THREE DAYS AFTER the election, Gus Brannhard landed his aircar
at Hoksu-Mitto at mid-afternoon. It had been a long time—since
before the Pendarvis Decisions—since Jack had seen him in anything
but city clothes. Now he was the old Gus Brannhard, in floppy felt
hat, stained and faded bush jacket with cartridge-loops on the
breast, hunting knife, shorts and knee-hose, and ankle boots. He
got out of the car, shook hands, and looked around. Then, after
dragging out a canvas kit bag and two rifle-cases, he looked around
again.
“God, Jack, you have this place built up,” he said.
“It looks worse on the ground even than it did from the air.
I hope you don’t have all the game scared out of the
country.”
“For about ten, fifteen miles is all. George Lunt sends a
couple of men out each day to shoot for the pot.” He picked
up the kit bag Gus had set down. “Let’s get you settled
and then have a look around.”
“Any damnthings?”
“A few. The Fuzzies who come in at the posts to the south
mention seeing hesh-nazza. We’re not shooting any back of the
house, the way I did in June. And we’re not seeing any
harpies anywhere, lately.”
“Well, that’s a good job!” Gus didn’t
like harpies either. Come to think of it, nobody did.
“I’m going to stay a couple of days, Jack. Maybe go out
and pot a zebralope, or a river-pig, tomorrow. Just take it easy.
Next day I’ll go looking for damnthings.”
Back in the living room, Jack got out a bottle.
“It’s an hour till cocktail time,” he apologized,
“but let’s have a primer. On the election.” He
poured for both of them, raised his glass, and said,
“Cheers.”
“I hope we have something to cheer about.” Gus
lowered his drink by about a third. “We elected a hundred and
twenty-eight out of a hundred and fifty delegates. That looks
wonderful on paper.” He halved what was left of his drink.
“About forty of them we can rely on. Company men and
independent businessmen who know where their business comes from.
Another thirty or so are honest politicians; once they’re
bought, they stay bought. It’s amazing,” he
parenthesized, “how fast we grew a crop of politicians once
we got politics on this planet. As for the rest, at least they
aren’t socialists or labor-radicals or Company-haters.
They’re the best we could do, and I’m hoping, though
not betting, that they’ll be good enough. At least
there’s nobody against us with money enough to buy them away
from us.”
“When’ll the Convention be?”
“Two weeks from Monday. It’ll be at the Hotel
Mallory; the Company’s picking up the tab for the whole
thing. Starts with a banquet on Sunday evening. I know what
it’ll be like. In the mornings they’ll all be nursing
hangovers.” Gus was contemptuous; he’d probably never
had a hangover in his life. “And in the evenings
they’ll be throwing parties all over the hotel. We’ll
get a couple of hours work out of them in the afternoons. That may
be all to the good.” He looked at his empty glass, then at
the bottle. Jack pushed it across the table to him. “You take
any hundred and fifty men like this Horace Stannery here, or Abe
Lowther at Chesterville, or Bart Hogan in the Big Bend district—I
got him acquitted of a cattle-rustling charge a year and a half
ago—and every one of them’ll try to show their constituents
what statesmen they are by sponsoring some lame-brained amendment
nobody else is witless enough to think of. That was a good
constitution Leslie Coombes and I wrote. I hate to think of what
it’ll be like when it’s adopted.”
He finished his second drink. Before he could start on another,
Jack suggested, “Let’s go out and look around till the
gang starts collecting.”
They started down the walk toward the run. There were quite a
few Fuzzies playing among the buildings, since it was late enough
for them to have lost interest in lessons and drifted out of the
school-hut. More had crossed the bridge to watch the fascinating
things the Big Ones were doing around the vehicle park.
Two, both males, approached. One said, “Heyo, Pappy
Jack,” and the other asked, “Pappy Jack, who is Big One
with face-fur?”
Gus laughed and squatted down to their level.
“Heyo, Fuzzies. What names you?”
They gave him blank stares. He examined the silver ID-disks at
their throats. They were blank except for registration numbers.
“What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t they have
names?”
“Except the ones who want to stay here, we don’t
name them; we let the people who adopt them do that.”
“Well, don’t they have names of their own? Fuzzy
names?”
“Not very good ones. Big One and Little One and Other One
and like that. In the woods, mostly they call each other
You.”
Gus was scratching one on the back of the neck, which all
Fuzzies appreciated. The other was trying to get his knife out of
the sheath.
