to every question, you know. Do you remember what happened to Genly?”
Malcolm pointed his forefinger at a hyena whose agate eyes glittered greedily from a nearby clump of grass. He clicked his tongue. Like a ruminating goat, he waggled his chin whiskers. In light of our predicament, my scruples about using the pistol again at last struck me as misplaced.
“All right,” I said grudgingly.
And drew my pistol from my holster. And, as Pete Grier had once used a spotlight to murder a defenseless deer, took full advantage of the moon to shoot that offal-eating brigand between the eyes. The report, echoing away, had an orgasmic quality. I felt drained and unaccountably saddened by the hyena’s death.
The other hyenas, along with a pair of scruffy vultures that belatedly managed to get airborne had already hightailed it, but I fired off the remainder of my clip, anyway.
Malcolm clung almost cravenly to the tree during this fusillade, but afterward, our besiegers dispersed, swung to the ground and ran along the water’s edge like a man emancipated from bondage. I slid the hot machine back into its holster and watched the other Minids descend from the surrounding trees. Soon they were all on the ground. Some of them—mostly males—ventured out onto the prairie to examine the corpse of the hyena I had shot. I, however, stayed upstairs, determined to keep the watch that Malcolm had abandoned.
“Look, I’m not going to do this all the time,” I informed the Minids. “But it does work when we need it, doesn’t it?”
The women and children turned dubious, moonlit faces upward, while Roosevelt, Fred, and Malcolm squatted beside the hyena with lava cobbles and pieces of chert, flaking these into tools with which to butcher the carcass. Morning was still many hours off, but they seemed disinclined to surrender my kill to the vultures by coming back to the thicket for a little well-earned shuteye. I watched them working without envy or appetite.
More than likely I dozed. When I awoke, Fred was standing sentinel in another tree, and the remainder of our band had found sleeping spots on the ground. So many bodies lay about that the scene triggered thoughts of massacre or holocaust.
Fred made a cooing sound and pointed into the underbrush. Rousing myself, I saw nothing, only thorn trees and desolation under a falling moon. Fred continued to coo, and a moment later a shadow emerged from a thicket to the northeast. At the sight of this figure my heart began ker-chunking like an engine block whose bolts have shaken loose.
It was Helen.
I repressed the urge to halloo, to scramble down to meet her. The Minids deserved to sleep, and my rushing to Helen would inevitably rouse and perplex more than a few of them. My heart laboring noisily, I waited for her to pick her way across the intervening territory to our water hole. Fred, having alerted her to our position, stopped cooing, but Helen did not seem to make good progress toward us. Ordinarily she was light-footed and quick. What was taking her so long? Had she sustained some terrible injury?
No, she had not. Helen was carrying something, clutching it in front of her like an idol. It was a baby. I remembered the baboon infant that, some time ago, she had brought back from a foraging expedition. That infant had not long survived its abduction, and if this was another stolen child, as it certainly appeared to be, the inarguable result of Helen’s frustrated maternal longings would be the poor creature’s death. Sweet Jesus, I thought, not again.
As quietly as I could, I went down to Helen and met her at the far side of the water hole. She handed me her darling, which was not a baboon but an australopithecine baby—from the africanus troop that had shadowed us all the way from New Helensburgh. The baby came willingly into my arms, and my first thought was that she resembled a human child in furry long johns. Her feet were more or less bare, and her knees—as if she had worn holes in her pajamas—were naked, calloused knots very like my own. She refused to look at me, glancing instead at Helen before staring wistfully out into the darkness of the bush. She was slightly larger and slightly hairier than Fred and Nicole’s A.P.B., probably more than a year old.
“At least you had the sense to steal one that’s old enough to eat solid foods,” I told Helen.
Helen took the australopithecine child out