The ear pierced the il usion that lulled the eye. Somewhere close by, a field mouse squeaked, briefly, as an owl or ferret found it.
Farther away, Kenton heard a wolf howl to salute the moon, then another and another, until the whole pack was at cry.
The eerie chorus made the hair prickle upright at the nape of the scout's neck. Charles stirred and muttered in his sleep. No one, human or sim, was immune to the fear of wolves.
The pack also disturbed the rest of a hairy elephant, whose trumpet call of protest instantly silenced the wolves. They might pull down a calf that strayed too far from its mother, but no beasts hunted ful -grown elephants. Not more than once, anyway, Kenton thought.
The normal small night noises took a while to come back after the hairy elephant's cry. The scout strained his ears listening for one set in particular: the grunts and shouts that would have warned of wild sims.
No camp was in earshot, at any rate. Hunting males ranged widely, though, and these sims would from long acquaintance not be in awe of men, and thus doubly dangerous.
A coughing roar only a couple of hundred yards away cut short his reverie on the sims. The scout sprang to his feet, his finger darting to the trigger of his musket. That cry also roused Charles. The sim stood at Kenton's side, hatchet ready in his hand.
The roar came again, this time fiercely triumphant. Spearfang, Charles signed, with kil .
'Yes,' Kenton said. Now that the beast had found a victim, it would not be interested in hunting for others, such as, for instance, himself and the sim. In dead of night, he welcomed that lack of interest.
All the same, excitement prickled in him. The big cats were not common along the Atlantic seaboard, and relentless hunting had reduced their numbers even in the hinterlands of the Virginia colony. Not many men, these days, came to the governor at Portsmouth to col ect the 5 pound bounty on a pair of fangs.
Kenton imagined the consternation that would ensue if he marched into the Hal of Burgesses with a score of six inch-long ivory daggers.
Most of the clerks he knew would sooner pass a kidney stone than pay out fifty pounds of what was not even their own money.
The scout snorted contemptuously. 'I'd sooner reason with a sim,' he said. Charles grunted and made the question-mark gesture. 'Never mind,' Kenton said. 'You may as well go back to sleep.'
Charles did, with the same ease he had shown before. Nothing troubled him for long. On the other hand, he lacked the sense for long-term planning.
Kenton watched the stars spin slowly through the sky. When he reckoned it was midnight, he woke Charles, stripped off his breeches and tunic, and rolled himself in his blanket. Despite exhaustion, his whirling thoughts kept him some time awake. This once, he thought, he would not have minded swapping wits with his sim.
Sunrise woke the scout. Seeing him stir, Charles nodded his way.
All good, the sim signed. Spearfang stay away.
'Aye, that's good enough for me,' Kenton said. Charles nodded and built up the fire while Kenton, sighing, stretched and dressed. Jokes involving wordplay were wasted on sims, though Charles had laughed like a loon when the scout went sprawling over a root a couple of days earlier. The turkey was still almost as good as it had been the night before. Munching on bulbs of wild onion between bites went a long way toward hiding the slight gamy taste the meat had acquired.
The way west was downhill now; the explorer and his sim had passed the watershed not long before they made camp. The little stream by which they had built their fire ran westward, not comfortably toward the Atlantic like every other waterway with which Kenton was familiar.
The scout strode along easily, working out the kinks a night's sleep on the ground had put in his muscles. His mouth twisted. A few years ago, he would have felt no aches, no matter what he did. But his light-brown hair was beginning to be frosted with gray, and to recede at the temples.
Kenton was proud the governor had chosen him for this first western journey, rather than some man still in his twenties. 'Oh, aye, a youngster might travel faster and see a bit more,' Lord Emerson said,
'but you're more likely to return and tell us of it.'
He laughed out loud. He wondered what Lord Emerson would have said after learning of his spearfang-hunting plans. Something pungent and memorable no doubt.
Charles stopped with a perplexed grunt very much the sort of sound a true man might have made. Ahead strange sound, he signed.
Kenton listened, but heard nothing. He shrugged. His eyes were as sharp as the sims, but Charles had very good ears. They were surely not a match for a hound's, nor was the sims sense of smel , but Charles could communicate what he sensed in a way no animal could match.
'Far or close?' the scout asked.
Not close.
'We'll go on, then,' Kenton decided. After a few hundred cautious yards, he heard the rumble too, or perhaps felt would have been the better word for it. He thought of distant thunder that went on and on, but the day was clear. - He wondered if he was hearing a waterfall far away.
'Kenton's Falls,' he said, trying out the sound. He liked it.
Charles turned to look at him, then made as if to stumble over a root.
The sim got up with a sly grin on his face. Kenton laughed too.
Charles had made a pun after all, even if unintentionally.
The game path they were following twisted southward bringing the edge of a large clearing into view. Kenton