“Hey, quit that. Not touch; sharp. You savvy
sharp?”
“Sure. Knife for me sharp, too.” He drew it from the
sheath on his shoulder bag and showed it: three-inch blade, which
would be equivalent to nine-inch for a human. The edge was razor
keen; he’d been around here long enough to learn how to keep
a knife honed. The other Fuzzy showed his too, and Gus let them
look at his. It had a zarabuck-horn grip; they recognized that at
once.
“Takku,” one said. “You kill with
noise-thing?”
“Big Ones,” the other said reprovingly, “call
takku zarabuck. Big Ones call noise-thing gun.”
They tagged along, talking about everything they saw. Gus lifted
them, one to each shoulder, and carried them. Taking rides on Big
Ones was something all Fuzzies loved. They were still riding on
Uncle Gus when they returned to the camp-house, where George Lunt
and Pancho Ybarra were mixing cocktails and Ruth van Riebeek and
Lynne Andrews were assembling snacks. Usually Fuzzies didn’t
hang around at cocktail time; this was when Big Ones wanted to make
Big One talk. These two, however, refused to leave Gus, and sat
with him on the grass, sipping hokfusinated fruit juice through
straws.
“You’re hooked, Gus,” George Lunt told him
cheerfully. “You’re Pappy Gus from now on.”
“You mean they want to stay with me?” Gus seemed
slightly alarmed. He liked Fuzzies, the way some bachelors like
children, as long as they’re somebody else’s.
“You mean, all the time?”
“Sure,” he said. “Little Fuzzy’s been
spreading the word; all the Fuzzies will have Big Ones of their
own. They’ve picked you for their Big One.”
“You be Big One for us?” one of the Fuzzies asked.
They both lost interest in their fruit juice and tried to climb
onto his back. “We like you.”
“Well, mightn’t be such a bad idea, at that,”
Gus considered. “I’m going to get a place of my own,
out of town, say ten or fifteen minutes flying-time.” With
the kind of aircar he flew, and the way he flew it, that would be
four or five hundred miles. “I like it where it gets dark at
night, and if you want noise, you have to make it
yourself.”
“I know.” He looked around Hoksu-Mitto and thought
of what Holloway’s Camp had been like. “It used to be
that way here.”
The next morning, Gus was still in bed when Holloway went across
the run to his office. He got through his paperwork in a couple of
hours and then looked in at the school and at Lynne Andrews’s
clinic, dispensary and hospital. Lynne had another viable Fuzzy
birth to report, and was as proud as though she had accomplished it
herself. That would be one of the first wave to get down into the
Piedmont and cash in on the land-prawn boom. The Fuzzy gestation
period was a little over six months. It would be March or April at
the earliest before the hokfusine-babies started coming in. Maybe,
in time, they’d have a population explosion to worry about.
Give that the Scarlett O’Hara treatment; enough other things
to think about today.
He found Gus Brannhard on what passed for the lawn of the
camp-house, playing with the two Fuzzies.
“I thought you were going hunting this morning.”
Gus looked up, grinning as sheepishly as his leonine features
permitted.
“I thought I was, too. Then I got to playing with the kids
here. Maybe I will this afternoon, but I just feel lazy.”
He just felt tired, was what. He’d been pushing himself
hard; probably hadn’t had two good nights sleep in a row
since People versus Kellogg and Holloway had been scheduled for
trial.
“Why don’t you take the kids hunting? I think
they’d like it.”
That hadn’t occurred to Gus. “Well, but they might
get hurt. Or lost; mind, I’m going five, six hundred miles to
hunt.”
“They won’t get lost. When you set your car down,
leave the generator on, on neutral. They can hear the vibrations
for five or six miles; if you get lost, they’ll lead you
back. George Lunt’s boys always do that when they go out with
Fuzzies.”
“Suppose I shoot something; won’t that scare
them?”
“Nah, they like shooting. They’re always underfoot
at the Protection Force target range. And I think you’ll all
three have fun.”
“Hear that, kids? You want to go with Unka Gus, hunt
takku, hunt . . . what the hell’s the Fuzzy for
zebralope?”
“Kigga-hikso.”
“Zeb’ alope? You shoot zeb’ alope too?”
the Fuzzies both asked.
