Immortal Lycanthropes - By Hal Johnson Page 0,15
a mistake you can bet she won’t make again.”
“Benson works for Mignon Emanuel?”
“No, they both work for Mr. Bigshot. But Benson would listen to Mignon Emanuel. He’s just smart enough to know what he’s not smart enough to do on his own; which is, frankly, smarter than usual.”
“Right, Mr. Bigshot. I guess I knew that.”
“Second things second. You left out how you recovered the second time, after the train. I presume you did not go back to Andre Rodriguez?”
Myron paused a moment. He sampled the coffee, which was still too hot. Some things, he was learning, are hard to talk about. Finally he said, “I read this book once, about these three hunters in the American frontier, and one of them got mauled by a bear. It was a terrible mauling, and he was in real bad shape, and then his wounds get infected, and he gets the fever. His friends can’t get him to move, and there’s nothing they can do for him anyway, so they camp out and wait for him either to get better or die. But the thing is, is it’s Indian country, and every day they wait puts them all into more and more incredible danger. Finally, it looks like the guy—his name was Hugh Glass—”
“(This is a true story, now?)”
“(Yeah, this was a nonfiction book.) It looks like Hugh Glass is going to die any moment, and he’s in a coma and everything. So his two friends can’t wait any longer—they decide to just leave him, assuming he’ll be dead in the morning. And they take all his gear, and his gun and everything, and they book. But the next morning, Glass’s fever breaks. And he realizes that his friends have gone, that they’ve left him alone with no gun and no food, and he vows revenge!” Myron was getting into the story. “Glass crawls around till he finds a spring, and he lies in the underbrush, eating all the berries he can reach, and gulping at the spring, until he’s strong enough to sit up; and then he can reach more berries! And bit by bit his strength returns. He’s still ripped to shreds, and his face is mostly off, but his strength returns until he can stagger around, and he happens to come across where some wolves had killed a deer or something, and he comes running out screaming at them, and one look at this guy, and the wolves turn tail and run, so he gets some meat. And he looks so terrifying, like a zombie, that the Indians don’t want to kill him, and he goes walking through the frontier, looking to find the two guys who abandoned him.”
“Did he find them?”
“Yeah, but it took forever, and he forgave them in the end. You know how that goes.”
“Myron, why are you telling me this story?”
“Because after a few miles I fell off the train. And after a while I could think and see again, and I dragged myself to a muddy ditch. And then I dragged myself away from the tracks, in case Benson was looking for me, along the tracks. And I found a barberry bush, and I ate the berries until I could sit up.”
“Too bad they sent Benson, and not a bloodhound, huh?”
“Does a bloodhound work for Mr. Bigshot?”
“No, I was just talking. There is no bloodhound.”
“Oh. Well, it was raining anyway, for a long time. I was just afraid Benson would come by and sense me. How come there’s no bloodhound?”
“Faith, I don’t know, a bloodhound’s just a kind of dog. There’s just one of us per species.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s just the way it is. You might as well ask why people walk on their feet, and not their hands.”
“If people walked on their hands, wouldn’t they just call hands feet?”
“I mean,” Gloria said, lighting a cigarette off the last one, “that this all happened so long ago that no one knows, and if they ever did know, they don’t remember.”
“How old are you?”
“Same age as you, probably. Ten thousand years or so.”
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“Myron, darling, it’s easy to lose count with numbers that big. Also, when I was born I doubt if there were any languages on Earth that could count as high as ten thousand. And who knows for how long I just lived as a gorilla, living among gorillas, not even knowing humans were anything except another thing to run away from, or rip apart?”
“Am I that old, too?”
“Either