued the day before.

Cooper found it first, and could not help sending a look of satisfaction at Henry Dale's back before he summoned his companions.

They eagerly followed the track, which, to their growing confusion, ran in the same direction they had previously chosen.

"Cooper, we've already seen the brutes did not come this way," Dale said with an ominously false show of patienoe.

"No, all we've seen is that they did not reach the band. Tracks have no flair for lying." Cooper held his course Dale, fuming, had no choice but to follow. A few minutes later, the guard stiffened. "Look here, all of you. Of a sudden, they spun on their heels and headed northeast"

"Why, I wonder?" Wingfield said. He glanced toward the column of smoke from the sims' fire, pointed. "They could easily see that from here."

"What does it matter?" That was Henry Dale. "Let's hunt down the beasts and have done with this pointless chatter."

"Pointless it is not," Wingfield said, "if it will help us in the hunting. Were you coming to a camp of your friends, Henry, why would you then avoid it?"

"Who knows why a sim does as it does, or cares? If it amuses you to enter the mind of an animal, go on, but ask me not to partake of your fatuity."

"Hold, Henry," Cooper said. "Edward's query is deserving of an answer.

In war, now, I'd steer clear of a camp, did it contain the enemy."

"Are sim bands nations writ in small?" Dale scoffed.

"I tell you honestly, I do not know for a fact," Cooper replied.

"Nor, Henry, do you." Dale scowled. Cooper stared him down.

The country rose as they traveled away from the James.

The sims they were fol owing stuck to wooded and brushy areas, even when that meant deviating from the chosen course. After seeing the fourth or fifth such zigzag, Cooper grunted, "Nation or no, that pair didn't relish being spotted. Soldiers travel so, behind the foe's lines."

"Even if you have reason," Caleb Lucas said a while later, ruefully rubbing at the thorn scratches on his arms, "why did the wretched creatures have to traverse every patch of brambles they could find?"

"Not for the sake of hearing your whining, surely." Had Cooper given Henry Dale that rebuke, he would have growled it. With the irrepressible young Lucas, he could not keep a twinkle from his eyes.

AII the Englishmen were scratched and bleeding. Wingfield stopped to extract a briar that had pierced his breeches.

The bushes around him were especially thick and thorny, their Ieaves a glistening, venomous dark green. Only against that background would the white bit of cloth have caught his notice.

He reached out and plucked it from its bramble without realizing for a moment what it meant. Then he let out a whoop that horrified his comrades. They stared at him as at a madman while he held up the tiny piece of linen.

"From Joanna's shift!" he said when he had calmed enough to speak clearly again. "It must be, the sims know thing of fabric, nor even pelts to cover their loins."

Save their own pelts, that is," Lucas grinned. Then the excitement took him too. "Proof we're on the right track."

And proof, or at least hope, my little girl yet lives," he said, as much to himself as to the rest. "Had they sought no more than meat, they'd not have left the shift round her so long, would they?" He looked to the others for reassurance.

"It were unlikely, Edward," Cooper said gently. Caleb Lucas nodded.

Henry Dale said nothing. Wiping his florid face with his sleeve, he pushed ahead.

Late that afternoon, near the edge of a creek, the Englishmen came upon the scaly tail of a muskrat, al that was left of the beast save for a blood-soaked patch of grass Allan Cooper found close by. "Here the sims stopped to feed," the guard judged. Further casting about revealed a sharpened stone that confirmed his guess.

"This making of tools on the spot has its advantages," Caleb Lucas said.

"One need never be without."

"Oh, aye, indeed, if one has but three different tools to make," Henry Dale said sourly.

Wingfield did his best to ignore the continual bickering. He went over the ground inch by inch, searching for signs of Joanna. He final y found a spattering of loose, yellowbrown muck on some chickweed not far from the edge of the stream. His heart leaped.

The others came rushing over at his exclamation. Dale and Lucas stared uncomprehending at the dropping, but Allan Cooper recognized it at once.

"The very same as my little Cecil makes, Edward," he said, slapping Wingfield on the back. "This far, your baby was alive."

"Aye," Wingfield got out, giddy with relief. His greatest fear had been that the sims would simply dash her against a treetrunk and throw her tiny broken body into the woods for scavengers to eat.

"They have her yet, I must grant it," Dale said. "Do they take her back to their fellows for tortures viler than those they might perform in haste?"

"Shut up, damn you!" Wingfield shouted, and would have gone for Dale had Cooper and Caleb Lucas not quickly stepped between them.

"Have you not cal ed them beasts all this while, Henry?" Lucas said.

"Beasts kill, aye, but they do not torture. That is reserved for men."

"Leave be, al of you," Cooper ordered in a paradeground voice.

"Yes, you too, Caleb. Such squabbling avails us nothing, the more so when a life's at stake."

The guard's plainspoken good sense was obvious to everyone, though Wingfield could not help adding, "See you remember we know it is a rescue now, Henry. I charge you, do nothing to put Joanna at risk."

Dale nodded gruffly.

The Englishmen hurried on; hope put fresh heart in them and sped their weary feet. Soon they were going down into marshier country again as they approached the York River, which paral eled the James to the north.

They al kept peering ahead for a telltale smudge of smoke against the sky.

Darkness fell before they found it. They had to stop, for fear of losing the sims' trail. Wingfield drew first watch. He sat in the warm darkness, wishing he had some way to let Anne know what he had found.

His wife would still be suffering the agony of fear and uncertainty he had felt until that afternoon, and would keep on suffering it until he brought their daughter home.

He refused to think of failing. He had before, when he thought Joanna dead. But having come so close, he felt irrationally sure things would somehow work out. He fought that feeling too. It could make him careless, and bring all his revived dreams to nothing.

When he surrendered sentry duty to Lucas, he thought he would be too keyed up to sleep. As it had back in his own bed, though, exhaustion took its tol ; the damp ground might have been a goosedown mattress ten feet thick.

if Henry Dale spotted the sims' fire first. The Englishmen were much closer to it than they had been to the one a couple of days before, for it was smaller and not as smoky. The hour was just past noon.

"We wait here," Allan Cooper decreed, "so we may approach by night and lessen the danger of being tdiscovered." They soon found that danger was real.

A sim on its way back to the fire walked within a double handful of paces of their hiding place. By luck, it was carrying a fawn it had kil ed, and did not notice them.

"Ah, venison," Caleb Lucas sighed softly, gnawing on smoked meat tough enough to patch the soles of his boots.

The wait seemed endless to Wingfield; the sun crawled across the sky. To be so close and yet unable to do anything to help his daughter ate at him. But getting himself kil ed with an ill-considered rush would do her no good either.

The Englishmen made low-voiced plans. All had to be tentative.

So much depended on where Joanna was around the fire, what the sims were doing to her (Wingfield would not let himself consider Henry Dale's notion), how many sims there were, how much surprise the rescuers could achieve.

At last the birds of day began to fall silent. The sky went gold and crimson in the west, deep blue and then purple overhead. When stars came out not far from where the sun had set, Al an Cooper nudged his fellows. "Now we move cannily, mind."

The guard led them as they crept toward the fire. He was humming a Spanish tune under his breath. Wingfield did not think he knew he was doing it. But he had learned his soldiering against Spanish troops, and a return to it brought back old habits.

This band of sims dwelt in more open country than had the other.

The Englishmen could not get very close. Half their plans, the ones involving unexpectedly bursting from the woods and snatching up Joanna, evaporated on the instant. They whispered curses and watched from the nearest shrubbery.

At first glance the scene in front of them did not seem much different from the one they had watched a couple of nights before.

There were more sims here, perhaps as many as forty. Three or four males were roasting roots and bits of meat on sticks over the fire, and passing the chunks of food to sims who stood round waiting.

Another male was cutting up an animal that, with its skin removed, Wingfield could not identify. He stiffened. That was no stone tool the sim used; it was a good steel knife. Henry Dale noticed that at about the same time he did. "Damned thieving creatures," he muttered.

A female set the young one it was holding down on the ground, then rose and ambled away from the fire, probably to relieve itself. The infant followed it with its eyes and shrieked in distress. The adult came back and played with it, dandling it in its arms, rol ing it about, and making faces at it. After the child was quiet, the female left it again.

This time, it stayed quiet until its mother returned.

