success, my conscientiousness paid off in a sighting. Some distance off, sharkishly patrolling the steppe, a pack of giant hyenas trotted toward me from the northeast.
“Oh, shit,” I murmured aloud. “Oh, holy shit.”
I dropped the antelope carcass (Aepyceros whazzus) and unholstered my Colt (Equus fatalis). Unbalanced by the sudden removal of so much dead weight, however, I fumbled the pistol to the ground, where it fired a muffled shot into the dust and kicked over onto its side. The noise halted the hyenas in their tracks, but only briefly. As soon as I had retrieved the .45 and pointed it shakily in their direction, they were already advancing again, contracting from a file of animals into an ugly, loping wedge. Only six bullets remained in my eight-clip, and although Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy might have found that number sufficient, it would fall about ten shy of what I needed to survive this onslaught. I sighted along the pistol’s muzzle, pulled the trigger, and—
Click.
I had not slid a fresh clip into the butt of the .45 that morning. Further, under prevailing circumstances I was going to have a hard time extracting the old clip and feeding in a substitute. A single bandolier crossed my torso, and I hurried to squeeze seven or eight cartridges out of its canvas loops into my hands. I was shaking so badly that a couple of these fell into the grass at my feet. Looking up, I saw the lead hyena. Its mouth was as big as one of the Carlsbad Caverns; its shallow panting breaths seemed to be coming in perfect synchrony with my heartbeats.
The hyena jumped. Scattering bullets everywhere, I struck the creature a desperate blow to the head with the butt of my pistol. A froth of saliva showered up into my vision, and I fell backward over the little buck I had killed. The hyena rolled away from me, unconscious.
Dazed, I struggled to my feet again. A second and a third hyena, intimidated, went around me—but their remaining comrades had just crested a gentle swelling in the plain, and it did not seem likely that, in light of their overwhelming numerical advantage, they would all prove such cowards. I dug into my pocket for the Swiss Army knife, not even daring to think what good it might do.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray Ngai my soul to take . . .
Whereupon, so help me, the cavalry arrived.
Leaping, ululating, brandishing their clubs, the Minids scurried into my field of vision from the east. Alfie and Helen were in the vanguard of this unexpected counterattack, and Alfie, bless him, had girded up his loins in the same pair of Fruit of the Loom that Roosevelt had snatched from my hand days and days ago. Whether Roosevelt had relinquished the briefs willingly, I had no idea—but the sight of that hairy habiline modeling those dirty jockey shorts while laying waste about him with his stave—well, it cheered my twentieth-century soul.
All the Minids—Jomo, Ham, Genly, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Helen—performed admirably, swinging their clubs so spiritedly that the hyenas, for all their size, were beset, bashed, brained, and bested. Moreover, throughout this abbreviated combat my rescuers kept up a demoralizing stream of hoots, yodels, and yawps.
Those hyenas that could tucked tail and ran. Four or five others crawled away with crushed skulls. I, altogether overcome, crumpled to the ground, a collapse that could have spelled an end to White Sphinx—except that the Minids, when they came forward to finish off the hyena that I had knocked unconscious, treated me, not as an odious interloper, but as a fellow habiline.
A fellow habiline in rather indifferent standing, perhaps, but undeniably a comrade and band member.
Hunkering nearby, Jomo and Malcolm banged the dead hyena’s massive head against the ground, fingered its nostrils and eyelids, and mumbled in their scraggly beards. Genly, squatting beside the antelope, was deeply curious about the bullet hole behind the buck’s right ear. While Roosevelt kept popping up from his crouch to survey the savannah, Ham, Alfie, and Helen lackadaisically cut away strips of meat from the open belly of my kill. I had never, without a pistol in hand, been this close to the Minids as a group before, and I wondered that they did not take more interest in me. Only Helen occasionally made eye contact, and I could not tell whether she was finding fault with my appearance or trying to index me in her mental catalogue file of bipedal