Hunter’s Run

Ramon looked around. Indeed, there were signs of a small, improvised camp. A tiny lean-to hardly big enough to sleep in had been constructed with fresh boughs and tied together with lengths of bark. A fire pit ringed by stone showed ashes where the lawman had cooked something at the end of a fire-hardened stick. Whoever they’d sent after Ramon had spent enough time in the field to know how to survive with what came to hand. Good for him.

Maneck stood silent by the bone-colored box, the thick fleshy sahael attached to its arm. Ramon looked at it, waiting to see what strategy the thing would adopt. The alien, however, did nothing. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Ramon cleared his throat.

‘Monster. Hey. Now we’re here, what is it you want me to do, eh?’

‘You are a man,’ Maneck said. ‘Behave as he would behave.’

‘He’s got tools and clothes, and he doesn’t have a leash on,’ Ramon said.

‘Your confluence will be approximate at the beginning,’ Maneck said. ‘This is expected. You will not be punished for it. Your needs will lead you to a matched flow. That is sufficient.’

‘Speaking of needs and flowing,’ Ramon said, ‘I got to piss.’

‘That will do,’ Maneck said. ‘Begin by achieving piss.’

Ramon smiled.

‘You stay here, then, I’ll go achieve piss.’

‘I will observe,’ Maneck said.

‘You want to watch me piss?’

‘We are to explore the banks which bound the man’s possible channels. If this task is a necessity of his being, then I will understand it.’

Ramon shrugged.

‘You’re just lucky I’m not shy about this kind of thing,’ Ramon said, walking to the nearest tree. ‘There’s some men couldn’t get a drop out, not with you watching them, eh?’

The ground was rough, and Ramon’s feet were tender. The long bath in the alien gel seemed to have softened away all his calluses. As he relieved himself against the tree trunk, he tried to make sense of the alien’s behavior. The limitations of human flow, it had said. For a being so impatiently concentrated on pragmatic results, Maneck was strangely interested in Ramon’s need to urinate, which ought to have struck it as irrelevant. It wasn’t an activity that seemed important to hunting the fugitive. But it had not known that binding his arms behind him would discomfort him, either. Perhaps the aliens needed him to understand what the habits of a man were. He was more than a hound. Merely by being human, he was a guide for them.

Ramon stood for a long moment after his bladder was empty, taking the opportunity to turn his mind to strategy. He could not refuse the aliens. The demonstration of the pain his leash could deliver had convinced him of that. But there was a long history of labor protests in which things simply took a longer time and more materials than expected. Slowdowns. Ramon might have to be on the job for these devils, but he didn’t have to be a good worker. He would move slowly, explain the fine points of pissing and shitting and hunting and trapping for as long as Maneck would allow it. Every hour Ramon could waste was another one that the lawman had to make his return to civilization and send help back. How things would unfold once that had happened, Ramon didn’t know.

He shook his penis twice as long as was truly required, then let the robe drop back down to cover his knees. Maneck’s great head shifted, but whether this was a sign of approval or disgust, Ramon had no way to tell.

‘You are complete?’ Maneck asked.

‘Sure,’ Ramon said. ‘Complete enough for the moment.’

‘You have other needs?’

‘I’ll need to find fresh water to drink,’ Ramon said. ‘And some food to eat.’

‘Complex chemical compounds which can be harvested of their potential to facilitate flow and prevent pooling,’ Maneck said. ‘This is mehiban. How will you manufacture this?’

‘Manufacture? I’m not going to make it. I’m going to catch it. Hunt for it. What is it you devils do?’

‘We consume complex chemical compounds. These are ae euth’eloi. Made things. But the oekh I have would not nourish you. How do you obtain food? I will allow you to procure it for yourself.’

Ramon scratched his arm and shrugged.

‘Well, I’m going to kill something. I’d try making a sling, maybe killing a flatfur or dragonjay, but I’ve got this fucking thing in my neck. You wouldn’t want to take it out of me, just long enough I can show you how this is done?’

Maneck stood unresponsive as a tree.

‘Didn’t think so, monster. It’s trapping, then. It might take a little longer, but it will do. Come on.’

In fact, the fastest and easiest thing would have been to gather up sug beetles as he had the other night. He had seen a few even this deep under the forest canopy. Or a half-hour of gathering would have gotten him enough mianberry to make a small meal; this far north, you could pick them off the trees by the handful. Feeding off the land wasn’t hard. The amino acids that had built up the biosphere of São Paulo were almost all identical to those on earth. But that would have been simple, and would have allowed them to move quickly on to whatever the next phase of their hunt would be. So instead, Ramon taught the alien how to trap.

His equipment had, of course, been destroyed with his van. If the thought had truly been that he should catch his dinner easily and well, that would have enraged him. Since his intention now was to stall, it only made him peevish. The bastard things had destroyed his van, after all.

Ramon scrounged through the underbrush for the raw material of a snare: whipvine, a few longish sticks seasoned enough to break but green enough to bend first, a handful of San Iganacio’s nut equivalent – a sticky bole that smelled of honey and resin – to act as bait. He was annoyed to find that all this hurt his fingers, which had been as tough as old leather; the syrup bath in which the aliens had soaked him must have melted away the calluses on his hands as well, leaving his fingers ill-prepared for real work. Through it all, Maneck watched in silence. Ramon found himself explaining the process as he went. The pressure of the thing’s unspeaking regard made him jumpy.