Gus wasn’t back till after the crowd began assembling for
cocktails at the camp-house that afternoon; when he came in he set
the car down in back of the cookhouse first, then brought it across
the run and grounded beside the house. The Fuzzies jumped out at
once, shouting, “Kill zeb’alope! Kill zarabuck! Unka
Gus kill zeb’alope, two zarabuck!”
Gus came over more slowly, unslinging his rifle, dropping out
the magazine and clearing the chamber, picking up the ejected
round. He was laughing as he leaned the rifle beside the bench at
the kitchen door.
“Give me a drink, somebody. No, not that stuff;
isn’t there any unadulterated whiskey around? Thank you,
George.” He poured from the bottle Lunt gave him, took a big
drink and refilled his glass. “My God, you should have seen
those kids! We set down beside a little creek a couple of miles
above where it empties into Snake River. First of all, that one
over there yelled, ‘Zatku! Zatku!’ and took off with
his chopper-digger. The other one started circling around, and in a
minute or so he had one. So we hunted zatku—land-prawn; goddamnit,
as soon as you learn the native names for things, the natives start
talking Lingua Terra. Then, after they killed a couple of them,
they were after me, ‘Pappy Gus, now we hunt
zeb’alope.’ So we hunted zebralope.
“They don’t hunt by scent, like dogs, but
they’re the smartest trackers I ever saw. Look, you’ve
hunted on Loki; so have I. You know how good the Bush Dwanga there
are. Well, these Fuzzies could make the best Dwanga tracker I ever
hunted with look like a blind imbecile. As soon as they find a
fresh track, they split. One went one way, and the other another.
In a minute, there was a big zebralope, damn near the size of a
horse, running right at me. I gave him one in the shoulder and one
in the neck; that finished him. So I gutted it. I knew they like
raw liver, so I sliced the liver up for them. They wanted me to eat
some. I told them Big Ones didn’t like raw liver. Now they
think Big Ones are all nuts. They ate the kidneys too. So then we
hunted zarabuck. We got two. Your namesakes, Gerd; van
Riebeek’s zarabuck, the little gray ones.”
“Did they eat the livers and kidneys from them too?”
Lynne Andrews demanded. “You bring them around to the
dispensary tomorrow.”
“Well, there is one thing for damn-good-an’-sure:
I’m adopting two Fuzzies. They’re the best hunting
companions I ever had. Beat a dog every way from middle; better
hunters, and better company. You can talk to a dog, but a dog
can’t talk back to you, and Fuzzies can. Unka Gus and his
Fuzzies are going to have a lot of fun. Pappy Gus,” he
corrected himself. “Pappy is the title of a Big One who
stands in loco parentis to a Fuzzy; Unka just means amicus Fuzziae
in general.”
“What are you going to call them?”
“I don’t know.” Brannhard thought for a
moment. “George named his crowd after criminals. Fitz
Mortlake named his for detectives and spies. I’ll have to
name mine for hunters. Fiction names: Allan Quartermain and Natty
Bumppo. You hear that, kids? You have names now. Allan Quartermain
name for you; Natty Bumppo name for you. Now, I hope I don’t
forget which is which.”
THE NEXT DAY, he teleprinted the Fuzzies’ registration
numbers, fingerprints and new names to Mrs. Pendarvis at the
Adoption Bureau, so Gus Brannhard was now officially Pappy Gus.
With some misgivings, Pappy Gus took Allan Quartermain and Natty
Bumppo damnthing hunting. He carried his big double express, and
took one of George Lunt’s men, similarly armed, along.
Damnthings were nothing for one man, or one man and two Fuzzies, to
go after alone. The Fuzzies had excellent suggestions about how to
find one, but they thought Pappy Gus and the other Big One were
taking foolish chances to get out of the car and shoot it on
foot.
“Thought I’d have some difficulty explaining
that,” Gus said when he returned. “Sportsmanship is not
usually an aboriginal virtue. Put in the form of ‘more
fun,’ though, they got it. I taught them how to shoot, too.
They thought that was fun.”
“Not with a 12.7 express, I hope.”
“No, with my pistol.” Gus’s pistol was an
8.5-mm Mars-Consolidated, a hunting weapon with an eight-inch
barrel and a detachable shoulder-stock. “It was too clumsy
for them, but the recoil didn’t bother them at all. I was
surprised. I thought it’d kick hell out of them, but it
didn’t. They liked it.”
Holloway was surprised too. He’d thought that even a .22
would be too much for a Fuzzy.
“I’m going to have Mart Burgess make up a couple of
little rifles for them,” Gus was saying.
