waiting was as far as politeness went among sim They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed. Make thing like noise-stick.
Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered.
He would have to learn If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing. Fetch me little tree like that, has signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk.
The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.
Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it. Dead, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.
Face more he was frustrated because he could not make polite expressions of sympathy speech would permit. After some thought, he signed Bad for band.
Bad for band, the female agreed. Toolmaker. All sims use and make tools, of course, but as with people, some were better than others.
The grizzled sim had lived enough to gain a great deal of experience, too. If it had passed on al it knew, the band would indeed suffer.
Henry Quick wondered how much he could help there. what hurt the band would also hurt him.
At the end of the day, he had the trunk of the spruce bare ranches and a notch carved in either end. Good help, he led to the female. It smiled back at him. He realized he had to make a conscious effort to smell it these days, probably, he thought, because by now his own odor was as bad as its.
bout then the males came back. They were smeared in blood but triumphant; they carried a plump doe already cut in pieces. The females and youngsters greeted them with glad cries. The band would feast tonight.
The male that had brought Quick the marten fur ambled over and picked up the would-be bow. It scowled, eyebrows king on the heavy brow-ridges.
Not like noise-stick, it signed ominously. Had it had a sign for fake, it would have signed it.
Not like, the trapper admitted, adding Do like, when the sim grunted a noise redolent of skepticism.
Quick's eye fell on the hind leg from which another male carving chunks.
He had intended to use another bootlace as a bowstring, but he had only two, and the sims , _ would need more bows than that . . . assuming he could make any at all. Sinew might serve in place of leather.
Save, he signed, and then paused, grinding his teeth: he not remember the sign for 'sinew.' Eventually, by pointing to the tendons in his own wrist and at the back of sims ankles, he put across his meaning. The male gave him a dubious look no butler would have been ashamed of, - but went over to the sim acting as butcher and passed the message along. That male shrugged as if to say the trapper was daft, but eventually set beside him several glistening white lengths, each with bits of flesh still clinging to it.
He did not work on the bow for several days after that.
His fever returned. It was not strong enough to drive him into delirium, but it did leave him shivering and miserable.
He glumly crunched the dusty maiden roots the female sim brought him and wished he felt more like a human being, or even a healthy sim.
Because he was stil aware of his surroundings, he real y noticed then the care the female sim gave him. It fed him, got him water, cleansed him, hauled him from place to place to keep him from lying in his own dung. It might not have been as gentle as a human nurse, but it was more conscientious than most. Not only was this spel of fever less severe than the last had been, it was shorter. Yet even after Quick began to feel better, he kept waking up chilled. Only when he saw the sims also clutching themselves, building thicker piles of bedding, and huddling close to the fire did he understand that the weather was changing. Autumn was drawing near, and hard on its heels would come winter.
The sims did what they could to get ready for it. They brought in stones and brush, which they began to work into a windbreak. As the days went by, it grew thicker and taller and extended all the way around the clearing, with a couple of thin spots through which the sims could push. They also stacked up great heaps of firewood; once the snow started, it would not be so easy to collect. Quick's hatchets helped them there. They could not have cut so much wood with their crude tools alone.
Some of them even realized it. The male that had brought Quick the marten pelt hefted its hatchet when it saw he was watching and signed, Good.
It was less happy, however, over the trapper's efforts to make arrows that were worth anything. Finding really straight lengths of branch was hard enough. Getting points on them proved worse. Because the sims used stone tools Quick had assumed they could easily chip out little stone arrowheads. But the tools they were used to making were hand-sized choppers and scrapers.
They had never done the tiny flakework arrowheads required. If Quick had shown them how, they could have duplicated his efforts. He no skill in shaping stone, though, and soon discovered knowing what he wanted was very different from singing how to make it.
About the time the first frost appeared on the windbreak, he worried about getting knocked over the head for failing to produce. If the sims decided to do that, he could not stop them, but that fatalistic certainty was only a small of what gradual y let him relax.
or more important was that the sims accepted him.
They had grown accustomed to him lying by the fire, and no longer saw him as much different from themselves,
