Wild Country

little about the books Sandy read. Dickens and McMurtry, Renault and Buck, Gibbon and Gibbons, Anger and Angier.

The truth is that Childe considered her grown sister slightly dotty about words, ‘specially the printed kind. Why, she and Ba'al got along day in, year out without a jotted note or a printed sign, theirs a world of genuine sign and not arbitrary symbols. It was a plain puzzlement the way Sandy filled two composition books a year, writing in a journal that nobody else had ever read.

Childe dismounted with a leap; ran pell-mell toward Quantrill, arms outstretched for one of the few dizzy delights that Ba'al could not provide. Quantrill braced himself, caught her, whirled Childe in a circle once, twice; heard the boar cough his concern. Then he let the girl regain her feet and hugged her briefly without speaking.

'Bring me somethin'?'

'No time, sis — but hold on! I have something for him.' Quantrill recalled suddenly. He saw her big eyes ask the question. 'Come and see,' he chuckled. 'For all I know he might not like it.'

The leviathan boar had not moved a hoof, only switching his flywhisk tail now and then, the yellow eyes missing nothing. Sandy ambled over to her old protector, watched in silence, and scratched Ba'al under the jaw.

Another girlchild might have squealed in alarm when Quantrill hauled the headless rattler from stowage in the hovercycle. Childe squealed in delight. 'Couldn't find a big one?'

'Gimme a break,' he joked, holding the massive varmint up for display to show that it was longer than the girl.

She whistled, a quick two-note warble, and Quantrill turned to see Ba'al advance in a bouncing trot, the murderous hooves spurting dust, Then, as he had learned through harrowing experience, Quantrill bent his knees and waited. Ba'al took offense whenever Quantrill stood erect nearby, for then the man's eyes were a handsbreadth higher than the boar's. With bent knees. Quantrill would eye the boar on even terms.

Ba'al planted his forelegs like a cutting horse as he noted the offering; then advanced again, snuffling. Quantrill held the snake out in both hands, nodding, Childe moving to Ba'al's side with odd snortings and head motions. Then — perhaps it was only his imagination — Quantrill could have sworn the great jaws opened in a smile. Ba'al moved his snout across the snake, his enormous tusks long as a man's forearm, curving up and back. Now nearing middle age, Ba'al had to lower his snout even farther to impale an enemy. A product of Texas Aggie geneticists, Ba'al was beyond prediction. It was Sandy's hope that he would live until both tusks formed complete circles, which might take another twenty years.

Quantrill reached out, scratched the boar's bristly jowl, moved back with empty hands. Ba'al shifted the tidbit in his jaws, snuffled in curiosity, then stalked slowly to the hovercycle.

No one interfered as the sensitive snout inquired around the rear cowl and its tarp. The bodybag was, after all, sealed. After a moment the boar backed away, tail erect, and uttered a series of deep grunts before he turned and trotted from sight into the deepening shadows of range scrub.

'Huh; well, I guess it's okay,' Childe said, and walked back to the soddy with Quantrill.

As always, he took potluck. Sandy hauled a block of venison chili from her old Peltier freezer and let Childe make the biscuits. Their guest noted, but did not mention, the new microwave cooker. If Sandy wanted to discuss her new gadgetry, she would.

Later, sharing strong coffee and the rich musk of buttermilk pecan pralines, Childe sighed as she heard a rusty old argument grind into motion between her elders. Sandy began it with, 'I hear they're paying top dollar for construction work.'

'In SanTone Ringcity, yes,' Quantrill said. Of the American urban centers that had felt nuclear fury, perhaps half of them had been rebuilt. Some, like San Antonio, had been firestormed to their beltline freeways. San Antonio had been unlucky enough to catch some intercepted nukes, bombs that had been scattered over ground zero without detonating. The center of San Antonio would not be fully safe for human life until that contamination was all scraped away. It was quicker to rebuild this nexus of Texas commerce as SanTone Ringcity, looking outward, away from the inner ruins.

Quantrill knew SanTone well. 'No half-built boomtown is a proper place to raise a kid,' he said, cutting his eyes toward Childe. 'And you'd have to kiss that boar goodbye.'

'There's lots of work nearer, at Wild Country Safari,' Sandy replied, and whacked her cup down with unnecessary force. 'Dammit, Ted, you have to work your way into something better than deputy work; you've just got to!' She saw the film of stubborn resolve cross his face; tried to attack through it. 'Don't kid me about working your way up to Marshal Teague's office; that's a political job, and you can't run with that crowd.'

'Don't want to,' he grumped. 'I prefer the company of ol' Jess Marrow, keeping track of exotic game on Safari lands. It's not as if I were a full-time deputy.'

'And someday those freak reflexes of yours will fail you; everybody slows down eventually. And then, instead of having two part-time jobs, you'll be full-time dead. You think I intend to wait around until the day some cimarron buries you?'

Long silence. Then, 'Who asked you to wait?'

'You did, a month ago,' Childe piped angrily.

Frowning at the girl, a half smile giving the lie to it, Quantrill winked. 'You hear too much, sis.'

'I hear Sandy cry at night. She wouldn't if you stayed here more.'

He nodded slowly. 'Sis, these are hard times. I wish the exotic game work would pay a man enough to marry and settle, but it won't. I make more money as a deputy in a week than I do in a month with Jess Marrow. Do you know what a federal deputy marshal does?'

'Manhunter.' It was a flat accusation from a nine-year-old, and it hurt. Even if Childe attached very few demerits to the idea.

Grudging it: 'Sometimes, yes. Before you were born, this wasn't Wild Country — not this wild, anyhow. A lot of Americans suffer today because of smuggled drugs, poorly refined fuel, and diseased animals coming across the border. Somebody has to stop it.'

He saw only polite interest in the girl's gaze. To her, these problems seemed very far away. He rarely opened old wounds, but this was a special case. 'I had a friend named Kent Ethridge once. One of the finest gymnasts this country ever had.' He stopped, turned to Sandy. 'Can she handle this?'

'I think so,' Sandy replied.

Quantrill faced the memory, gnawing his lip as he proceeded. 'Kent Ethridge and I were — manhunters for a bad government. We hated it. Ethridge began to spend his time off with drugs, stuff that made him forget what he was. The stuff is terribly expensive; that's bad enough. But it did terrible things to his mind and his body, too.' He saw Childe nod solemnly, considered explaining the terror of knowing that your mastoid implant could be detonated by pitiless masters; decided against it. 'Ethridge was a hero in the rebellion, and became an agent for our new government.'

'This gov'ment? The good one?'

'Good as we deserve, as usual. We thought Ethridge had cleaned himself up, didn't use drugs anymore; but maybe you never get entirely cured. Anyway, he stopped a shipment of heavy sh — drugs, and he didn't turn it all in.' A silence. 'I guess he decided then there was no way he could get straight. So he took the best way out that he knew.'

'I don't get it.'

'He took a massive overdose,' Quantrill said softly. 'When they found him in his apartment, he'd been dead for a week.'

Childe knew about that. 'Yuck.' she said, wrinkling her nose.

'I had to identify him. and yuck is right. I know it was partly his own fault, but Ethridge didn't start the drug smuggling. He just got caught in it. It turns good men into bad ones.'

'And you hunt those bad men?'

'Sometimes. Now then: Mexico could help stop it, but too many bad men pay mordidas, bribes, to their government.'

A moment's confusion. 'Is a bribe more like a peso or a dollar?'

'More like a million dollars in good money.'

'That's not good money,' Childe said, going directly to the heart of the matter.