“Eight-point-five pistol, say about four pounds. Single-shot,
at least for their first ones. Too many complications about an
auto-loader for a Fuzzy to remember.”
If anybody could make a Fuzzy-size rifle, Mart Burgess could. He
was the same sort of gunsmith as Henry Stenson was an
instrument-maker. You only found that sort of craftsmanship on
low-population planets where there was no mass market to encourage
mass production. Holloway didn’t quite like the idea,
though.
“All the other Fuzzies’ll hear about it, and
they’ll want rifles too. You give rifles to primitive
peoples, you know what happens? Teach these Fuzzies about bows, and
they can make their own, the way the Fuzzies are doing here. Give a
Stone Age people steel spears and knives and hatchets, and one will
last years. As soon as they learn blacksmithing they can make their
own out of any scrap they pick up. But give them firearms, and they
have to have ammunition. They can’t make that themselves;
they’re past the point of no return. The next thing, they
forget how to use their own weapons, and then they really are
hooked.”
Gus said the same thing Pancho Ybarra had said a couple of weeks
ago.
“They’re hooked now, on hokfusine, even if they
don’t know it. They can’t get enough from
land-prawns.
“And talk about being hooked, how about yourself? You
don’t make your own ammunition; you even stopped reloading
because it was too much bother. What do you use that you make
yourself?”
“That’s different. I trade for what I use. It used
to be sunstones; now it’s the work of running this madhouse.
With you, it used to be defending criminals, and now it’s
prosecuting them. But we both trade, and the Fuzzies haven’t
anything to trade. What they get from us is free
handouts.”
“Like Nifflheim they haven’t anything to trade. You
mean to sit there and tell me you don’t get anything from
Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Baby and the rest of your family?
If you don’t, why don’t you get rid of them? You think
Victor Grego doesn’t get something from that Fuzzy of his?
Why, he’d kill anybody who tried to take Diamond away from
him. Or my Allan and Natty, that I’ve only had since
yesterday?
“You talk about anybody being hooked; we’re hooked.
Hooked on Fuzzies. And they earn everything they get from us just
by being around. You just let them keep on being Fuzzies, and
don’t worry about anything else. They’ll be all right
as long as we’re all right to them.”
THREE DAYS AFTER the election, Gus Brannhard landed his aircar
at Hoksu-Mitto at mid-afternoon. It had been a long time—since
before the Pendarvis Decisions—since Jack had seen him in anything
but city clothes. Now he was the old Gus Brannhard, in floppy felt
hat, stained and faded bush jacket with cartridge-loops on the
breast, hunting knife, shorts and knee-hose, and ankle boots. He
got out of the car, shook hands, and looked around. Then, after
dragging out a canvas kit bag and two rifle-cases, he looked around
again.
“God, Jack, you have this place built up,” he said.
“It looks worse on the ground even than it did from the air.
I hope you don’t have all the game scared out of the
country.”
“For about ten, fifteen miles is all. George Lunt sends a
couple of men out each day to shoot for the pot.” He picked
up the kit bag Gus had set down. “Let’s get you settled
and then have a look around.”
“Any damnthings?”
“A few. The Fuzzies who come in at the posts to the south
mention seeing hesh-nazza. We’re not shooting any back of the
house, the way I did in June. And we’re not seeing any
harpies anywhere, lately.”
“Well, that’s a good job!” Gus didn’t
like harpies either. Come to think of it, nobody did.
“I’m going to stay a couple of days, Jack. Maybe go out
and pot a zebralope, or a river-pig, tomorrow. Just take it easy.
Next day I’ll go looking for damnthings.”
Back in the living room, Jack got out a bottle.
“It’s an hour till cocktail time,” he apologized,
“but let’s have a primer. On the election.” He
poured for both of them, raised his glass, and said,
“Cheers.”
“I hope we have something to cheer about.” Gus
lowered his drink by about a third. “We elected a hundred and
twenty-eight out of a hundred and fifty delegates. That looks
wonderful on paper.” He halved what was left of his drink.
“About forty of them we can rely on. Company men and
independent businessmen who know where their business comes from.
Another thirty or so are honest politicians; once they’re
bought, they stay bought. It’s amazing,” he
parenthesized, “how fast we grew a crop of politicians once
we got politics on this planet. As for the rest, at least they
aren’t socialists or labor-radicals or Company-haters.
