"Nice to meet you," Alex said. Carol spared him a half wave as she left.
Alex decamped from the car and stepped carefully across the West Texas earth. The narrow-leafed prairie grass looked okay, but the sparse, pebbled ground was scattered about with a scary variety of tiny, wire-stemmed little weeds, all chockablock with burs and hooks and rash-raising venomous bristles.
Alex minced carefully to the group at the tripod. They were busy. They had a velvet-horned buck up by its neck, at a pulley mounted at the junction of three tall tepee poles. There were four of them: two men in long-sleeved hunter's gear, and two hard-bitten women in bloodstained paper and trail boots. One of the men, the one with glasses, had an electric rifle over his back. They were all wearing Trouper cuffs.
"Qué pasa?" Alex said.
"We're butchering Bambi," the second man told him, grunting as he cinched off the end of the pulley rope.
The hunters had already cut the entrails from the animal and dumped them somewhere along the trail. Alex closely examined the animal's lean, swaying, eviscerated carcass.
The taller woman drew a bowie knife of ice-pale ceramic and stepped up to her work. She took each of the buck's dangling rear legs in hand, then slashed out some meaty, ill-smelling gland from within the hocks. She tossed the bloody glands aside, wiped and holstered her bowie knife, and fetched up a smaller knife about the length of her thumb.
The man with the rifle gazed at Alex indifferently. "Just get in .to camp?"
"Yeah. My name's Alex. Juanita's my sister.
"Who's Juanita?" the rifleman said. The second man silently jerked his thumb toward the camp's central yurt. "Oh," the rifleman realized. "You mean Janey."
"You'll have to forgive Rick here," the taller woman said. "Rick programs." She circled the deer's neck with a swift shallow cut, then carved straight down its throat to the chest and out at right angles to the end of each foreleg. She was very deft about it. With the help of the second woman, she began methodically shredding the hide down over the sleek naked meat.
Alex shook one of the tripod poles. It seemed very sturdy. The lacquer on the bamboo was one of those modem lacquers. "Are you planning to eat this thing? I don't think I ever ate a wild animal before."
"You'll eat the weirdest crap in Texas when Ellen Mae's around," said the second man.
"Suck it up, Peter," said Ellen Mae spiritedly. "If you don't like real food, stick to Purina Disaster Chow." She glanced at Alex. "These mighty hunters don't appreciate me. Hand me that bone saw."
Alex examined Ellen Mae's butcher tools on their bed of rawhide. He recognized the bone saw by its long, glacier-colored, fractal edge. He stooped and picked it up. It had a slight permanent bloodstaining in the ceramic, and a worn checkered grip, but its serrated teeth were every bit as sharp as freshly broken glass. It was a beautiful tool, and one of the objects in the world one would least like to be struck with. Alex made an experimental slash or two at the air and was a bit surprised to see the others leap mm diately out of his reach.
"Sorry," he said. "Mega-tasty item." He gripped the back of the blade carefully and offered Ellen the handle.
Ellen took it impatiently and began to saw the buck's legs oil at the knee joints. It took her about a minute flat to do all four of them. The second woman neatly stacked the severed limbs aside.
"Y'know, you don't look much like Jane at first, but I'm starting to get the resemblance," Peter told him;
"Maybe," Alex told him. "Are you the Peter who does the phones around here?"
"Yeah, that's right," Peter said, pleased. "Peter Vierling. I hack towers. Satellites, cellular coverage, the relays, that's all my lookout."
"Good. You and me are gonna have to do some business."
Peter looked at him with such open contempt that Alex was taken aback. "After lunch or whatever," Alex amended. "No big hurry, man."
"You look like you need lunch, kid," said Rick the programmer. "You need some real meat on your bones." He patted his backpack. "Got you a special treat here. You can have Bambi's liver."
"Great," Alex said. "Bambi's lats and pecs look pretty chewy... . Any of you guys ever try human meat?"
"What?" Peter said.
"I had human meat last time I was in Matamoros," Alex said. "It's kind of fashionable now."
"Cannibalism?" Rick said.
Alex hesitated. He hadn't expected them to act so alarmed. "It wasn't my idea. It just sort of showed up during the meal."
"I've heard of that stuff," Ellen Mae said slowly. "It's a Santeria thing."
"Well, it's not like they bring you out a big human steak," Alex demurred. "It comes out in this little pile of cubes. On a silver platter. Like fondue. It's a bad idea to eat the meat raw because of the, you know, infection risk. So everybody cooks it on these little forks."
They were silent for a long moment. The two women stopped their methodical skinning work. "What's it like?" Rick asked.
"Well, not much, by the time you get through cooking ," Alex said. "Everybody sort of dipped 'em in the fondue and took 'em out to cool on these little fork rests. And en we ate 'em one after another, and everybody looked -really solemn about it."
"Did anybody say prayers?" said the second woman.
"I wouldn't call 'em prayers exactly... . It used to be like Santeria, I guess, but now it's mostly kind of a dope-trade custom. A lot of those dope-trade guys got into organ smuggling and stuff after the legalizations, so there's lots of... you know . .
"Spare parts around?" Peter suggested.
"This guy's bullshitting us," Rick concluded.
Alex said nothing. His hosts in Matamoros had told him it was human meat, but they hadn't brought in any fresh bones or anything, so it could have just as easily been rabbit. He didn't see much real difference anyway, as long as you thought you were eating human meat. .
"It's just a border thing," he said at last. "Una cosa de Ia frontera."
"You really hang out with dope dealers?" Rick said.
"I don't care about dope," Alex said. "I'm into medical supplies."
The four of them burst into laughter. For some reason this central fact of his life seemed to strike them as hilarious. Alex concluded swiftly that he was dealing with mentally damaged hicks and would have to adjust his behavior accordingly.
"Tell our friend Alex about the special tour of the camp," Rick urged.
"Oh yeah," Peter said. "Y'see, Alex, we get a lot of visitors. Especially in the peak storm season, during the spring. And we've discovered that the easiest way to get a good overview of Troupe operations is to fly an ultralight over the camp."
"An aircraft," Alex said. He glanced at Ellen and the other, shorter woman, whose name he had still not The two women were deliberately paying a lot of attention to severing the animal's left shoulder.
"Yçah. We have two manned ultralights. Plus three powered parafoil chutes, but those are for experts. You interested?"
"Never tried that before," Alex said.
"The ultralight's got its own navigation," Peter said. "Just like a car! Only even safer, 'cause in midair there's no traffic and no tricky road conditions. You don't have to lift a finger."
"Does it go really fast?" Alex said.
"No, no, not at all."