“Can’t say why.” Farrell frowned, puzzled. “He’s a brave man, the kind to go up against a bear with nothing but a knife.”
“Yeah, but he’d already shot his rifle, and that didn’t stop the boar-bear,” Zeke objected. “Five more men shot it, too, before it reached him.”
“But he held his ground,” Farrell objected.
“Swung aside at the last minute,” Lem reminded him. “Yeah, but that’s just good fighting,” Farrell countered. “He still stood with that knife up, waiting to see if the bear turned on him.”
“It didn’t?” Gar guessed.
“No, it stumbled on and lay dead,” Farrell told him. “Don’t change how brave he was, though.”
“So what kind of ‘coward talk’ did this brave man make?” Gar asked.
The men glanced at one another, clearly unwilling to talk about it even now. At last Lem said, “That there weren’t no point to people getting killed when they didn’t have to—that folks don’t have to fight, and surely not to the death.”
“Coward talk, all right.” Zeke nodded with conviction. “So he’s out here with the rest of us now, and it’s kill or be killed for sure.”
“Only if the clans get together to clean us out,” Lem demurred.
“Yeah, or unless another band tries to take our food,” Zeke shot back.
Farrell nodded. “Least that makes sense—killing to get food for starving folks.”
“Not like killing ‘cause one great-great-fifty-times-great grandpa shot another.” Lem stood up. “Enough talk. Time to hike home if we want to get there before dark.” He looked down at Gar. “Come if you want, stranger. The roof might be only straw, but it’s better than sleeping out in the open.”
“It does feel like rain,” Gar admitted. “Do you always invite the people you ambush home?”
“Sure—why not?” Lem grinned. “Once we’ve got their food and their goods, leastways. They don’t usually accept, though.” Gar shrugged. “Why not? I’m a trader, and your people might have furs to swap for needles.” He stood and started kicking dirt over the fire.
The outlaws began to relax on the way home, becoming downright talkative. Gar only had to toss in the occasional question to steer the conversation toward the outlaw life and the reasons for taking it up; the men were quick enough to argue the merits of their comrades’ cases. When Lem claimed that the youngest of their number, a teenager named Kerlew, had been outcast for being a weakling and just downright strange, Farrell objected.
“Kerlew ain’t no weakling,” he said. “He’s made it through three winters with nothing worse than a head cold, and he’s always brought in his share of squirrel meat.”
“Makes good gunpowder, too,” Zeke observed.
Lem grinned at Gar. “You notice they don’t try to say he isn’t strange.”
“Well, he does get that faraway look in his eye a lot,” Zeke admitted.
“And he talks about the gods like he really believes in ‘em.” Farrell shook his head in despair.
“His clan cast him out for no more than that?” Gar asked in disbelief.
“He likely would have run away on his own, sooner or later,” Zeke opined. “They made fun of him so much, it’s a wonder he stayed till he was eighteen.”
“Thought he had nothing to lose,” Lem explained to Gar, “so he started preaching peace—and by oak, ash, and thorn, that boy can preach!”
“But his clan declared him a coward and cast him out?” Gar asked.
“A coward and a traitor, for making the Murrays doubt themselves and their cause,” Lem said, bitter again. “Thought he weakened their backbones.”
“Now he stiffens ours,” Farrell said. “If you don’t think the outlaw life is the right life, stranger, you just ask young Kerlew, and you’ll be dazed by his answer.”
“You think this life is right and good?” Gar asked in amazement.
“ ‘Course we do.” Lem looked him straight in the eye. “We don’t have to kill no one for no good reason, stranger—or for the sake of a quarrel hundreds of years gone, which amounts to the same thing.”
“We’ll kill if another band tries to kill us,” Farrell said, “but I’ll tell you, none of us can remember the last time that happened.”
“ ‘Course, you don’t live to be all that old, with only thin walls to keep out the cold, and with bears and wolves against you,” Lem pointed out. “But the word gets passed down. Eighty years since one band tried to kill off another for their food, that’s what we figure.”
“That’s very good,” Gar said. “I should think hunger would drive you to it more often than that.”
“It might, if the clans didn’t club together to wipe us out every so often,” Zeke said bitterly.
“When you tell it that way, I’m surprised there’s anyone who doesn’t join you in the forest,” Gar said.
Lem eyed him askance. “You know what ‘outlaw’ means, stranger?”
“Happens that I do,” Gar said. “It means that you broke the law, put yourself outside it, so you lose its protection. Anyone can kill you for any reason, and your clan won’t avenge you.”
Lem nodded. “So anybody from any clan can beat us up or steal from us or kill us off if they’re fool enough to come into the deep woods, where every tree trunk might have a sharpshooter ready to kill them.”
“But it means no healing if you’re sick, and none of the goods you can make on a homestead,” Farrell pointed out. Gar nodded slowly. “Good reasons to stay within the law, even if you don’t really agree with it. You’d have to be awfully sick of fighting to stand up and walk out. Do all the clans have those laws?”
“There’s stories about clans who didn’t, but they died off,” Farrell said offhandedly.
Gar felt a chill. He wondered if the tales had been true, and talk against war really did make a clan weak—or if they were simply stories made up to frighten clansfolk into doing as they were told.
“You do get sick and tired of the fighting if you live long enough,” Zeke allowed, “ ‘specially if you get to know somebody from the other clan and find out how much they’re like you.”
“And there’s always some who do,” Lem sighed, “and who fall in love.”
Gar felt the chill again. “You sound as if you know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ve got two in our band right now,” Lem said, “and it’s a miracle they’re still in love, after the way they starved and just barely managed till we found them.”
“Allie is a Rork,” Farrell said, “and Billy is a Gonigle. Hard for young folk not to meet each other, when the same stream flows through both their farms.”
“But if their clans didn’t live next to each other, they wouldn’t be fighting?”
“Seems to be the way of it,” Lem sighed.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Farrell added, “but it seems the ancestors didn’t believe that.”
“So we’ve been learning it the hard way ever since,” Lem said sourly.
Gar steered the conversation back to crime. “Didn’t they try to hide the fact that they were in love?”
“Oh, they tried,” Lem said, “but good luck keeping anything secret from your clan. You’re going to go sneaking off far too often, and sooner or later there’ll be a pair of eyes to watch you go.”
“And a pair of silent feet to follow you,” Farrell added.
“Somebody got curious, and trailed one of them?” Gar asked.
“One of the Rork girls, as Allie tells it,” Lem said, “a little one. You know how the tads are about spying on the big ones when folks come a’ courting. Well, the child followed Allie…”
“Fun game,” Zeke said generously.
“Yeah, tracking without being spotted,” Lem agreed. “The tad was too good at it, though, and Allie didn’t suspect a thing, though I’m sure she must have been wary…”