He could trap a pigoon, bludgeon it to death, butcher it in secret. He’d have to hide the mess: he has a notion that the sight of full frontal blood and guts might take him over the threshold as far as the Children of Crake are concerned. But a pigoon feast would do him a world of good. Pigoons are fat, and fat is a carbohydrate. Or is it? He searches his mind for some lesson or long-lost chart that would tell him: he knew that stuff once, but it’s no use, the file folders are empty.
“Bring home the bacon,” he says. He can almost smell it, that bacon, frying in a pan, with an egg, to be served up with toast and a cup of coffee… Cream with that? whispers a woman’s voice. Some naughty, nameless waitress, out of a white-aprons-and-feather-dusters porno farce. He finds himself salivating.
Fat isn’t a carbohydrate. Fat is a fat. He whacks his own forehead, lifts his shoulders, spreads his hands. “So, wise guy,” he says. “Next question?”
Do not overlook a plentiful source of nutrition that may be no farther away than your feet, says another voice, in an annoying, instructive tone he recognizes from a survival manual he once leafed through in someone else’s bathroom. When jumping off a bridge, clench your bum so the water won’t rush up your anus. When drowning in quicksand, take a ski pole. Great advice! This is the same guy who said you could catch an alligator with a pointed stick. Worms and grubs were what he recommended for a snack food. You could toast them if you wanted.
Snowman can see himself turning over logs, but not just yet. There’s something else he’ll try first: he’ll retrace his steps, go back to the RejoovenEsense Compound. It’s a long hike, longer than any he’s taken yet, but worth it if he can get there. He’s sure there will still be a lot left, back there: not only canned goods, booze as well. Once they’d figured out what was going on, the Compound inhabitants had dropped everything and fled. They wouldn’t have stayed long enough to clean out the supermarkets.
What he really needs is a spraygun, though—with one of those, he could shoot pigoons, hold off the wolvogs—and, Idea! Light bulb over head!—he knows exactly where to find one. Crake’s bubble-dome contains a whole arsenal, which ought to be right where he left it. Paradice, was what they’d named the place. He’d been one of the angels guarding the gate, in a manner of speaking, so he knows where everything is, he’ll be able to lay his hands on the necessary items. A quick in and out, a snatch and grab. Then he’ll be equipped for anything.
But you don’t want to go back there, do you? a soft voice whispers.
“Not particularly.”
Because?
“Because nothing.”
Go on, say it.
“I forget.”
No, you don’t. You’ve forgotten nothing.
“I’m a sick man,” he pleads. “I’m dying of scurvy! Go away!”
What he needs to do is concentrate. Prioritize. Whittle things down to essentials. The essentials are: Unless you eat, you die. You can’t get any more essential than that.
The Rejoov Compound is too far away for a casual day trip: it’s more like an expedition. He’ll have to stay out overnight. He doesn’t welcome that thought—where will he sleep?—but if he’s careful he should be okay.
With the can of Sveltana sausages inside him and a goal in sight, Snowman’s beginning to feel almost normal. He has a mission: he’s even looking forward to it. He might unearth all sorts of things. Cherries preserved in brandy; dry-roasted peanuts; a precious can of imitation Spam, if serendipity strikes. A truckload of booze. The Compounds hadn’t stinted themselves, you could find the full range of goods and services there when there were shortages everywhere else.
He gets to his feet, stretches, scratches around the old scabs on his back—they feel like misplaced toenails—then walks back along the path behind his tree, picking up the empty Scotch bottle he threw down at the wolvogs the night before. He gives it a wistful sniff, then tosses it and the Sveltana can onto his midden-heap of empty containers, where a whole crowd of debauched flies is making merry. Sometimes at night he can hear the rakunks pawing through this private dump of his, searching for a free meal among the leavings of catastrophe, as he himself has often done, and is about to do again.
Then he sets about making his preparations. He reties his sheet, arranging it over his shoulders and pulling the extra up through his legs and tucking it in through the belt effect at the front, and knotting his last chocolate energy bar into a corner. He finds himself a stick, long and fairly straight. He decides to take only one bottle of water: most likely there’ll be water along the way. If not, he can always catch the runoff from the afternoon storm.
He’ll have to tell the Children of Crake he’s going. He doesn’t want them to discover he’s missing and set out looking for him. They could run into dangers, or get lost. Despite their irritating qualities—among which he counts their naive optimism, their open friendliness, their calmness, and their limited vocabularies—he feels protective towards them. Intentionally or not, they’ve been left in his care, and they simply have no idea. No idea, for instance, of how inadequate his care really is.
Stick in hand, rehearsing the story he’ll tell them, he goes along the path to their encampment. They call this path the Snowman Fish Path, because they carry his fish along it every week. It skirts the edge of the beach while keeping to the shade; nevertheless he finds it too bright, and tilts his baseball cap down to keep out the rays. He whistles as he approaches them, as he always does to let them know he’s coming. He doesn’t want to startle them, strain their politeness, cross their boundaries without being invited—loom up on them suddenly out of the shrubbery, like some grotesque flasher exposing himself to schoolkids.
His whistle is like a leper’s belclass="underline" all those bothered by cripples can get out of his way. Not that he’s infectious: what he’s got they’ll never catch. They’re immune from him.
Purring
The men are performing their morning ritual, standing six feet apart in a long line curving off into the trees at either side. They’re facing outward as in pictures of muskoxen, pissing along the invisible line that marks their territory. Their expressions are grave, as befits the seriousness of their task. They remind Snowman of his father heading out the door in the morning, briefcase in hand, an earnest aiming-for-the-target frown between his eyes.
The men do this twice a day, as they’ve been taught: it’s necessary to keep the volume constant, the odour renewed. Crake’s model had been the canids and the mustelids, and a couple of other families and species as well. Scent-marking was a wide-ranging mammalian leitmotif, he’d said, nor was it confined to the mammals. Certain reptiles, various lizards…
“Never mind about the lizards,” said Jimmy.
According to Crake—and Snowman has seen nothing since to disprove it—the chemicals programmed into the men’s urine are effective against wolvogs and rakunks, and to a lesser extent against bobkittens and pigoons. The wolvogs and bobkittens are reacting to the scent of their own kind and must imagine a huge wolvog or bobkitten, from which they would be wise to keep their distance. The rakunks and pigoons imagine large predators. Or this was the theory.