They’re the best we could do, and I’m hoping, though
not betting, that they’ll be good enough. At least
there’s nobody against us with money enough to buy them away
from us.”
“When’ll the Convention be?”
“Two weeks from Monday. It’ll be at the Hotel
Mallory; the Company’s picking up the tab for the whole
thing. Starts with a banquet on Sunday evening. I know what
it’ll be like. In the mornings they’ll all be nursing
hangovers.” Gus was contemptuous; he’d probably never
had a hangover in his life. “And in the evenings
they’ll be throwing parties all over the hotel. We’ll
get a couple of hours work out of them in the afternoons. That may
be all to the good.” He looked at his empty glass, then at
the bottle. Jack pushed it across the table to him. “You take
any hundred and fifty men like this Horace Stannery here, or Abe
Lowther at Chesterville, or Bart Hogan in the Big Bend district—I
got him acquitted of a cattle-rustling charge a year and a half
ago—and every one of them’ll try to show their constituents
what statesmen they are by sponsoring some lame-brained amendment
nobody else is witless enough to think of. That was a good
constitution Leslie Coombes and I wrote. I hate to think of what
it’ll be like when it’s adopted.”
He finished his second drink. Before he could start on another,
Jack suggested, “Let’s go out and look around till the
gang starts collecting.”
They started down the walk toward the run. There were quite a
few Fuzzies playing among the buildings, since it was late enough
for them to have lost interest in lessons and drifted out of the
school-hut. More had crossed the bridge to watch the fascinating
things the Big Ones were doing around the vehicle park.
Two, both males, approached. One said, “Heyo, Pappy
Jack,” and the other asked, “Pappy Jack, who is Big One
with face-fur?”
Gus laughed and squatted down to their level.
“Heyo, Fuzzies. What names you?”
They gave him blank stares. He examined the silver ID-disks at
their throats. They were blank except for registration numbers.
“What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t they have
names?”
“Except the ones who want to stay here, we don’t
name them; we let the people who adopt them do that.”
“Well, don’t they have names of their own? Fuzzy
names?”
“Not very good ones. Big One and Little One and Other One
and like that. In the woods, mostly they call each other
You.”
Gus was scratching one on the back of the neck, which all
Fuzzies appreciated. The other was trying to get his knife out of
the sheath.
“Hey, quit that. Not touch; sharp. You savvy
sharp?”
“Sure. Knife for me sharp, too.” He drew it from the
sheath on his shoulder bag and showed it: three-inch blade, which
would be equivalent to nine-inch for a human. The edge was razor
keen; he’d been around here long enough to learn how to keep
a knife honed. The other Fuzzy showed his too, and Gus let them
look at his. It had a zarabuck-horn grip; they recognized that at
once.
“Takku,” one said. “You kill with
noise-thing?”
“Big Ones,” the other said reprovingly, “call
takku zarabuck. Big Ones call noise-thing gun.”
They tagged along, talking about everything they saw. Gus lifted
them, one to each shoulder, and carried them. Taking rides on Big
Ones was something all Fuzzies loved. They were still riding on
Uncle Gus when they returned to the camp-house, where George Lunt
and Pancho Ybarra were mixing cocktails and Ruth van Riebeek and
Lynne Andrews were assembling snacks. Usually Fuzzies didn’t
hang around at cocktail time; this was when Big Ones wanted to make
Big One talk. These two, however, refused to leave Gus, and sat
with him on the grass, sipping hokfusinated fruit juice through
straws.
“You’re hooked, Gus,” George Lunt told him
cheerfully. “You’re Pappy Gus from now on.”
“You mean they want to stay with me?” Gus seemed
slightly alarmed. He liked Fuzzies, the way some bachelors like
children, as long as they’re somebody else’s.
“You mean, all the time?”
“Sure,” he said. “Little Fuzzy’s been
spreading the word; all the Fuzzies will have Big Ones of their
own. They’ve picked you for their Big One.”
“You be Big One for us?” one of the Fuzzies asked.
They both lost interest in their fruit juice and tried to climb
onto his back. “We like you.”
“Well, mightn’t be such a bad idea, at that,”
Gus considered. “I’m going to get a place of my own,
out of town, say ten or fifteen minutes flying-time.” With
the kind of aircar he flew, and the way he flew it, that would be
four or five hundred miles. “I like it where it gets dark at
night, and if you want noise, you have to make it
yourself.”
“I know.” He looked around Hoksu-Mitto and thought
of what Holloway’s Camp had been like. “It used to be
that way here.”