This band did not have one firekeeper as the other had.

From time to time, a female or young male would come up to the blaze and toss on a branch or a shrub. The system seemed haphazard to Wingfield, but the fire never looked likely to go out.

A group of sims had gathered on the far side of the fire around something their bodies kept Wingfield from making out. Whatever it was, it mightily interested them. Some stood, others hunkered down on their haunches for a closer look. They pointed and jabbered; once one shook another, as if to get a point across. Wingfield could not help chuckling to himself, they reminded him of so many Englishmen at a public house.

Then the chuckle died in his throat, for he saw that one of the males there had a great glob of mud plastered to the hair from its rib cage.

The sim moved slowly and painfully.

Wingfield touched Cooper's arm. "On my oath, that is the one I fought. I knew I marked him with my knife."

"Then we tracked truly, as I thought. Good. Now we, " Wingfield's hand clamped down tight on the guard's wrist, silencing him. From the center of that tightly packed bunch of sims had come a familiar thin, wailing cry.

"Joanna!"

"How do you know 'tis not one of their cubs yowling?" t Henry Dale demanded. "All brats sound alike."

"Only to a single man," Wingfield retorted, too full of exaltation and fear to care how he spoke. Against al hope, his daughter lived, but how was he to free her from her captors? And what, the question ate at him, as it had from the onset, what had prompted the sims to steal her in the first place?

A couple of sims stepped away to take food, opening a gap in the crowd.

"There, do you see?" Wingfield said triumphantly. No matter how dirty she was (quite, at the moment), smooth, pink Joanna could never be mistaken for a baby sim.

As if to make that pikestaff-plain, one of the sim infants lay beside her on a bed of grass and leaves. Terror stabbed Wingfield as an adult ran its hand down his daughter's chest and bel y, but then it did the same to the hairy baby next to her. It stared at its palm, as if not believing what it had felt.

The sim Wingfield had wounded held up one of Joanna's hands, then that of the infant of its own kind. Then it held up their feet in the same way. The other sims grunted. Some looked at their own hands and feet, then toward Joanna's. Except for size and hairiness, there was not much difference between their members and hers.

But then the sim patted Joanna's smooth, rounded head, and that was nothing like what the tiny sim next to her had. Already its brow beetled bonily, and above it the skull quickly retreated. Noticing that, one of the adults rubbed her own receding brow. She scratched, for all the world as if lost in thought.

"What are they playing at?" Henry Dale whispered harshly.

Wingfield, at a loss, could only shrug.

Caleb Lucas said, "If a tribe of devils set up housekeeping outside London and we wished to learn of what they were capable, were it not wise for us to seize on a small one, knowing ful well a grown devil would drag us straight to perdition?"

"Why are you dragging in devils?" Dale did not have the type of mind that quickly grasped analogies.

Allan Cooper did. "Youngster, meseems you've thrown your dart dead center," he said. "To the sodding sims, we must be devils or worse." He stopped, then went on, sounding surprised at where that line of thought was taking him, "Which would make them men of a sort, not so? I'd not've believed it."

Wingfield paid more attention to Joanna than to the argument. She was still crying, but did not seem in dreadful distress. It was her hungry cry, not the sharper, shriller one she used when gas pained her or something external upset her.

The female sim that had scratched its head might have been the mother of the infant with whom Joanna was being compared. It took Joanna away from the wounded sim and lifted her to a breast. The baby nursed as eagerly as if it had been Anne. Wingfield told himself that was something his wife never needed to know.

He invented and discarded scheme before scheme for rescuing his daughter. The trouble was that the sims would not leave her alone.

Even while she was feeding, they kept coming up to stare at her and touch her. She ate on, blissful y oblivious to everything but the nipple.

"By God, I shal get her back," Wingfield said.

He spoke loud enough to distract Allan Cooper. "What? How?" the guard said.

And then Wingfield knew what he had to do. "Do you three cover me with your weapons," he said, "and should the sims harm Joanna or should I fall, do as you deem best. Otherwise, I conjure you not to shoot."

Before his comrades' protests could more than begin, he got up from his concealment and walked into the light of the sims' fire.

The first sim to see him let out a hoot of alarm that made the rest of the band whip their heads around. He walked slowly toward the fire, his hands empty and open; he had left his crossbow behind when he rose.

Had the sims chosen to, they could have slain him at any instant He knew that. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground; they were light with the liquid springiness fear gives. But the strange unreality of the moment gripped the sims no less than him. Never before had an Englishman come to them alone and unarmed (or so they must have thought, for the pistols in his boots did not show, in truth, he had forgotten them himself).

But then, the sims had never stolen a baby before.

Females snatched up youngsters and bundled them away in their arms as Wingfield passed. Lucas had it right, he thought wryly; it was as if Satan had appeared, all reeking of brimstone, among the Jamestown cabins.

He stopped a few feetin front of the male he had fought. That one had stooped to grasp a sharp stone; many of them lay in the dirt round the fire. But the sim made no move to attack. It waited, to see what Wingfield would do.

The Englishman was not sure if the sim knew him. He pointed to the plastered-over cut he had given; to the bruise and scab on his own forehead; to Joanna, who was still nursing at the female sims breast.

He repeated the gestures, once, twice.

The sims broad nostrils flared. Its mouth came open, revealing large, strong teeth. It pointed from Wingfield to Joanna, gave a questioning grunt.

"Aye, that's my daughter," Wingfield said excitedly. The words could not have meant anything to the sim, but the animated tone did.

It grunted again.

Wingfield dug in his pouch, found a strip of smoked meat, and tossed it to the sim. The sim sniffed warily, then took a bite. Its massive jaw let it tear and chew at the leathery stuff where the Englishman had to nibble and gnaw, and made its smile afterward a fearsome thing.

When Joanna finally relinquished the nipple, the sim holding her swung her up to its shoulder and began pounding her on the back. The treatment was rougher than Wingfield would have liked, but was soon rewarded with a hearty belch. The female sim began to rock Joanna, much as Anne would have.

Wingfield pointed to his daughter, to himself, and then back in the direction of Jamestown. As best he could, he pantomimed taking Joanna home. When he was done, he folded his arms and waited expectantly, trying to convey the attitude that nothing but going along with his wishes was even conceivable.

Had he hesitated, faltered for an instant, he would have lost everything. As it was, that aura of perfect confidence gave him his way. None of the sims moved to stop the female when it came forward and set Joanna in his arms.

He bowed to it as he might have to a great lady of the court, to the sim he had fought as to an earl. Holding Joanna tightly to him, he backed slowly toward the brush where his companions waited. He expected the tableau to break up at any moment, but it held. The sims watched him go, the firelight reflecting red from their eyes.

He was close to the place from which he had come when Caleb Lucas said from the bushes, "Splendidly done, oh, splendidly, Edwardi" His voice was a thread of whisper; none of the sims could have heard it.

"Aye, you have the girl, and good for you." Henry Dale did not try to hold his voice down. Indeed, he rose from concealment. "Now to teach the vermin who stole her the price of their fol y." He aimed a pistol at the sims behind Wingfield.

"No, you fool!" Lucas shouted. He lunged for Dale at the same moment the sims cried out in fear, fury, and betrayal.

Too late, the pistol roared, belching flame and smoke. The lead ball struck home with a noise like a great slap. The sim it hit shrieked, briefly.

With a lithe twist, Dale slipped away from Caleb Lucas.

His hand darted into his boot-top for his other pistol. The second shot was less deliberately aimed, but not a miss. This time the screams of pain went on and on.

By then Wingfield was among the bushes. Behind him, the sims were boiling like ants whose nest has been stirred with a stick. Some scrambled for cover; others, bolder, came rushing after the Englishman.

A stone crashed against greenery mere inches from his head.

"No help for it now," Henry Dale said cheerfully, bringing up his crossbow. The bolt smote a charging sim square in the chest. The sim staggered, hands clutching at the short shaft of death. It pitched forward on its face.

More rocks flew. Wingfield turned to one side, to try to shield Joanna with his body.

Allan Cooper got to his feet. "God damn you to hel for what you make me do," he snarled at Dale. He fired one pistol, then a second, then his crossbow.

