Hunters Run Page 0,31

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't eat fur."

"Ah," Maneck said. It moved up close behind Ramon and sank to the ground, its legs bending backward grotesquely. "It will be interesting to observe this function. Proceed."

"I need a knife," Ramon said. When Maneck said nothing, he added, "The man would have a knife."

"You will require one also?"

"Well, I can't do this with my teeth," Ramon said.

Wordlessly, the alien plucked a cylinder from its belt and handed it to Ramon. When Ramon turned it over in bafflement, Maneck reached across and did something to the cylinder, and a six-inch silver wire sprang out stiffly. Ramon took the strange knife and began gutting the gordita. The wire slid easily through the flesh. Perhaps it was the hunger that focused Ramon so intently on his task, because it wasn't until he had set the gordita on a spit and begun on the first grasshopper that he realized what the alien had done.

It had handed him a weapon.

The thing had made its mistake. Now it would die for it.

He fought the sudden rush of adrenaline, struggling to keep the blade from wobbling in his hands, to keep his hands from shaking. Bent over the careful task of digging out the grasshopper's rear gills, he glanced at Maneck. The alien seemed to have noticed nothing. The problem was, where to strike it? Stabbing it in the body was too great a risk; he didn't know where the vital organs were, and he couldn't be sure of striking a killing blow. Maneck was larger and stronger than he was. In a protracted fight, Ramon knew, he would lose. It had to be done swiftly. The throat, he decided, with a rush of exhilaration that was almost like flying. He would slash the knife as deep across the alien's throat as he could. The thing had a mouth and it breathed, after all, so there had to be an air passage in the neck somewhere. If he could sever that, it would only be a matter of remaining alive long enough for the alien to choke to death on its own blood. It was a thin chance, but he would take it.

"Look here," he said, picking up the body of the gordita. With its legs and scales cut away, its flesh was soft and pink as raw tuna. Maneck leaned closer, as Ramon had hoped, its eyes trained on the dead flesh in his left hand, ignoring the blade in his right. The heady elation of violence filled him, as if he was in the street outside a bar in Diegotown. The monsters didn't know that this thing they'd captured knew how to be a monster too! He waited until Maneck turned its head a little to the side to better squint at the gordita, exposing the mottled black-and-yellow flesh