The next morning, Gus was still in bed when Holloway went across
the run to his office. He got through his paperwork in a couple of
hours and then looked in at the school and at Lynne Andrews’s
clinic, dispensary and hospital. Lynne had another viable Fuzzy
birth to report, and was as proud as though she had accomplished it
herself. That would be one of the first wave to get down into the
Piedmont and cash in on the land-prawn boom. The Fuzzy gestation
period was a little over six months. It would be March or April at
the earliest before the hokfusine-babies started coming in. Maybe,
in time, they’d have a population explosion to worry about.
Give that the Scarlett O’Hara treatment; enough other things
to think about today.
He found Gus Brannhard on what passed for the lawn of the
camp-house, playing with the two Fuzzies.
“I thought you were going hunting this morning.”
Gus looked up, grinning as sheepishly as his leonine features
permitted.
“I thought I was, too. Then I got to playing with the kids
here. Maybe I will this afternoon, but I just feel lazy.”
He just felt tired, was what. He’d been pushing himself
hard; probably hadn’t had two good nights sleep in a row
since People versus Kellogg and Holloway had been scheduled for
trial.
“Why don’t you take the kids hunting? I think
they’d like it.”
That hadn’t occurred to Gus. “Well, but they might
get hurt. Or lost; mind, I’m going five, six hundred miles to
hunt.”
“They won’t get lost. When you set your car down,
leave the generator on, on neutral. They can hear the vibrations
for five or six miles; if you get lost, they’ll lead you
back. George Lunt’s boys always do that when they go out with
Fuzzies.”
“Suppose I shoot something; won’t that scare
them?”
“Nah, they like shooting. They’re always underfoot
at the Protection Force target range. And I think you’ll all
three have fun.”
“Hear that, kids? You want to go with Unka Gus, hunt
takku, hunt . . . what the hell’s the Fuzzy for
zebralope?”
“Kigga-hikso.”
“Zeb’ alope? You shoot zeb’ alope too?”
the Fuzzies both asked.
Gus wasn’t back till after the crowd began assembling for
cocktails at the camp-house that afternoon; when he came in he set
the car down in back of the cookhouse first, then brought it across
the run and grounded beside the house. The Fuzzies jumped out at
once, shouting, “Kill zeb’alope! Kill zarabuck! Unka
Gus kill zeb’alope, two zarabuck!”
Gus came over more slowly, unslinging his rifle, dropping out
the magazine and clearing the chamber, picking up the ejected
round. He was laughing as he leaned the rifle beside the bench at
the kitchen door.
“Give me a drink, somebody. No, not that stuff;
isn’t there any unadulterated whiskey around? Thank you,
George.” He poured from the bottle Lunt gave him, took a big
drink and refilled his glass. “My God, you should have seen
those kids! We set down beside a little creek a couple of miles
above where it empties into Snake River. First of all, that one
over there yelled, ‘Zatku! Zatku!’ and took off with
his chopper-digger. The other one started circling around, and in a
minute or so he had one. So we hunted zatku—land-prawn; goddamnit,
as soon as you learn the native names for things, the natives start
talking Lingua Terra. Then, after they killed a couple of them,
they were after me, ‘Pappy Gus, now we hunt
zeb’alope.’ So we hunted zebralope.
“They don’t hunt by scent, like dogs, but
they’re the smartest trackers I ever saw. Look, you’ve
hunted on Loki; so have I. You know how good the Bush Dwanga there
are. Well, these Fuzzies could make the best Dwanga tracker I ever
hunted with look like a blind imbecile. As soon as they find a
fresh track, they split. One went one way, and the other another.
In a minute, there was a big zebralope, damn near the size of a
horse, running right at me. I gave him one in the shoulder and one
in the neck; that finished him. So I gutted it. I knew they like
raw liver, so I sliced the liver up for them. They wanted me to eat
some. I told them Big Ones didn’t like raw liver. Now they
think Big Ones are all nuts. They ate the kidneys too. So then we
hunted zarabuck. We got two. Your namesakes, Gerd; van
Riebeek’s zarabuck, the little gray ones.”
“Did they eat the livers and kidneys from them too?”
Lynne Andrews demanded. “You bring them around to the
dispensary tomorrow.”