A sharpened stone tore Wingfield's breeches, cut his thigh. Had it hit squarely, it would have crippled him. The sims were howling like, lost souls, lost angry souls. Dale was right, no help for it now, Wingfield saw. His pistol bucked when he fired one-handed. He did not know whether he hit or missed. In a way, he hoped he had missed. That did not stop him from drawing his other gun.

"You purposed this all along, Henry," he shouted above the din.

"Aye, and own it proudly." Dale dropped another sim with a second crossbow bolt. He turned to kick Caleb Lucas in the ribs. "Fight 'em, curse you! They'll have the meat from your bones now as happily as from mine."

"No need for this, no need," Lucas gasped, swearing and sobbing by turns. But whether or not that was true, he realized, as Wingfield had, that there was no unbaking a bread. His pistols barked, one after the other.

But the sims on their home ground were not the skulking creatures they were near Jamestown. Though half a dozen lay dead or wounded, the rest, male and female together, kept up the barrage of stones. Their missiles were not so deadly as the Englishmen's, but they loosed them far more of often.

One landed with a meaty thud. Allan Cooper, his face a mask of gore, crumpled slowly to the ground.

He turned to Wingfield, who was struggling to fit another bolt into his weapons groove. "Go on!" he shouted. "You have what you came for.

I'll hold the sims. As you say, I am to blame here."

"But, "

Dale whipped out his rapier. Its point flickered in front of Wingfield's face. "Gal Aye, and you, Caleb. I promise, I shal give the brutes enough fight and chase to distract 'em from you."

He sprang into the clearing, rushing the startled sims. One swung a stout branch at him. Graceful as a dancer, he ducked, then thrust out to impale his attacker. The sim gave a bubbling shriek; blood gushed from its mouth.

"Gal" Dale yelled again.

Without Joanna, Wingfield would have stood by the other Englishman no matter what he said. When she squalled at the rough treatment she was getting, though, he scrambled away into the woods. Lucas fol owed a few seconds later.

For as long as they could, they looked back at Henry Dale. After that first one, no sim dared come within reach of his sword. He stayed in the clearing for what seemed an impossibly long time, stones flying al around him.

At last he turned. "Catch me if you can!" he shouted, brandishing his rapier. Wingfield saw how he limped as he ran; not every stone had missed. Dale dashed through the undergrowth, going in a different direction from his comrades and making no effort to move quietly. His defiant cries rang through the night. So did the sims' bellows of rage as they pursued him.

"You make for home," Caleb Lucas urged Wingfield. "I will give Henry such help as I may."

"They will surely slay you," Wingfield said, but he knew he would not hold Lucas back. Had their positions been reversed, he would not have wanted the youngster to try to stop him.

Just then, the sims' shouts rose in-a goblin chorus of triumph.

Screams punctuated it, not al from an English throat. As Dale had promised, he did not die easily. Caleb Lucas sobbed.

"Come," Wingfield said softly, his own voice breaking. "Now we have but to save ourselves, any way we may."

And So to bed

Sims made people

look at themselves and their place in nature differently from the way they had before.

They showed the link between humans and animals far more clearly than any creatures with which Euro peons had been familiar before.

Had there been no sims, had the Americas been populated by native humans, say, or only by animals-the development of the transformational theory of life might have been long delayed. This would have slowed the growth of several sciences, biology being, of course, the most obvious of them. Speculating on might-have-beens, however, is not the proper domain of history. The transformational theory of life was first put forward in I66I. After that, humans' view of their place in the world would never be the same

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths May 4, I66I.

A fine bright morning. Small beer and radishes for to break my fast, then into London for this day.

The shambles on Newgaoe Street stinking unto

heaven, as is usual, but close to it my destination, the sim marketplace. Our servant Jane with too much for one body to do, and whilst I may not afford the hire of another man or maid, two sims shall go far to ease her burden.

Success also sure to gladden Elizabeth's heart, my wife being ever one to follow the dame Fashion, and sims all the go of late, though monstrous ugly. Them formerly not much seen here, but since the success of our Virginia and Plymouth colonies are much more often fetched to these shores from the wildernesses the said colonies front upon. They are also commenced to be bred on English soil, but no hope there for me, as I do require workers full-grown, not cubs or babes in arms or whatsoever the proper term may be.

The sim-sel er a vicious lout, near unhandsome as his wares. No, the truth for the diary: such were a slander on any man, as I saw on his conveying me to the creatures.

Have seen these sims before, surely, but briefly, and in their masters'

livery, the which by concealing their nakedness conceals as well much of their brutishness. The males are most of them well made, though lean as rakes from the ocean passage and, I warrant, poor victualing after. But al are so hairy as more to resemble rugs than men, and the same true for the females, their fur hiding such dubious charms as they may possess nigh as well as a smock of linen: nought here, God knows, for Elizabeth's jealousy to light on.

This so were the said females lovely of feature as so many Aphrodites.

They are not, nor do the males recall to mind Adonis. In both sexes the brow projects with a shelf of bone, and above it, where men do enjoy a forehead proud in its erectitude, is but an apish slope.

The nose broad and low, the mouth wide, the teeth nigh as big as a horse's (though shaped, it is not to be denied, like a man's, the jaw long, deep and devoid of chin. They stink.

The sim-sel er full of compliments on my coming hard on the arrival of the Gloucester from Plymouth, him having thereby replenished his stock in trade.

Then the price should also be not so dear, says I, and by God it did do my heart good to see the ferret-faced rogue discomfited.

Rogue as he was, though, he dickered with the best, for I paid full a guinea more for the pair of sims than I had looked to, spending in all 6s.4d. The coin once passed over (and bitten, for to ensure its verity), the sim-seller signed to those of his chattels I had bought that they were to go with me.

His gestures marvelous quick and clever, and those the sims answered with too. Again, I have seen somewhat of the like before.

Whilst coming to understand in time the speech of men, sims are without language of their own, having but a great variety of howls, grunts, and moans. Yet this gesture-speech, the which I am told is come from the signs of the deaf, they do readily learn, and often their masters answer back so, to ensure commands being properly grasped.

Am wild to learn it my own self, and shal . Meseems it is in its way a style of tachygraphy or short-hand such as I use to set down these pages. Having devised varying tachygraphic hands for friends and acquaintanoes, 'twill be amusing taking to a hand that is exactly what its name declares.

As I was leaving with my new charges, the sim-seller did bid me lead them by the gibbets on Shooter's Hil , there to see the bodies and members of felons and of sims as have run off from their masters. It wondered me they should have the wit to take the meaning of such display, but he assured me they should. And so, reckoning it good advice if true and no harm if a lie, I chivied them thither.

A filthy sight I found it, with the miscreants' flesh all shrunk to the bones. But boo! quoth my sims, and looked close upon the corpses of their own-kind, which by their hairiness and flat-skul ed heads do seem even more bestial dead than when animated with life.

Home then, and Elizabeth as delighted in my success as am I. An excellent dinner of a calf's head boiled with dumplings, and an abundance of buttered ale with sugar and cinnamon, of which in celebration we invited Jane to partake, and

she grew right giddy. Bread and leeks for the sims, and water, it being reported they grow undocile on stronger drink.

After much debate, though good-natured, it was decided to style the male Tom and the female Peg. Showed them to their pallets down cellar, and they took to them readily enough, as finer than what they were accustomed to.

So to bed, right pleased with myself despite the expense.

May .. An advantage of having sims present appears that I had not thought on. Both Tom and Peg quite excellent ratters, finer than any puss-cat. No need, either, to fling the rats on the dungheap, for they devour them with as much gusto as I should a neat's tongue. They having subsisted on such smal deer in the forests of America, I shall not try to break them of the habit, though training them not to bring in their prey when we are at table with guests. The Reverend Mr. Milles quite shocked, but recovering nicely on being plied with wine.

May 8. Peg and Tom the both of them enthral ed with fire. When the work of them is done of the day, or at evening ere they take their rest, they may be found before the hearth observing the sport of the flames.

Now and again one will to the other say boo!, this noise, I find, they utter on seeing that which does interest them, whatsoever it may be.

Now as I thought on it, I minded me reading or hearing, I recall not which, that in their wild unpeopled haunts the sims know the use of fire as they find it set from lightning or other such mischance, but not the art of its making. No wonder then they are Vulcanolaters, reckoning name more precious than do we gold.

