“Three?” Simmons said.
“Three something-something,” Kolomusnim replied, holding up that many fingers. The unintelligible word had far too many consonants, and probably meant condor. “And man-sign. Mebbe two days, mebbe right after shoot. Belly cut, liver, kidney, tongue, haunches gone, loin—good meat. No man sign after that.”
“Hmmm.” Simmons thought, elbows on his knees; the squatting posture looked nearly as natural to him as to the Indian. “Probably some little band of holdouts scavenging the edge of the marsh.”
He rose. “There are three condors feeding on some camels we shot. You can wait here, Adrienne. I’ll have the birds netted inside a couple of hours, and then you can come in with the cars.”
She had been looking over his horse lines; there were twelve mounts, not counting two pack-mules. Sensibly, he’d been using the Land Rovers as a base to carry fodder and water, and then ranging out to check his baits with the less noisy horses. That would minimize the chances of scaring off any feeding condors.
“To hell with that, Jim,” she said. “I’m the Bad Girl of the Rolfes, remember? I’ll ride in with you, and we can have the chopper pick the birds up, bring them back here, load the rest and be back at the Gate before sunset.”
He hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. “All right,” he said. “Never could stand to be left out of the boys’ games, eh?”
She shrugged. “I’m not Little Miss Cindy Lou Magnoliablossom,” she said dryly, patting the FN FiveseveN automatic holstered high on her right hip.
There are some advantages to FirstSide, she thought. The extinctions there fortunately include a lot of Cindy Lou-ism.
“I noticed; Alf, saddle an extra horse.”
Until then Schalk and Piet had been silent as boulders. Now Piet stirred.
“Nie, nie, miss,” he said. “We go too.” At her frown, he raised a massive hand and went on. “Miss, if something happened to you and we weren’t there, your oupa would have our bliddy ba… our bliddy heads.”
His face had taken on a mulish look she recognized; she shrugged and said, “The more the merrier. It’s only a couple of miles, right?”
“About ten,” Simmons said in a resigned voice. “Alf, saddle three extras; you’ll be staying with the birds here. Jake, run over to the lieutenant and borrow three spare rifles.” He turned to the Afrikaners. “You do know how to handle a standard O’Brien rifle, I suppose?”
“It’s a bliddy gun, isn’t it?” Schalk said, taking the semiauto weapon and checking the action with businesslike competence before slapping in a twenty-round magazine. “Your bushman any good?”
Kolomusnim looked up. “Better than lard-ass white man needs horse go ten miles,” he said, and grinned as Schalk’s complexion turned mottled with fury.
Then the tracker looked at Adrienne, glanced over to Simmons and spoke in his own language.
“He says what do we need a woman along for? If we’re not hunting for game that has to be skinned and cooked,” Simmons said, suppressing a smile.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” Adrienne said, pronouncing each syllable separately, as if she were reading it from a page.
The horses were good mixed hunter blood; the Commission had never imported anything but the best, and she trusted Jim Simmons to choose his working stock carefully. Schalk and Piet Botha picked two bays of about seventeen hands that looked capable of handling their weight; they rode reasonably well, although she knew they’d both been city born and raised, Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. Either they’d picked it up here, or had been well taught FirstSide; she seemed to remember reading somewhere that the old South African government had used mounted infantry for patrol work, and Botha had a farm down in the south country. She chose a fifteen-hand dappled-gray mare that had a good deal of Arab in its bloodlines, to judge from the rather small and elegantly wedge-shaped head, and the arch of neck and tail. It snorted slightly as she checked the girths, slid her own rifle into the scabbard that slanted back under the flap on the right side, put her foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. That was the lightened Western type the Frontier Scouts used; there was a machete and a canvas chuggle of water strapped to the left side, with jerky and biscuit and raisins in the saddlebags, plus the various items regulations required.
Kolomusnim turned without another word and began trotting back the way he’d come. They fell naturally into a column behind him; she rode beside Simmons, with the two Gate Security operatives behind her and the other Scout bringing up the rear, leading two pack-mules; one carried an empty condor cage on either side of its panniers, the other a large folded net and a spare field radio.
Adrienne took a deep breath of the hot air, full of the dusty scent of the dry grasslands, horse sweat, and a hint of the marshes. There were insects aplenty in the air, and the horse twitched its ears and various parts of its skin as she squeezed her calves against its barrel and brought it up to a round trot. She realized that, for some reason, she was intensely happy.
And I’d really like to be able to show all this to Tom, she thought wistfully. Not likely. If he ever gets to our beloved Commonwealth of New Virginia, he’s not likely to be feeling very good about me. Since that would happen only if he stumbled on the Gate secret, in which case he’d be shanghaied here as an Involuntary Settler and could never go back.
“Can’t your Yokut learn to ride?” she asked Simmons.
The Indian had been dropping back occasionally to run gripping the Scout’s stirrup with his right hand, then loping ahead again.
Simmons chuckled. “Kolo rides quite well. He also thinks horses are for girly-boys and white men, if there’s a difference. We could beat him to the bait if we galloped, but the horses would be blown and he’d be ready to go on running all day. He covered fifty miles in twenty hours once, on a bet, when we were shepherding a bunch of Collettas and Morrisons on safari east of the Sierras.”
They rode quickly, alternating between a trot and a quick walk. The reeds grew nearer, and the mosquitoes more persistent, along with buzzing horseflies and half a dozen other types of noisy insects. In the abstract, Adrienne knew that marshes were vital to the food chain, nurseries for fish and wildfowl and any number of other good things. In the concrete here-and-now, she found this one seriously interfering with her good mood.
Simmons reined in well away from the edge of the marsh, throwing up a hand to halt the others. The verge was scalloped here, a tongue of very slightly higher land running inward to make an egg-shaped embayment of dry ground about a thousand yards deep and half that across at the mouth, with the fat end toward the swamp. Two dead camels lay near the bottom of the egg, and the stink was formidable even at this distance; they must have been caught coming back from grazing on the reeds at the edge. The three condors crawled over the carrion like greater versions of the insects that swarmed about the feast in a glittering cloud.
“Dropped both camels with head shots from right here,” Simmons confirmed; he was a little vain of his marksmanship, and the rifle in his saddle scabbard had a telescopic sight attached. “The condors’ll be heavy and sleepy, ought to be slow to take off—not that they’re hummingbirds at the best of times.”
The big birds were feeding; one had its head deep in the feral camel’s body cavity. It pulled it out, looking curiously around, and returned to its meal. Adrienne didn’t consider herself squeamish; she’d been reared in the country, had watched livestock slaughtered since she was barely six, and had gutted and skinned plenty of game herself, starting not much later. She still had to swallow slightly as she surveyed the scene with her monocular.