Date Point: 16y2m4d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm
Julian Etsicitty
Daar caught up with them about an hour after Xiù called ahead to let them know he was coming.
A lot had happened in that hour. Yan had laid out his bibtaws in a kind of scent lure, some distance out from the treeline, and then while they waited the men from nearby villages had joined them. They didn’t seem to entirely trust the buzzing drone, but Julian’s say-so was enough to convince them that this particular one wasn’t a “death-bird” but just some friendly applied sky-magic.
After that came the waiting, inevitable in any hunt. Waiting suited Julian just fine; he was a patient man, and spent the time getting comfortably snuggled up in their blind next to Yan. Like always, the big fella was radiating so much body heat, it easily kept the chill of the rain away.
Daar was calmly sniffing the air, and his big shaggy body was wedged in against Julian’s other side. Being quite literally caught between the leaders of their respective species was…weird, when Julian thought about it. Probably not Xiu levels of weird, but pretty dang close.
For the moment, they weren’t saying much. It was all hunt-talk.
“You hunt Brown Ones much?” Daar whispered, kinda impressive for the big fella like him.
“Sometimes. When we must,” Yan replied, evenly. “When they attack villages. Last time, I was a young man. Younger than Vemik!”
“…Musta been a hard fight.”
“Many went to the Gods that day. My half-father and my older brother, and others.”
Julian watched patches of damp sunlight and bands of rainy showers drifting across the open plains and shivered to imagine it. When Yan had been young, the Ten’gewek hadn’t even had bows and arrows. Taking on a Brown One with nothing more than spears and courage…
On the ground, too. Among the trees would have been one thing, but out on the open plains? Every one of a Ten’gewek’s natural advantages would have been mitigated.
Even so, he’d seen Given-Men drive their spears clean through a Werne bull.
“You won, though?” he checked.
“It died of its wounds a hand of days later.”
Jesus.
“…I guess I can see why you’d want an easier time of it.”
Yan nodded solemnly. “So few of us now. High-rarchy saw to that. Every man we lose is less meat for his tribe, is starving women and sick children.”
“So why hunt it at all? Even with that cannon Hoeff brought, hunts can go wrong.”
Yan sighed and twitched his tail. It batted Julian lightly in the head, but Julian decided not to complain. Clearly the big guy had a lot on his mind.
“Brown Ones must not hunt the People. If they Take, and learn they can take easy, then we can not ever leave forest.”
“…You know how this is gonna go, right?” Daar rumbled. “It’s gonna show up, Hoeff’s gonna shoot it, and it’s gonna die.”
Yan nodded. His eyes never stopped scanning the horizon, even though Xiù would have told them if their quarry was getting close. “Yes.”
“Seems kinda…”
“Anticlimactic?” Julian suggested.
“That too.”
Yan sighed heavily again. “Seems many things. Seems like an easy Taking, too easy. Seems like cheating. Seems disrespectful. But what to do? Throw good men into its jaws? Will lose many. Might lose Vemik. A lot of future in him.”
He finally looked away from the plains. “…No good answers, I think. Curse of sky-magic. Once you know a thing can be done, always there are good reasons to do it. Yes? And all the reasons not to do it… they seem small and weak. Good men will die today if we fight it the old way.”
“…Or we cheat, and they go home to their women,” Julian finished the thought for him.
“Yes.”
“But here’s the thing,” Daar rumbled. “Firstly, an’ I don’t mean any disrespect Yan Given-Man…”
“Speak, Daar Stone-Back.”
“Do ‘ya need ‘ta hunt this critter? I mean—wait, I smell it now.”
Yan’s tongue lashed the air. “…Sure?”
“Never argue with Daar’s nose,” Julian advised him. “…Actually.” He sniffed the breeze too as it picked up a bit more and cooled his cheeks. “It’s faint, but…musky?”
“Smells like the biggest, most brutalest ‘back ever,” Daar agreed, then chittered. “Maybe Yan’s armpit, too…”
Yan grumbled in amusement, and whistled a high impersonation of an Akyawentan birdoid. Around them, from their perches among the trees, the men of the tribes nodded, twitched their tails and toyed nervously with their spears and bows. Julian saw Vemik take a deep breath and test the point of one of his special steel arrowheads. To judge by the way he stuck his thumb in his mouth afterwards, it was plenty sharp.
“There’s somethin’ ‘ya might think about real hard ‘fore we do this, Yan. I don’t pretend like I’m a man o’ ‘yer people, but ‘ya watched Gyotin put that crown on my head on the TV, right?”
“Yes.”
“That means a lotta things. One of ‘em is that I’m the protector of all my kind, and of my friends, too. So that means I swore before the Unseen Spirits of my people that I’d not flinch from that…and that means I gotta tell you how I see this. An’ it ain’t gonna be nice.”
“Nothing about this is nice, my friend. Speak.”