Considering such reflections, I resolved this morning on an experimtnt, to see what they might do. Rising early for to void my bladder in the pot, I put out the hearthfire, which in any case was gone low through want of fuel. Reired then to put on my dressing gown and, once clad, returned to await developments.

First up from the cellar was Tom, and his cry on seeing the flames extinguished heartrending as Romeo's over the body of fair Julia when I did see that play acted this December past. In a trice comes Peg, who moaning with Tom did rouse my wife, and she much upset at being so rudely wakened.

When calm in some small measure was restored, I bade by signs, in the learning of which I proceed apace, for the sims to sit quiely before the hearth, and with flint and steel restored that which I had earlier destroyed. They both made such outcry as if they had heard sounded the Last Trump.

Then doused I that second fire too, again to which distress from Peg and Tom. Elizabeth by this time out of the house in some dudgeon, no doubt to spend money we lack on stuffs of which we have no want.

Set up in the hearth thereupon several smal ares of sticks, each with much tinder so as to make it an easy matter to kindle. A brisk striking of flint and steel dropping sparks onto one such produced a merry little blaze, to the accompaniment of much booing out of the sims.

And so to the nub of it. Showing Tom the steel and flint, I clashed them once more the one upon the other so he might see the sparks engendered thereby. Then pointed to one of the aforementioned piles of sticks I had made up, bidding him watch close, as indeed he did. Having made sure of't, I did start that second pile alight.

Again put the fires out, the wailing accompanying the act less than heretofore, for which I was not sorry. Pointed now to a third assemblage of wood and tinder, but instead of myself lighting it, I did convey flint and steel to Tom, and the with signs essayed to bid him play Promeheus.

His hands much scarred and cal used, and ugler their hair knobby-knuckled as an Irishman's. He held at first the implements as if not taking in their purpose, yet the sims making tools of stone, as is widely reported, he could not fail to grasp their utility.

And indeed ere long he did try parroting me. When his first clumsy attempt yielded no result, I thought he would abandon such efforts as beynd his capacity and reserved for men of my sort.

But persist he did, and at length was rewarded with scintil ae like unto those I had made. His grin so wide and gleeful I thought it would stretch clear round his head.

Then without need of my further demonstration he set the instruments of rite production over the materials for the blaze. Him in such excitement as the sparks fell upon the waiting tinder that beneath his breeches rose his member, indeed to such degree as would have made me proud to be its possessor. And Peg was, I think, in such mood as to couple with him on the spot, had I not been present and had not his faculties been directed elsewhere than toward the lectual.

For at his success he cut such capers as had not been out of place upon the stage, were they but a trifle more rhythmical and less unconstrained.

Yet of the making of fire, even if

by such expedient as the friction of two sticks (which once I was forced by circumstance to attempt, and would try the patience of Job), as of every other salutary art, his race is as utterly ignorant as of the moons of Jupiter but lately found by some Italian with an optic glass.

No brute beast of the field could learn to begin a fire on the technique being shown it, which did Tom nigh readily as a man. But despite most diligent instruction, no sim yet has mastered such subtler arts as reading and writing, nor ever will, meseems. Falling in capacity thus between men and animal, the sims do raise a host of conundrums vexing and perplexing. I should pay a pound, or at the least ten shillings, merely to know how such strange fusions came to be.

So to the Admiralty full of such musings, which did occupy my mind, I fear, to the detriment of my proper duties.

May I0. Supper this evening at the Turk's Head, with the other members of the Rota Club. The fare not of the finest, being boiled venison and some few pigeons, al meanly done up.

The lamb's wool seemed naught but poor ale, the sugar, nutmeg, and meat of roasted apples hardly to be tasted. Miles the landlord down with a quartan fever, but il -served by his staff if such is the result of his absence.

The subject of the Club's discussions for the evening much in accord with my own recent curiosity, to wit, the sims. Cyriack Skinner did maintain them creatures of the Devil, whereupon was he roundly raped by Dr. Croon as having in this contention returned to the pernicious heresy of the Maniches, the learned doctor reserving the power of creation to the Lord alone. Much flinging back and forth of biblical texts, the which all struck me more as being an exercise of ingenuity of the debaters than bearing on the problem, for in plain fact the Scriptures nowhere mention sims.

When at length the talk did turn to matters more ascertainable, I spoke somewhat of my recent investigation, and right well received my remarks were, or so l thought. Others with experience of sims with like tales, finding them quick enough on things practic but sadly lacking in any higher faculties. Much jollity at my account of the visible manifestation of Tom's excitement, and whispers that this lady or that (the names, to my vexation, I failed to catch) owned her sims for naught but their prowess in matters of the mattress.

Just then came the maid by with coffee for the Club, not of the best, but better, I grant, than the earlier wretched lamb's wool. She a pretty yellow-haired lass called, I believe, Kate, a wench of perhaps sixteen years, a goodbodied woman not over thick or thin in any place, with a lovely bosom she did display most charmingly as she bent to fill-the gentlemen's cups.

Having ever an eye for beauty, such that I reckon little else beside it, I own I did turn my head for to follow this Kate as she went about her duties. Noticing which, Sir William Henry called out, much to the merriment of the Club and to my chagrin, "See how Samuel apes" Him no mean droll, and loosed a pretty pun, if at my expense.

Good enough, but then at the far end of the table someone (I saw not who, worse luck) thought to cap it by braying like the donkey he must be, "Not half the peeping, I warrant, as at his sims of nights!"

Such mockery clings to a man like pitch, regardless of the truth in't, which in this case is none. Oh, the thing could be done, but the sims so homely 'twould yield no titillation, of that I am practical y certain.

May I2. The household being more infected this past week with nits than ever before, resolved to bathe Peg and Tom, which also I hoped would curb somewhat their stench. And so it proved, albeit not without more alarms than I had looked for. The sims most loath to enter the tub, which must to them have seemed some instrument of torment. The resulting shrieks and outcry so deafening a neighbor did cal out to be assured all was well.

Having done so, l saw no help for it but to go into the tub my own self, notwithstanding my having bathed but two weeks before. I felt, I think, more hesitation stripping down before Peg than I should in front of Jane, whom I would simply dismiss from consideration save in how she performed her duties. But I did wonder what Peg made of my body, reckoning it against the hairy forms of her own kind.

Hath she the wit to deem mankind superior, or is our smoothness to her as gross and repel ent as the peltries of the sims to us? I cannot as yet make sign to enquire. As may be, my example showing them they should not be harmed, they bathed themselves. A trouble arose l had not foreseen, for the sims being nearly as thickly haired over all their bodies as I upon my head, the rinsing of the soap from their hides less easy than for us, and requiring much water.

Lucky I am the well is within fifty paces of my home. And so from admiral of the bath to the Admiralty, hoping henceforward to scratch myself less.

May I3. A pleasant afternoon this day, carried in a coach to see the lions and other beasts in the menagerie. I grant the lions pride of place through custom immemorial, but in truth am more taken with the abnormous creatures fetched back from the New World than those our people have known since the time of Arthur. Nor am I alone in this conceit, for the cages of lion, bear, and camel had but few spectators, whilst round those of the American beasts I did find myself compelled to use hands and elbows to make shift to pass through the crowds.

This last not altogether unpleasant, as I chanced to brush against a handsome lass, but when I did enquire if she would take tea with me she said me nay, which did irk me no little, for as I say she was fair to see.

More time for the animals, then, and wondrous strong ever they strike me. The spear-fanged cat is surely the most horridest murderer this shuddering world hath seen, yet there is for him prey worthy of his mettle, what with beavers near big as our bears, wild oxen whose horns are to those of our familiar kine as the spear-fanged cat's teeth to the lion's, and the great hairy elephants which do roam the forests.

Why such prodigies of nature manifest themselves on those distant shores does perplex me most exceedingly, as they are unlike any beasts even in the bestiaries, which as all men know are more flights of fancy than sober fact. Amongst them the sims appear no more than one piece of some great jigsaw, yet no pattern therein is to me apparent; would it were.

Also another new creature in the menagerie, which I had not seen before. At first I thought it a caged sim, but on inspection it did prove an ape, brought back by the Portuguese from Afric lands and styled there, the keeper made so good as to inform me, shimpan. It flourishes not in England's clime, he did continue, being subject to sickness in the lungs from the cool and damp, but is so interesting as to be displayed whilst living, howsoever long that may prove.

