strangers.
Charles would be able to show them so much that he could prove himself too valuable to exclude. Apart from the knife and hatchet he carried, he had learned a great deal in Virginia that wild sims were ignorant of.
Even something as simple as the art of tying knots was unknown here.
These sims, if they were like the ones along the Atlantic, would not know how to set snares. Charles might even be able to show them how to tan leather, which would give them footwear and many new tools.
All that would make the wild sims harder to push aside when English settlers began coming over the mountains. Kenton found he did not much care. He and Charles had been a team for years now; he could not find it in his heart to wish the sim anything but good, no matter what resulted afterwards.
The wind was blowing harder now, bringing with it cool, moist air.
It must have felt wonderful to the sims, who because of their thick hair suffered worse than humans from the usual run of summer weather. That dislike of heat, though, did not keep them from feeding the fire with branches and dry shrubs whenever it began to get low. - The amount the sims could eat was astonishing. Because they spent so much time hungry, they were extravagantly able to make up for it when the chance came. They also let nothing go to waste, eating eyes, tongues, and lungs from carcasses, smashing big bones and sucking smaller ones to get every scrap of marrow.
At last, a sort of happy torpor came to the encampment.
females nursed their infants. Youngsters gradual y lost -intrest in throwing Kenton's musket balls at each other and bedded down in nests of dry grass and leaves. Most of the atults followed them before long, singly or in pairs.
A few males stayed awake. One kept the fire going. Three more went to the edge of the clearing as sentries. One of those carried a club, another a couple of chipped stones. The third, a large, hulking sim, bore Kenton's rifle. It carried the gun by the muzzle end of the barrel and swung it menacingly every minute or so, as if daring anything dangerous to come close.
The clever sim sat cross-legged by the fire not far from the scout. It stared down at the dagger it held in its lap.
From time to time it would run a hand along its chinless jaw, the very image of studious concentration.
Kenton felt a touch of sympathy; the sim could study the knife till doomsday without learning how it was made. At that moment the sim looked his way. It shook its head, exactly as a frustrated man might: it was full of questions, and had no way to ask them.
Some of the wild Virginia sims had learned sign-speech from runaways and used it among themselves, but it had not come over the mountains.
The wild troops had so little contact with one another that ideas spread very slowly among them.
The sim picked up a stone chopper, took it in its left hand and the knife in its right. The crudeness of its own product next to the other must have infuriated it, for it suddenly
scrambled to its feet and hurled the stone far into the night.
All three of the males standing watch whirled at the sound of the rejected tool landing in the bushes. The clever sim let out an apologetic hoot. The others relaxed.
The clever sim came over to glare at Kenton. The scout thought what a man would be feeling, confronted with skil s and knowledge so far ahead of anything he possessed, and confronted with a being like and yet unlike himself. Sims were less imaginative than humans, but surely some of that combination of anger, fear, and awe was on the subhuman's face.
Anger quickly came to predominaoe. Kenton uselessly tightened his muscles against the knife thrust he expected.
He hardly noticed the first raindrop that landed on his cheek, or the second. Even when a drop hit him in the eye, it distracted him only briefly from his fearful focus on the blade in the sims hairy hand.
The sim shook its head in annoyance as the rain began. To it, too, the early sprinkles were but an irritation. As the rain kept up, though, it forgot Kenton, forgot the knife it held. Its cry of alarm brought the rest of the troop bounding from their rest.
For a moment, Kenton wondered if the clever sim had gone mad. But soon he understood its concern, for the rain grew harder. The fire began to hiss as water poured down on it, and no wild sim could start a fire once it went out.
Because that was so, the sims had had to learn to keep their flames alive even in the face of rain. Some of the males held hides above the fire to shield it from the storm. Females dug ditches and built little dams of mud so the water on the ground would not get the fuel wet.
Their efforts worked for a time. The sims with the hide shield coughed and choked on the smoke it trapped, but they did not leave their post.
The fire continued to crackle.
Kenton all but ignored it. His mouth was wide open, to catch as much of the rain as he could. The sims had given him no more water than food, and his throat felt raspy as a file.
It took a while to get enough for a swallow, but every one was bliss.
The downpour grew heavier, the wind stronger. Soon it was blowing sheets of water horizontal y. The sims' hides were less and less use.
They wailed in dismay as the fire went out. Kenton could hardly hear them over the drumming of the rain. He was glad they had not dumped him face down; he might have drowned.
The storm lasted through the night, and began to ease only when light returned. Drenched, Kenton was relieved the rain was warm; had the cloudburst come, say, in fal , he would have been all too vulnerable to chest fever. He imagined it carried off many of the sims.
They huddled together, sodden and miserable, around their dead fire, their arms up to keep some of the rain from their faces. Now and then one would let out a mournful, keening cry that several others would echo. It
