as his more usual imaginings of sweet-scented girls reaching up to him from featherbeds thick enough to smother in.
Waking hungry to a blanket in the middle of a forest clearing was hard.
Even eating what was left of the grouse was not help much, though it would have been an expensive luxury if ordered in a cafe east of the mountains. Too much of what he did involved things that were expensive luxuries east of the mountains.
What he craved were the luxuries he could only get back there.
The intensity of that craving ended up undoing him.
The next clearing around which he had a set of traps was over on the west side of the one the sims used. The trail he had blazed to it swung a lot farther north than it had to, so he could give the sims clearing a wide berth. Now that the subhumans had shown how friendly they were, he decided to take the direct route. If he did that the rest of the time he was there, he thought, he could save several days' travel and set out for the fleshpots of the east that much sooner.
The sims, he told himself, would not mind.
Nor did they. He happened on a party of hunting males not long after he set out. Several saw him, and nodded his l way as they might have to one of their own band. But he had I not reckoned on the bear.
For all his woodscraft, the first he knew of it was when it loomed up on its hind legs like some ancient, brooding god, not fifty feet from him. In that moment he had a good shot at its chest and belly, but he held his fire. Bears, even silvered bears like this one, rarely attacked without being provoked.
But it did not do to count on a bear, either. This one peered his way.
He was close enough to see its nostrils flare as it took his scent. It gave an oddly pig like grunt, dropped to al fours, and barreled toward him.
He threw his rifle to his shoulder, fired, and ran. The bear screamed. He heard its thunderous stride falter. But it stil came on, roaring its pain to the world and crashing through bushes and firs like a runaway railroad engine.
And in a sprint a bear, even a wounded bear, is faster than a man.
He had heard before he set out on this trapping run, they had most of the kinks out of a repeating rifle. He would have given five years' worth of furs to have one now. He threw away the gun he did have so he could run faster. If he lived, he'd come back for it.
He never remembered feeling the blow that shattered his right leg. Al he knew at the time was that, instead of sprinting in one direction, he was suddenly spinning and Sling through the undergrowth in a very different one.
That saved his life. The bear had to change directions too, and it was also hurt.
In the second or two its hobbling charge gave him, he jerked out his pistol, cocked it, and squeezed the trigger. He seemed to have forever to shoot. His hand was steady, with he eerie steadiness the shock of a bad injury can bring. The bear's mouth gaped in a horrible snarl; the pistol bal shattered a fang before burying itself in the beast's brain. The bear sighed and fell over, dead.
'God, that was close,' the trapper said in a calm, conversational voice.
He started to pull himself to his feet and the instant he tried to put any weight on his leg, all the pain his nervous system had denied till then flooded over m. He fainted before he could shriek.
The sun had moved a fair distance across the sky when he came back to himself. The moment he did, he wished he but escape to unconsciousness again. He tasted blood, and realized he had bitten his lip. He had not noticed. That pain was a trickle, set against the all-consuming torrent in his leg.
Tears were streaming down his face by the time he managed to sit up; the world had threatened to gray out several times in the process. His trouser leg was wet too, not only from where he'd pissed himself while unconscious but also farther down, where the bear had struck him. Blood was soaking through the suede.
He held himself steady with one hand in a thorn bush while he walked the other down his leg to the injury.
Something hard and sharp was pressing against the inside of his trousers. He groaned, this time not just from the pain. With a compound fracture, and heaven only knew how much other damage in there, he would soon be as dead as if the bear had killed him cleanly.
He wished it had. This way hurt worse.
His hands shook so badly that he took a quarter of an hour to reload his pistol. A lead ball would end his misery no less than the bear's. But after the weapon was ready, he did not raise it to his head. If he had been able to charge it with powder and wadding and bullet, how could pain's grip on him be absolute?
He began to drag himself toward the bear. That took no longer than loading the gun had, though the body was only a handful of paces from him: he passed out several times on the way. At last he reached the carcass. If he was going to try to live, he would need to eat.
The bear was food, for as long as it stayed fresh.
The pistol ball left no visible wound, now that the bear's mouth was closed in death. Quick's first shot, with the rifle, had torn along the left side of the beast's neck and lodged in its shoulder. It might have been a mortal wound, but not quickly enough to do the trapper any good He tried to push the point of his broken shinbone back into his flesh, and failed repeatedly: the pain was too much to stand. He did drag himself to a sapling close by the bear's carcass and cut it down with his knife. Then, using the lace from his left boot, he tied the sapling to his leg. It was not much of a splint, but it was a little better than nothing. With it on, the broken pieces did not grind together quite so agonizingly.
He set out to make a fire, against the coming chill of night and the chill of his damaged body and for cooking a bloody gobbet he had worried off the bear's shoulder. He was still crumbling dry leaves for tinder when the hunting party of male sims came upon him.
He did not realize they were there until they were almost on top of him.
Along with their crude weapons, they carried squirrels and rabbits, a snake, and a couple of birds: . Not a great day's bag by any means. They looked in wonder from Henry Quick to the bear and back again. You kills one asked. After a little while, he recognized it as the male that had brought him the marten fur.