The shimpanse is a baser brute than even the sim. It goes on al fours, and its hinder feet more like unto monkeys' than men's, having thereon great toes that grip like thumbs. Also, where a sims teeth, as I have observed from Tom and Peg, are uncommon large, in shape they are like unto a man's, but the shimpanse hath tushes of some savagery though of course paling alongside those of the spear-fanged cat.

Seeing the keeper a garrulous fellow, I enquired of him further about this shimpanse. He owned he had himself thought it a sort of sim on its arrival, but sees now more distinguishing points than likenesses: gait and dentition, such as I have herein remarked upon, but also in its habits. From his experience, he has seen it to be ignorant of fire, repeatedly al owing to die a blaze though fuel close at hand. Nor has it the knack of shaping stones to its ends, though it will, he told me, cast them betimes against those who annoy it, once striking one such with force enough to render him some time senseless.

Hearing the villain had essayed tormenting the creature with a stick, my sympathies lay all for the shimpanse, wherein its keeper concurred.

And so homewards, thinking on the shimpanse as I rode. Whereas in the lands wherewith men are most familiar, it were easy distinguishing men from beasts, the strange places to which our vessels have but lately fetched themselves reveal a stairway ascending the chasm, and climbers on the stairs, some higher, some lower. A pretty image, but why it should be so there and not here does I confess escape me.

May I6. A savage row with Jane today, her having forgotten a change of clothes for my bed. Her defense that I had not so instructed her, the lying minx, for I did plainly make my wishes known the evening previous, the which I recollect most distinctly. Yet she did deny it again and again, final y raising my temper to such a pitch that I cursed her right roundly, slapping her face and pul ing her nose smartly.

Whereupon did the ungrateful trul lay down her service on the spot. She decamped in a fury of her own, crying that I treated the sims, those very sims which I had bought for to ease her labors, with more kindlier consideration than I had for her own self.

So now we are without a serving-maid, and her a dab hand in the kitchen, her swan pie especially being toothsome. Dined tonight at the Bell, and expect to tomorrow at the Swan on the Hoop, in Fish Street.

For Elizabeth no artist over the hearth, nor am I myself. And as for the sims, I should sooner open my veins than indulge of their cuisine, the good Lord only knowing what manner of creatures they in their ignorance should add to a pot.

Now as my blood has somewhat cooled, I must admit a germ of truth in Jane's scolds. I do not beat Tom and Peg as a man would servitors of more ordinary stripe. They, being but new come from the wilds, are not inured to't as are our servants, and might well turn on me, their master. And being in part of brute kind, their strength does exceed mine, Tom's most assuredly and that of Peg perhaps. And so, say I, better safe. No satisfaction to me the sims on Shooter's Hill gallows, were I not there to see't.

May 20. Today to my lord Sandwich's for supper. This doubly pleasant, in enjoying his fine companionship and saving the cost of a meal, the house being still without maid. The food and drink in excellent style, as to suit my lord. The broiled lobsters very sweet, and the lamprey pie (which for its rarity I but seldom eat of) the best ever I had. Many other fine victuals as well (the tanzy in especial), and the wine all sugared.

Afterwards backgammon, at which I won 5 ere my luck turned.

Ended it in my lord's debt, which he did graciously excuse me afterwards, a generosity not looked for but which I did not refuse.

Then to aambo, wherein by tagging and rich to Sandwich I was adjudged winner, the more so for playing on his earlier munificence.

Thaeafter nigh a surfeit of good talk, as is custom at my ord's.

He mentioning sims, I did relate my own dealings with Peg and Tom, to which he listened with much interest. He thinks on buying some for his own household, and unaware I had done so.

Perhaps it was the wine let loose my tongue, for I broached somewhat my disjoint musings on the sims and their place in nature, on the strangeness of the American fauna and much else besides. Lord Sandwich did acquaintanoe me with a New World beast found in their southerly holdings by the Spaniards, of strange outlandish sort: big as an ox, or nearly, and all covered over with armor of bone like a man wearing chain. I should pay out a shilling or even more for to see't, were one conveyed to London.

Then coffee, and it not watered as so often at an inn, but full and strong. As I and Elizabeth making our departures, Lord Sandwich did bid me join him tomorrow night to hear speak a savant of the Royal Society.

It bore, said he, on my prior ramblings, and would say no more, but looked uncommon sly. Even did it not, I should have leaped at the chance.

This written at one of the clock, for so the watchman just now cried out. Too wound up for bed, what with coffee and the morrow's prospect.

Elizabeth aslumber, but the sims also awake, and at frolic, meseems, from the noises up the stairway.

If they be of human kind, is their fornication sans dergy sinful?

Another vexing question. By their existence, they do engender naught but disquietude. Nay, strike that They may in sooth more sims engender, a pun good enough to sleep on, and so to bed.

May 2I. All this evening worrying at my thoughts as a dog at a bone. My lord Sandwich knows not what commotion internal he did by his invitation, all kindly meant, set off in me. The speaker this night a spare man, dry as dust, of the very sort I learned so well to loathe when at Cambridge.

Dry as dust! Happy words, which did spring al unbidden from my pen.

For of dust the fellow did discourse, if thereby is meant, as commonly, things long dead. He had some men bear in bones but lately found by Swanscombe at a gravel-digging. And such bones they were, and teeth (or rather tusks), as to make it all I could do to hold me in my seat. For surely they once graced no less a beast than the hairy elephant whose prototype I saw in the menagerie so short a while ago. The double-curving tusks admit of no error, for those of all elephants with which we are anciently familiar form but a single segment of arc.

When, his discourse concluded, he gave leave for questions, I made bold to ask to what he imputed the hairy elephant's being so long vanished from our shores yet thriving in the western lands. To this he confessed himself baffted, as am I, and admiring of his honesty as well.

Before the hairy elephant was known to live, such monstrous bones surely had been reckoned as from beasts perishing in the Flood whereof Scripture speaks. Yet how may that be so, them surviving across a sea wider than any Noah sailed?

Meseems the answer lieth within my grasp but am balked from setting finger to't. The thwarting fair to drive me mad, worse even, I think, than with a lass who will snatch out a hairpin for to defend her charms against my importuning.

May . Grand oaks from tiny acorns growt This morning came a great commotion from the kitchen. I rushing in found Tom at struggle with a cur dog which had entered the door being open on account of fine weather, to steal half a flitch of salt bacon. It dodging most nimbly round the sim, snatched up the gammon and fled out again, him pursuing but in vain.

Myself passing vexed, having intended to sup thereon. But Tom al downcast on returning, so had not the heart further to punish him.

Told him instead, him understanding I fear but little, it were well men not sims dwelt in England, else would wolves prowl the London streets still. - Stood stock still some time thereafter, hearing the greater import behind my jesting speech. Is not the answer to the riddle of the hairy elephant and other exotic beasts existing in the New World but being hereabouts long vanished their having there but sims to hunt them?

The sims in their wild haunts wield club and sharpened stone, no more.

They are ignorant even of the bow, which from time out of mind has equipt the hunter's armory.

Just as not two centuries past we Englishmen slew on this island the last wolf, so may we not imagine our most remotest grandsires serving likewise the hairy elephant, the spear-fanged cat. They being more cunning than sims and better accoutered, this should not have surpassed their powers. Such beasts would survive in America, then, not through virtue inherent of their own, but by reason of lesser danger to them in the sims than would from mankind come.

Put this budding thought at luncheon today to my lord Sandwich.

He back at me with Marvelled to his coy mistress (the most annoyingest sort!), viz had we but world enough and time, who could reckon the changes as might come to pass? And going on, laughing, to say next will be found dead sims at Swanscombe.

Though meant but as a pleasantry, quoth I, why not? Against true men they could not long have stood, but needs must have given way as round Plymouth and Virginia. Even without battle they must soon have failed, as being less able than mankind to provide for their wants.

There we let it lie, but as I think more on't, the notion admits of broader application. Is't not the same for trout as for men, or for lilacs? Those best suited living reproduce their kind, whilst the trout with twisted tail or bloom without sweet scent die all unmourned, leaving no descendants. And each succeeding generation, being of the previous survivors constituted, will by such reasoning show some little difference from the one as went before.

