Twelve hours later the hunter began to slow down. He was standing, blurry-eyed, on the bank above Filly’s effluent grating watching the warm, uriniferous fluids swirl off into the canal system. A cloud of gnats hung in the vapors around his helmet. During the night he had examined every heat source on Filly’s skin—mostly the city’s own appendages. Now he dozed on his feet. A jolt of Speed pumped into his jugular vein. Eyes opened wide—unfocused. His detector indicated a moving body by the canal. He nocked an arrow and crept off, stalking an Agromeck on its way to the fields.
Kaia’s senses returned. The long hours of silence had relaxed his hibernation reflex. Peering from the tall grain, he saw no hunter. Dashing into an orchard, he sucked a sweet thing from a tree. Running briskly, he sought the safety of the canal.
The first arrow kicked him in the right femur, pinning his loincloth into his upper thigh. The impact threw him to the ground, bent over the arrow. He crawled a few feet and saw the skull-mask rise above the grassy canal bank. Bowstring taut. Kaia tugged on the bloody shaft. Shreds of loincloth moved deep in the wound, but the broad barbs held firm in the quadriceps. He struggled to his feet and tried to run, but the three-foot shaft vibrated and grated painfully. Nerves and bone chips. The second arrow struck his back—entering under the right scapula and passing through the right lung. He glanced down to see the wet red barbs jump out of his sternum. Grass hit him in the face.
The sight of the kill triggered the hunter’s post-hypnotic suggestion to take a trophy. His tracking frenzy ended and he relaxed. His neck console moved to the end of its tape and readied the Molecular Reward. He sauntered up to Kaia’s body where it lay in a pool of clotted blood—thick purple jellylike clots. He bent down over the cooling form and took out his trophy knife.
The gurgle in the canal did not carry through his helmet. He didn’t see the coweye. She was on him with both feet—stamping and kicking—spreading the pieces of his mangled body over a twelve-foot circle. His chalky bones snapped, and his rose-water blood splattered.
The coweye bent over Kaia and touched his throat with her hand. Satisfied, she snapped the barbed arrow head off the shaft in his chest. Carefully, she edged the shaft out from under his shoulder blade. Pressing wooden pegs in his thigh, she widened the wound and engaged the barbs. His leg arrow came out easily.
Foxhound found the remains of the hunter later in the day. The hunter’s belt communicator had optic records that told the story. Val and Walter examined the large, purple jellylike clots and broken arrows.
“Send for the Bioteck,” said Val. “I’d like to see what these clots are made of. They don’t look anything like our own rose-water blood.”
Walter nodded. He was studying the stills of the arrow impacts. “While he is here, have the teck project these wounds into their three-dee mannequin. They look fatal to me.”
The Bioteck returned with a transparent mannequin under one arm and a stack of reports under the other.
“It’s blood clot,” he said, referring to the jellylike material. “It isn’t normal, of course. Hemoglobin, fibrinogen and hematocrit are all about three times normal. The hemoglobin is fifteen grams—if you can imagine!”
Val nodded.
The teck stood up the mannequin.
“This chest wound is fatal. The arrow passes through the hilum of the right lung. There are big vessels there, bronchi too. The leg wound, though serious, probably would not kill… if it were treated promptly.”
Val walked around the mannequin and compared the optic printouts. If the buckeye’s anatomy was anything like their own, he should be dead.
“What would a coweye want with a dead buckeye?” asked Val.
The teck shrugged, “They’re cannibals, sir.”
Val wasn’t satisfied. There were still too many unanswered questions—the tightbeams from Outside, the decoy corpses on Tinker’s trail, and the peculiar resurrections.
“Why would cannibals decoy us away from Tinker’s trail?”
Silence.
“Answer from the CO,” announced Scanner.
Val put it on print and audio, hoping it would clear up some of the mystery.
The Class One worldwide computer spoke with the kindly voice of an old man, sympathetic, yet confident.
“Your problems with the cooling buckeyes are not new,” began the CO. “The hibernation reflex has been showing up in the aborigines ever since we started hunting them with the heat-seeking detectors. They have the gene for increased tone in their neurohumoral axis, so metabolic shut-down can be a defense mechanism in the proper environment. The hunters have provided that environment. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Meanwhile, we can use any data you accumulate.”
They waited politely until the screen cleared.
“Playing possum,” smiled Val. “At least we aren’t fighting the occult. Witchcraft makes me nervous.” He shuddered. “I can still feel her wet cold body. I’m sorry now that I didn’t cut her carotid. Let her get away. That won’t happen again.”
Walter dictated a few notes to Scanner for inclusion in hunter orientation.
“With knowledge of this reflex we should have more success on our Hunts. Finding a buckeye who is playing possum should be easy with the coordinates of his last sighting—killing him should be even easier.”
Val nodded.
The Bioteck picked up his papers and mannequin. As he was leaving he suggested: “If you ever come across a live buckeye you might just tie off the dominant carotid and bring him to the lab for study.”
Walter stopped his dictation. “How’s that again?”
“Check his palms for calluses,” said the teck. “If his right hand is hornier—more keratotic—you can assume he is right-handed. His left cerebrum would be dominant. Cut into his left neck and tie off the internal carotid on that side… should infarct part of the brain. He should live, but he’ll be almost a vegetable—ideal for the boys down in Bio to work with. There are lots of parameters of five-toeism we should know more about before they become extinct.”
“Right,” said Val, “good idea.”
Walter cancelled the rest of his dictation.
Kaia opened his eyes in a strange nest. The coweye soaked his wounds and changed his dressings frequently. Chest pains along the tract of the arrow shaft caused him to wink in and out of hibernation. She forced boiled mussel meat and rich barley soup into him. It was her follicular phase, and she needed a mate.
At night she came to him grasping with her copulatory apparatus. Her demand-type thrusting failed to initiate his pelvicautonomic-cycle, for his granulating thoracic wound kept his parasympathetics depolarized by irritating the right vagus nerve. At new moon she went luteal and disappeared into the canal.
For two weeks he foraged painfully for scraps of food on the grassy slopes of the canal. In his crippled condition he couldn’t risk exposure to the buckeye detectors that monitored the gardens—he would never be able to escape if hunters found him again.
At full moon she returned—tense follicle. His sperm still waited. Her previous ovum had languished in its corona and died. A new ovum was soon to take its place in the tube. He enjoyed warm food during the days and a hot nest at night. After she was fertilized, her golden corpus luteum again commanded her moods. She left the nest one morning, threw him two mussels from the canal bottom, and swam off without a word.
He limped back to Filly’s Mountain.
Try to go through life a little bit hungry.
You never know when you’ll meet someone edible.
For several months Hunter Control was very quiet. The thousands of square miles of Orange Country gardens flourished, were harvested, and flourished again with only a rare buckeye sighting. Craft reported empty campsites—bones, chewed and charred—ashes—broken tools. Nothing to track.