“Well, there is one thing for damn-good-an’-sure:
I’m adopting two Fuzzies. They’re the best hunting
companions I ever had. Beat a dog every way from middle; better
hunters, and better company. You can talk to a dog, but a dog
can’t talk back to you, and Fuzzies can. Unka Gus and his
Fuzzies are going to have a lot of fun. Pappy Gus,” he
corrected himself. “Pappy is the title of a Big One who
stands in loco parentis to a Fuzzy; Unka just means amicus Fuzziae
in general.”
“What are you going to call them?”
“I don’t know.” Brannhard thought for a
moment. “George named his crowd after criminals. Fitz
Mortlake named his for detectives and spies. I’ll have to
name mine for hunters. Fiction names: Allan Quartermain and Natty
Bumppo. You hear that, kids? You have names now. Allan Quartermain
name for you; Natty Bumppo name for you. Now, I hope I don’t
forget which is which.”
THE NEXT DAY, he teleprinted the Fuzzies’ registration
numbers, fingerprints and new names to Mrs. Pendarvis at the
Adoption Bureau, so Gus Brannhard was now officially Pappy Gus.
With some misgivings, Pappy Gus took Allan Quartermain and Natty
Bumppo damnthing hunting. He carried his big double express, and
took one of George Lunt’s men, similarly armed, along.
Damnthings were nothing for one man, or one man and two Fuzzies, to
go after alone. The Fuzzies had excellent suggestions about how to
find one, but they thought Pappy Gus and the other Big One were
taking foolish chances to get out of the car and shoot it on
foot.
“Thought I’d have some difficulty explaining
that,” Gus said when he returned. “Sportsmanship is not
usually an aboriginal virtue. Put in the form of ‘more
fun,’ though, they got it. I taught them how to shoot, too.
They thought that was fun.”
“Not with a 12.7 express, I hope.”
“No, with my pistol.” Gus’s pistol was an
8.5-mm Mars-Consolidated, a hunting weapon with an eight-inch
barrel and a detachable shoulder-stock. “It was too clumsy
for them, but the recoil didn’t bother them at all. I was
surprised. I thought it’d kick hell out of them, but it
didn’t. They liked it.”
Holloway was surprised too. He’d thought that even a .22
would be too much for a Fuzzy.
“I’m going to have Mart Burgess make up a couple of
little rifles for them,” Gus was saying.
“Eight-point-five pistol, say about four pounds. Single-shot,
at least for their first ones. Too many complications about an
auto-loader for a Fuzzy to remember.”
If anybody could make a Fuzzy-size rifle, Mart Burgess could. He
was the same sort of gunsmith as Henry Stenson was an
instrument-maker. You only found that sort of craftsmanship on
low-population planets where there was no mass market to encourage
mass production. Holloway didn’t quite like the idea,
though.
“All the other Fuzzies’ll hear about it, and
they’ll want rifles too. You give rifles to primitive
peoples, you know what happens? Teach these Fuzzies about bows, and
they can make their own, the way the Fuzzies are doing here. Give a
Stone Age people steel spears and knives and hatchets, and one will
last years. As soon as they learn blacksmithing they can make their
own out of any scrap they pick up. But give them firearms, and they
have to have ammunition. They can’t make that themselves;
they’re past the point of no return. The next thing, they
forget how to use their own weapons, and then they really are
hooked.”
Gus said the same thing Pancho Ybarra had said a couple of weeks
ago.
“They’re hooked now, on hokfusine, even if they
don’t know it. They can’t get enough from
land-prawns.
“And talk about being hooked, how about yourself? You
don’t make your own ammunition; you even stopped reloading
because it was too much bother. What do you use that you make
yourself?”
“That’s different. I trade for what I use. It used
to be sunstones; now it’s the work of running this madhouse.
With you, it used to be defending criminals, and now it’s
prosecuting them. But we both trade, and the Fuzzies haven’t
anything to trade. What they get from us is free
handouts.”
“Like Nifflheim they haven’t anything to trade. You
mean to sit there and tell me you don’t get anything from
Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Baby and the rest of your family?
If you don’t, why don’t you get rid of them? You think
Victor Grego doesn’t get something from that Fuzzy of his?
Why, he’d kill anybody who tried to take Diamond away from
him. Or my Allan and Natty, that I’ve only had since
yesterday?
“You talk about anybody being hooked; we’re hooked.
Hooked on Fuzzies. And they earn everything they get from us just
by being around. You just let them keep on being Fuzzies, and
don’t worry about anything else. They’ll be all right
as long as we’re all right to them.”