Seeing no flaw in this logic, resolve tomorrow to do this from its tachygraphic state, bereft, of course, of maunderings and privacies, for prospectus to the Royal Society, and mightily wondering whatever they shall make of it.

May 23. Closeted all this day at the Admiralty. Yet did it depend on my diligence alone, I fear me the Fleet should drown. Still, a deal of business finished, as happens when one stays by it. Three quills worn quite out, and my hands all over ink. Also my fine camlet cloak with the gold buttons, which shall mightily vex my wife, poor wretch, unless it may be cleaned. I pray God to make it so, for I do mislike strife at home.

The burning work at last complete, homeward in the twilight. It being washing-day, dined on cold meat. I do confess, felt no small strange stir in my breast on seeing Tom taking down the washing before the house. A vision it was, almost, of his kind roaming England long ago, till perishing from want of substance on vying therefore with men.

And now they are through the agency of men returned here again, after some great interval of years. Would I knew how many.

The writing of my notions engrossing the whole of the day, had no occasion to air them to Lord Brouncker of the Society, as was my hope.

Yet expound I must, or burst. Elizabeth, then, at dinner made audience for me, whether she would or no. My space at last exhausted, asked for her thoughts on't.

She said only that Holy Writ sufficed on the matter for her, whereat I could but make a sour face. To bed in some anger, and in fear lest the Royal Society prove as closeminded, which God prevent.

Did He not purpose man to reason on the world around him, He should have left him witless as the sim.

May 24. To Gresham College this morning, to call on Lord Brouncker. He examined with great care the papers I had done up, his face revealing naught. Felt myself at recitation

I, once more before a professor, a condition whose lack these last years I have not missed. Feared also he might not be able to take in the writing, it being done in such haste some short-hand characters may have replaced the common ones.

Then to my delight he declared he reckoned it deserving I knew not how to make answer, and should have in the next moment fled. But up spake to my great surprise Lord Brouncker, reciting from Second Chronicles, the second verse of the fourth chapter, wherein is said of Solomon and his Temple, Also he made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and the height thereof was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

This much perplexed the Puritan and me as well, though I essayed not to show it. Lord Brouncker then proceeded to his explication, to wit that the true compass of a ten-cubit round vessel was not thirty cubits, but above one and thirty, I misremember the exact figure he gave. Those of the Royal Society learned in mathematics did agree he had reason, and urged the Puritan make the experiment for his self with cup, cord, and rule, which were enough for to demonstrate the truth.

I asked if he was answered. Like a gentleman he owned he was, and bowed, and sat, his face ful of troubles. Felt with him no small sympathy, for once one error in Scripture be admitted, where shal it end?

The next query was of different sort, a man in periwigg enquiring if I did reckon humankind to have arisen by the means I described. Had to reply I did. Our forefathers might be excused for thinking otherwise, them being so widely separate from al other creatures they knew.

But we moderns in our travels round the globe have found the shimpanse, which standeth nigh the flame of reasoned thought; and more important still the sim, in whom the flame does burn, but more feebly than in ourselves. These bridging the gap twixt man and beast meseems do show mankind to be in sooth a part of nature, whose engenderment in some past distant age is to be explained through natural law.

Someone rose to doubt the variation in each sort of living thing being sufficient eventually to permit the rise of new kinds. Pointed out to him the mastiff, the terrier, and the bloodhound, all of the dog kind, but become distinct through man's choice of mates in each generation.

Surely the same might occur in nature, said I. The fellow admitted it was conceivable, and sat.

Then up stood a certain Wilberforce, with whom I have some small acquaintance. He likes me not, nor I him. We know it on both sides, though for civility's sake feigning otherwise. Now he spoke with smirking air, as one sure of the mortal thrust. He did grant my willingness to have a sim as great-grandfather, said he, but was I so willing to claim one as great-grandmother? A deal of laughter rose which was his purpose, and to make me out a fool.

Had I carried steel, I should have drawn on him. As was, rage sharpened my wit to serve for the smallsword I left at home. Told him it were no shame to have one's greatgrandfather a sim, as that sim did use to best advantage the intel ect he had. Better that, quoth I, than dissipating the mind on such digressive and misleading quibbles as he raised. If I be in error, then I am; let him shew it by logic and example, not as it were playing to the gallery.

Came clapping from all sides, to my delight and the round dejection of Wilberforce. On seeking further questions, found none.

Took my own seat whilst the Fel ows of the Society did congratulate me and cry up my essay louder, I thought, than either of the other two.

Lord Brouncker acclaimed it as a unifying principle for the whole of the study of life, which made me as proud a man as any in the world, for all the world seemed to smile upon me.

And so to bed.

I69I Around the Salt Lick Europeans soon settled the Atlantic seaboard of North America.

Settlement was slower in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies further south, as the harsh tropical climate of much of Central and South America posed a serious chal enge to immigrants. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only New Granada and Argentina, the most northerly and southerly of the Hispanic settlements, tnuly flourished.

The British North American colonies, however, soon outdistanced even the most successful settlements farther south. Because the land was more like that to which the settlers had been accustomed, European farming techniques needed less adaptatbn than was the case in Central and South America. Moreover, the establishment of a divine-right monarchy on the French model in England made political and religious dissenters eager to leave the island, and the Crown happy to see them go. Thus a constant stream of settlers was assured.

As the seventeenth century drew toward a close, explorers were beginning to penetrate the mountain passes and push west into the North American heartland. Bands of wild sims made sure some would not find their way home, and others fel victim to spearfangs and other wild beasts. But neither sims nor beasts could halt or even slow the steady westward push of people into North America.

Still, as has always been true, the first humans to go west of the mountains faced no smal danger, and had to show extraordinary resourcefulness in unfamiliar and dangerous circumstances....

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

THOMAS KENTON PAUSED to

look westward at land no man had seen before. The gap in the mountains revealed an endless sea of deep green rolling woods ahead.

Virginia had been such a wilderness once, before the English landed eighty-odd years ago.

"But no more, eh, Charles?" he said to the sim at his side.

"Virginia fills with farmers, and the time has come to find what this western country is like."

Find, Charles signed. Like most of the New World's native subhumans, he understood speech well enough, but had trouble reproducing it. Signals based on those used by the deaf and dumb came easier for him.

The sim was close to Kenton's own rangy six feet one. His eyes, in fact, were on a level with the scout's, but where Kenton's forehead rose, his sloped smoothly back from beetling brow ridges. His nose was low, broad, and flat; his mouth wide; his teeth large, heavy, and yellow; his jaw long and chinless. As an Englishman, he would have been hideous. Kenton did not think of him so; by the standards of his own kind, he was on the handsome side.

On, Charles signed, adding the finger-twist that turned it into a question. At the scout's nod, he strode ahead, his deerskin buskins silent on the mossy ground. His only other clothing was a leather belt that held water bottle, hatchet, knife, and pouches for this and that.

His thick brown hair served him as well as did Kenton's leather tunic and trousers.

A turkey called from a stand of elms off to one side.

Kenton felt his stomach rumble hungrily, and an instant later heard Charles's. They grinned at each other. Hunt, the scout signed, not wanting to make any noise to alert the bird.

The sim nodded and trotted toward the far side of the trees.

Kenton gauged distances. If all went well, the shot would be only about fifty yards, a half-charge of powder should serve. He poured it into the little charge-cup that hung from the bottom of his powderhorn, then down his musket barrel it went.

Working with practiced speed, he set a greased linen patch on the gun's muzzle, laid the round ball on it, and rammed it home til it just touched the powder. Then he squeezed down on the first of the musket's two triggers, setting the second so it would go off at the lightest touch.

The whole procedure took about fifteen seconds.

And it was al needless. Kenton waited, expecting the frightened turkey to burst from cover at any moment. What emerged, however, was Charles, carrying the bird by the feet in one hand and his bloody hatchet in the other. He was laughing.

"Good hunting," Kenton said. He careful y reset the first trigger, making sure he heard it click back into place. He did not begrudge the sim the kill; he welcomed anything that saved powder and bul ets.

Stupid bird, Charles signed. I get close, throw. He pantomimed casting the hatchet. It had a weighted knob at the end of the handle to give it proper balance for the task. Even wild sims were dangerous, flinging the sharp-chipped stones they made.