“If you do this thing, you won’t have done it by ‘yer own strength an’ will. You’ll have said, ‘ta all the men of ‘yer people, that you didn’t think they were strong enough ‘ta do this thing. It’ll make you look weak. An’ because o’ that, it’ll make you weak. It’ll Take ‘yer strength from ‘ya, Yan. Because all tough little Hoeff’s gotta do up in that tall-ass Ketta is twitch his finger, an’ that Brown One won’t be nothin’ but a big wet mess.”
“Is my strength to Give,” Yan retorted, but he glanced nervously up at Hoeff then around at his men. “…An old man’s strength for a young man’s life? For many young man’s life?”
“No, Yan Given-Man. You can’t. You are no chieftain anymore. You are bigger. An’ you are irreplaceable right now. You know that word, right?”
“So are they,” Yan waved his hand at this men, and if he happened to be especially waving it at Vemik, Julian wasn’t about to comment.
Daar shook his neck-fur out and looked the Given-Man dead in the eye. “Yan…I say this as the single most murderous livin’ being among all the stars above. No they ain’t. ‘Yer people can survive losin’ a buncha them. Right now I don’t think they would survive losin’ you.”
“…So we are not Strong after all.”
“Yes ‘ya are Yan, but ‘yer very, very strong children who must grow much, much bigger an’ wiser. An’ I say that with more respect than I’ve ever given anyone like you.”
Yan cast a despairing glance at the horizon. “…Not weak, you’re saying. Just… not ready?”
‘Not yet, and ‘specially not now. You must grow ‘yer people. An’ I won’t pretend ‘ta know how Brown Ones think, or what they do or anythin’ like that…but I can’t see how cripplin’ ‘yer standin’ at the lodge, or sendin’ a buncha strong, brave men to their doom is gonna help ‘ya grow.”
A new voice joined the conversation, and Julian looked up to see the drone perched in a branch above them. Xiù. “Remember on the ship, Yan? When we showed you the comet?”
“…I remember.”
Yan sat in silence for a long few minutes. Then, he muttered a curse under his breath – “Godshit” – and raised his bow high into the air above his head. Heads turned in his direction, he paused, and then whistled a low, descending note three times
At first, the hunting party just gave him a confused look. Then, in ones and twos, they shrugged, put their weapons away, and withdrew from the forest edge, swinging away and down. Vemik gave Yan the most curious look as he brachiated past, and was gone.
“…I will have to explain this,” Yan grumbled.
“An’ it’s gonna cause ‘ya some pain, too.” Daar nodded along. “But it’ll be livin’ men tha’ll give ‘ya grief, not their spirits an’ sad children.”
“If it attacks again, we will have to hunt it.”
“Well… here’s prayin’, then.”
Julian’s radio crackled with the sound of Hoeff’s voice. “…Yo, uh… What’s goin’ on down there? We doin’ this or not?”
“Negative,” Julian informed him.
“…You’re kidding! I’ve got a shot lined up and everything!”
“Hoeff… Let’s not hash this out right this second. Just stand down.”
He heard Hoeff mutter something about blue balls to himself, but the rifle was raised and Julian heard the sound of that big chunky magazine being ejected.
“It’s here,” Xiù said. She somehow contrived to point using nothing more than a brief flicker of the drone’s wings.
Sure enough, the Brown One had just shambled over a rise in the landscape. Its tongue lashed out into the open air and tasted the breeze, and then picked its way down toward the pile of nice stinky bibtaws.
“…Y’know, if Gaoians had ever had a dragon,” Daar mused, “I reckon it’d’ve looked a lot like that.”
“Dragon?” Yan asked, keeping a careful eye on it. “Means what?”
“How about we go home, and we’ll tell you all about dragons,” Julian promised.
“…Yes.”
The Brown One raised its head and tasted the air suspiciously, made a kind of warning growl, then lowered its head and, to Julian’s faint surprise scooped the bundle of bibtaws delicately into its mouth before turning and setting off back up the hill. Xiù lifted her drone off the branch and flew high up into the air to follow it.
“…One of these days, I’m going to want to tranquilize one of those things and study it up close,” Julian admitted. “Why bibtaw, anyway? Couldn’t be much more than a snack for something that big.”
“Nesting season. Bibtaw is good food for young Brown Ones,” Yan explained. “Also, strong taste. Good for drawing him from a long way.”
He wasn’t wrong there. Bibtaw stank like the bastard child of a skunk and a muskrat.
“…Let’s get outta this tree,” Daar said.
Their return to ground level took a few minutes, and Daar shook himself gratefully once all four of his paws were firmly back in contact with the leaf litter. He wasn’t an inept climber, exactly, but he’d never be a graceful arboreal creature, either. Gaoians just weren’t designed to be at home in the branches.
“…You said you had something you wanted to ask me about?” Yan asked as they turned away from the plains and left the departing Brown One behind.
“Yeah.” Daar glanced back over his shoulder, sniffed the wind, then shook his coat and plodded ahead through the brush. “Think I’ve made up my mind, though.”
“You have?” Julian asked.
“…Yeah.”
He spent the walk back telling them about Leemu.