The sun was going down over the vast forest ahead. "We may as well camp," Kenton decided when they came to a smal , cool, quick-flowing stream. He and Charles washed their heads and soaked their feet in it. They drank til they sloshed, preferring the stream's water to the warm, stale stuff in their canteens.

Then they scoured the neighborhood for dry twigs and brush for the evening's fire. Kenton was careful to make sure trees and bushes screened the site from the west. When he took out flint and steel to set off the tinder at the end of the fire, Charles touched his arm.

Me, please, the sim Kenton passed him the metal and stone. Charles briskly clashed them together, blew on the sparks that fell to the tinder. Soon he had a small smokeless blaze going.

When he started to pass the flint and steel back to L Kenton, the scout said, "You may as well keep them; you use them more than I do, anyway."

The flickering firelight revealed the awe on Charles's face. That awe was there even though he was of the third generation of sims to grow up as part of Virginia. In the wild, sims used fire if they came across it, and kept it alive as best they could, but they could not start one.

To Charles, Kenton's simple tools conveyed a power that must have felt godlike.

The scout burned his hands and his mouth on hot roasoed turkey, but did not care. Blowing on his fingers, he chuckled, "Better than going hungry, eh, Charles?"

The sim grunted around a mouthful. He did not bother with any more formal reply; he took his eating seriously.

They tossed the offal into the stream. Charles had taken the first watch the night before, so tonight it belonged to Kenton. The sim stripped off his shoes and belt, curled up by the fire, with his hair, he needed no blanket, and fel asleep with the ease and speed Kenton always envied. Charles and his breed never brought the day's troubles into the evening with them. Were they too simple or too wise?

The scout often wondered.

He let the fire die to red embers that hardly interfered with his night sight. The moon, rounding toward ful , spilled pale light over the forest ahead, smoothing its contours till it resembled nothing so much as a calm, peaceful sea.

The ear pierced the il usion that lulled the eye. Somewhere close by, a field mouse squeaked, briefly, as an owl or ferret found it.

Farther away, Kenton heard a wolf howl to salute the moon, then another and another, until the whole pack was at cry.

The eerie chorus made the hair prickle upright at the nape of the scout's neck. Charles stirred and muttered in his sleep. No one, human or sim, was immune to the fear of wolves.

The pack also disturbed the rest of a hairy elephant, whose trumpet call of protest instantly silenced the wolves. They might pull down a calf that strayed too far from its mother, but no beasts hunted ful -grown elephants. Not more than once, anyway, Kenton thought.

The normal small night noises took a while to come back after the hairy elephant's cry. The scout strained his ears listening for one set in particular: the grunts and shouts that would have warned of wild sims.

No camp was in earshot, at any rate. Hunting males ranged widely, though, and these sims would from long acquaintance not be in awe of men, and thus doubly dangerous.

A coughing roar only a couple of hundred yards away cut short his reverie on the sims. The scout sprang to his feet, his finger darting to the trigger of his musket. That cry also roused Charles. The sim stood at Kenton's side, hatchet ready in his hand.

The roar came again, this time fiercely triumphant. Spearfang, Charles signed, with kil .

"Yes," Kenton said. Now that the beast had found a victim, it would not be interested in hunting for others, such as, for instance, himself and the sim. In dead of night, he welcomed that lack of interest.

All the same, excitement prickled in him. The big cats were not common along the Atlantic seaboard, and relentless hunting had reduced their numbers even in the hinterlands of the Virginia colony. Not many men, these days, came to the governor at Portsmouth to col ect the 5 pound bounty on a pair of fangs.

Kenton imagined the consternation that would ensue if he marched into the Hal of Burgesses with a score of six inch-long ivory daggers.

Most of the clerks he knew would sooner pass a kidney stone than pay out fifty pounds of what was not even their own money.

The scout snorted contemptuously. "I'd sooner reason with a sim," he said. Charles grunted and made the question-mark gesture. "Never mind," Kenton said. "You may as well go back to sleep."

Charles did, with the same ease he had shown before. Nothing troubled him for long. On the other hand, he lacked the sense for long-term planning.

Kenton watched the stars spin slowly through the sky. When he reckoned it was midnight, he woke Charles, stripped off his breeches and tunic, and rolled himself in his blanket. Despite exhaustion, his whirling thoughts kept him some time awake. This once, he thought, he would not have minded swapping wits with his sim.

Sunrise woke the scout. Seeing him stir, Charles nodded his way.

All good, the sim signed. Spearfang stay away.

"Aye, that's good enough for me," Kenton said. Charles nodded and built up the fire while Kenton, sighing, stretched and dressed. Jokes involving wordplay were wasted on sims, though Charles had laughed like a loon when the scout went sprawling over a root a couple of days earlier. The turkey was still almost as good as it had been the night before. Munching on bulbs of wild onion between bites went a long way toward hiding the slight gamy taste the meat had acquired.

The way west was downhill now; the explorer and his sim had passed the watershed not long before they made camp. The little stream by which they had built their fire ran westward, not comfortably toward the Atlantic like every other waterway with which Kenton was familiar.

The scout strode along easily, working out the kinks a night's sleep on the ground had put in his muscles. His mouth twisted. A few years ago, he would have felt no aches, no matter what he did. But his light-brown hair was beginning to be frosted with gray, and to recede at the temples.

Kenton was proud the governor had chosen him for this first western journey, rather than some man still in his twenties. "Oh, aye, a youngster might travel faster and see a bit more," Lord Emerson said,

"but you're more likely to return and tell us of it."

He laughed out loud. He wondered what Lord Emerson would have said after learning of his spearfang-hunting plans. Something pungent and memorable no doubt.

Charles stopped with a perplexed grunt very much the sort of sound a true man might have made. Ahead strange sound, he signed.

Kenton listened, but heard nothing. He shrugged. His eyes were as sharp as the sims, but Charles had very good ears. They were surely not a match for a hound's, nor was the sims sense of smel , but Charles could communicate what he sensed in a way no animal could match.

"Far or close?" the scout asked.

Not close.

"We'll go on, then," Kenton decided. After a few hundred cautious yards, he heard the rumble too, or perhaps felt would have been the better word for it. He thought of distant thunder that went on and on, but the day was clear. - He wondered if he was hearing a waterfall far away.

"Kenton's Falls," he said, trying out the sound. He liked it.

Charles turned to look at him, then made as if to stumble over a root.

The sim got up with a sly grin on his face. Kenton laughed too.

Charles had made a pun after all, even if unintentionally.

The game path they were following twisted southward bringing the edge of a large clearing into view. Kenton stared in open-mouthed wonder at the teeming, milling bur&lo the break in the trees revealed.

There were more of them than Virginia herds had cattle. The beasts were of two sorts. The short-horned kind, with its hump and shaggy mane, was also fairly common east of the mountains; it closely resembled the familiar wisent of Europe. The other variety was larger and grander, with horns sweeping out from its head in a formidable defensive arc. Only stragglers of that sort reached Virginia. They were notoriously dangerous to hunt, being quicker and stronger than their more common cousins.

The rumble the sim and scout had heard was coming from the clearing; it was the pounding of innumerable buffalo hooves on the turf. Charles poinoed to the herd, signing, Good hunting. Good eating

"Good hunting indeed," Kenton said. Its meat smoked over a fire, a single buffalo could feed Charles and him for weeks. But the scout saw no need for that much work. With the big beasts so plentiful, it would be easy to kil one whenever they needed fresh meat.

Good hunting in another way also, the scout realized. A herd this size would surely draw wolves and spearfangs to prey on stragglers.

Kenton smiled in anticipation. He would prey on them.

"Let's get some meat," Kenton said matter-of-factly. Charles nodded and slipped off the trail into the trees. The scout followed.

He could just as well have led; the sim and he were equal y skilled in woodscraft But he would not go wrong letting Charles pick a spot from which to shoot.

Once away from the trail, the scout felt as though the forest had swallowed him. The crowns of the trees overhead hid the sun; light came through them wan, green, and shifting. Shrubs and bushes grew thick enough to reduce vision to a few yards, but not enough to impede progress much. The air was cool, moist, and still, with the smell of earth and growing things.

Steering by the patterns of moss and other subtle signs, Charles and Kenton reached the clearing they had spied in the distance. It was even larger than the scout had thought, and ful of buffalo. More entered by way of a game track to the north that was wider than most Virginia roads; others took the trail south and west out.

Charles picked a vantage point where the forest projected a little into the clearing, giving Kenton a broad view and a chance to pick his target at leisure. "Good job," the scout murmured. Charles wriggled with pleasure at the praise like a patted hound.

But Kenton knew there was more to the sims glee than any dog would have felt. Charles's reasoning was slower and far less accurate than a man's, but it was enough for him to understand how and why he had pleased the scout. People who treated their sims like cattle or other beasts of burden often had them run away.

Kenton shook his head slightly as he aimed at a plump young buffalo not thirty yards away. If Gharles wanted to flee on this journey, he had his chance every night.

The flintlock bucked against the scout's shoulder, though the long barrel of soft iron reduced the recoil. Buffalo heads sprang up at the report; the animals' startled snorts filled the clearing. Then the buffalo were running, and Kenton felt the ground shudder under his feet.

If the sound of the beasts' hooves had been distant thunder before, now the scout heard the roar as if in the center of a cloudburst. Charles was shouting, but Kenton only saw his open mouth, his cry was lost in the din of the stampede.

The cow the scout had shot tried to join the panic rush, despite the blood that gushed from its shoulder just below the hump and soaked its shaggy brown hair. After half a dozen lurching strides, blood also poured from its mouth and nose. It swayed and fel .

Several other buffalo, most of them calves, were down, trampled, when Kenton and Charles went out into the clearing, which was now almost empty. The scout took the precaution of reloading, this time with a double charge, before he emerged from the woods, in case one of the buffalo stil on their feet should decide to charge.

Crows and foxes began feasting while Charles was still cutting two large chunks of meat from the tender, fat-rich hump. Soon other hunters and scavengers would come: spearfangs, perhaps, or wolves or sims. Kenton preferred meeting any of them on ground of his own choosing, not here in the open. He drew back into the woods as soon as Charles had finished his butchery. They got well away from the open space before they camped, and Kenton made sure they did so in a small hollow to screen the light of his fire from unwelcome eyes.

After he had eaten, he wiped his greasy hands on the grass, then dug into his pack for his journal, pen, and inkpot. He wrote a brief account of the past couple of days of travel and added to the sketch map he was keeping.

As always, Charles watched with interest. Talking marks? he signed.

"Aye, so they are."

How do marks talk? the sim asked, punctuating the question with a pleading whimper. Kenton could only spread his hands regretfully.

Several times he had tried to teach Charles the ABCs, but the sim could not grasp that a sign on paper reprented a sound. No sim had ever learned to read or write.

Then the scout had an idea, maybe his map would be easier than letters for Charles to understand. "Recall the creek we walked along this morning, how it bent north and then southwest?"

The sim nodded. Kenton pointed to his representation. "Here is a line that moves the same way the creek did."

Charles looked reproachful y at the scout. Line not move. Line there.

"No; I mean the line shows the direction of the creek. D'you see?

First it goes up, then down and over, like the stream did."

So? In their deep, shadowed sockets beneath his brow ridges, Charles's eyes were full of pained incomprehension. Line not like stream. How can line be like stream?

"The line is a picture of the stream," the scout said.

Line not picture. Charles's signs were quick and firm. Picture like thing to eyes. Line not like stream.

Kenton shrugged and gave up. That had been his last, best try at getting the idea across. Sims recognized paintings, even pen-and-ink drawings. Abstract symbols, though, remained beyond their capacity.

The scout sighed, got out his blanket, and slept.

Instead of returning to the clearing, Kenton decided to parallel the game track down which the buffalo had fled. Mockingbirds yammered in the treetops high overhead, while red squirrels and gray frisked along the branches, pausing now and then to peer suspiciously down at the man and the sim.

"An Englishman I met at Portsmouth told me there are no gray squirrels in England, only red ones," Kenton remarked.

No grays? Who ate them?

Kenton smiled, then sobered. There was more to the question than Charles, in his innocent ignorance, had meant. People on both sides of the Atlantic were still hotly debating the notion someone had put forward a generation before: that the struggle of predator against prey determined which forms of life would prosper and which would fail.

The scout liked the idea. To his mind, it explained why such beasts as spearfangs and hairy elephants lived in America but not in Europe, though their ancient bones had been found there. Humans, even savages, were better hunters than sims. Already, after less than a century, spearfangs were scarce in Virginia. No doubt they had been exterminated east of the ocean so long ago that even the memory of them was gone.

The thought of life changing through time horrified folk who took their Scripture literal y. Kenton could not fathom their cries of protest.

America had shown so many wonders the Bible did not speak of, sims not the least, that using Scripture to account for them struck him as foolish. Like most colonists, he preferred to judge truth for himself, not receive it from a preacher. A little past noon, the scout began hearing the low rumble of many buffalo hooves again. He found a herd gathered at a salt lick, pushing and shoving each other to get at the salt like so many townswomen elbowing their way to a peddler's cart. He took out his journal and noted the lick. When settlers eventual y came, they could use the salt to preserve their meat.

He had not intended to hunt that day, not when he and Charles were still carrying some of the buffalo hump. But a tawny blur exploded from the far side of the clearing and darted toward a yearling cow at the edge of the herd. The spearfang's roar sent the buffalo scattering in terror and made ice walk up Kenton's back.

The spearfang's powerful forelimbs wrapped round the buffalo's neck.

Despite the beast's panic-stricken thrashing and bucking, the spearfang wrestled it to the ground. Excitement made the big cat's short, stumpy tail quiver absurdly.

The struggle went on for several minutes, the buffalo trying desperately to break free and the spearfang to hold it in place with front legs and claws. At last the spearfang found the grip it wanted.

Its jaws gaped hugely. It see its fangs slashing across the buffalo's throat. Blood fountained. The buffalo gave a final convulsive shiver and was still. The spearfang began to feed, tearing great hunks of dripping meat from the buffalo's flank.

Kenton swung up his musket, glad he had a double charge in the gun.

Luckily, the spearfang was exposing its left side to him. He released the set trigger, took a deep breath and held it to steady his aim, touched the second trigger.

His flint and gunpowder were French, and of the best quality; only a farmer would use Virginia-made powder. Along with the twin triggers, they ensured that the musket would not misfire or hang fire.

The spearfang screamed. It whirled and snapped at its flank. But the wound was not mortal, for the spearfang bounded into the woods the way it had come.

"Oh, a pox," Kenton said; the shot had struck too far forward to pierce the heart. He paused to reload before pursuing the big cat. He was not mad enough to follow a wounded spearfang armed only with a brace of pistols.

As he had been trained, Charles trotted ahead to find the trail.

Kenton soon waved him back to a position of safety; the spearfang had left a blood-spattered spoor any fool could follow.

That over-confidence almost cost the scout his life. Once in the forest, the spearfang doubled back on its trail. Kenton did not suspect it was there till it burst from the under growth a bare ten yards to his left.

Those yawning jaws seemed a yard wide, big enough to gulp him down at a single bite. He had not time to turn and shoot; afterwards, he thought himself lucky to have got off a shot across his body, his musket cradled in the crook of his elbow.

With a lighter gun, he probably would have broken his arm. But one of the reasons he carried a five-foot, eleven pound rifle was to let him take such snap shots at need.

Because of its weight, it had less kick.

The spearfang pitched sideways as the ball, which weighed almost a third of an ounce, slammed into its face just below a glaring eye. An instant later, Charles's hatchet clove the beast's skull. Kenton thought his bullet had already killed it, but was honest enough to admit he was never quite sure. His narrow escape made his hands shake so much he spilled powder as he reloaded, something he had not done since he was a boy.

Charles had to set a foot on the spearfang's carcass to tug his hatchet free. He used it and his knife to worry the fangs from the cat's upper jaw, handed Kenton the bloody trophies.

"Thanks." The scout wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with the back of his hand. "That, by God, is 5 pounds earned."

The sim shrugged. With his simple wants, money meant little to him.

Ever practical, he signed, Good meat back there.

Here in this unexplored territory, 5 pounds was of no more immediaoe use to Kenton than to Charles. The scout nodded, made his wits return to the business at hand. "So there is. Let's get at it." He and the sim walked back toward the buffalo the spearfang had kil ed.