Old Hunters on the New Wild Read online

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  Cayden feared the mudders felt little enthusiasm as they sang on their return to the camp. Once more, none of the other hunters found the courage to fire their rifles and claim a trophy. Cayden’s morale plummeted. None of the men and women who rode upon those palanquins seemed to sense the consequences of Cayden’s failure, for they smiled and laughed upon their cushions as if hardship could not come to the savanna. Due to his hesitance, his father sat upon a pile of cushions as well. Wyatt had yet to show his face through the curtains he kept tightly closed on his palanquin, doubtless angry that his injury forced him to ride upon the back of the clones, no matter how the guides bore that old man’s weight with reverence. Because of Cayden’s cowardice, the swarm of razor boar sliced open Wyatt’s legs, and those hurts likely ended any chance of Wyatt returning to the hunt for the expedition’s remainder. Who would find the conviction to fire their weapons and feed the mudders after the razor boar drove Wyatt Holmes out of the grass? What would become of the loyal mudders should the remainder of the expedition fail to secure food for so many stomachs?

  “Excuse me, Mother-son.” Cayden jumped when he felt Jarvis’ hand fall upon his shoulder. Would he ever learn to sense that guide’s approach? “Your father wishes to speak with you.”

  The mudders carrying Wyatt’s carriage casually shifted the palanquin’s weight to their arms so that the curtains lowered closer to the ground, and Cayden once again marveled at the strength those clones seemed to so easily summon. Wyatt’s face seemed pale to Cayden when the old man finally pulled the curtains aside. Cayden peeked at the bandages wrapped about his father’s legs, and the sight of blood already staining the dressing made him feel sick with shame.

  Wyatt snorted at the concern expressed on his son’s face. “Sometimes, son, I actually think you were born lucky, no matter how I fear you’ll live to see the nightfall of our kind.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Wyatt’s eyes dulled. “I suppose you wouldn’t. Count yourself fortunate you were never forced to serve in any of the water wars. I saw injuries in those days that make my legs seem little more than scratched. I saw weapons that make the guns we carry on this hunt seem like toys.”

  Cayden held his breath. Wyatt never spoke of those war years. Cayden remembered the day he discovered the dress jacket of his father’s uniform neatly folded in a box kept at the bottom of an attic closet. The jacket held dozens of tiny, colorful ribbons pinned on its chest, and Cayden still often imagined what adventures those ribbons might have represented. He asked his father once to describe those war years, but Wyatt only sadly shook his head before making Cayden promise to never again ask him for a story of that time. He told Cayden those stories were too terrible to ever rise from the past. He told Cayden that only those who didn’t bleed and murder told stories of those killing days, and he warned Cayden to never listen to the charlatans who pretended to know what it had been like to pull a trigger and to kill on the battlefields humanity cursed to the land.

  Many years later, however, Cayden sensed his father wished to share something of those days as the mudders carried him upon cushions, and so he pressed Wyatt to learn more.

  “Were the wars as terrible as they say?”

  “They were worse,” Wyatt replied. “No one tells the half of it. We’re lucky any of us survived at all.”

  “And did the clones really fight as soldiers?”

  Wyatt grimaced. “Oh, they fought, but they didn’t fight like soldiers. They fought more like equipment. They were weapons all by themselves, all so carefully crafted by the geneticists to run so long and hard on adrenaline, made so that they seldom needed a thing to eat or drink, made to fight for weeks on end without sleep. It was so easy for the clones to kill. They were all faster and stronger. No level of chaos could cloud their minds. They survived injuries that would’ve killed natural man, and they healed so quickly to return to the front. We’re lucky the geneticists took such care to make them as loyal as they were dangerous. Those wars would’ve ended a lot sooner if those mudder soldiers had taken command. I don’t think we would’ve been able to stop them. I doubt you or I would be here on the savanna if those clones ever decided they wanted to do anything else than follow orders.”

  “Is that why our mudder guides aren’t allowed to kill any of the animals on their own? Is it why they’re not allowed to wield their own weapons?”

  “The old men who called themselves generals were plenty frightened to see how effectively those mudder soldiers did their job. So they convinced the geneticists to destroy their solider facilities, and all the mudder soldiers fortunate enough to survive the wars were rounded together and gassed. The wars pushed pretty much everything from the first creation but man into extinction, and no one wanted to jeopardize what remained of us by keeping clone armies waiting for another chance to fulfill the duty they were first hatched to complete.

  Everything was empty when the wars finished, and so those geneticists began repopulating the planet as best as they could imagine. That’s when they started introducing the plant and wildlife of the second creation. But the clones cannot harvest or kill any of that new life themselves. They killed too well in the wars that came before, and so mankind’s too frightened to let them take any weapons into their own hands.”

  Cayden was surprised to find his thoughts drifting to the clone called Kendra. He thought of how her body felt against his, of how she burned like a torch, and how her scent made him hunger.

  “What happens if no one can pull the trigger now that you’re hurt? Do the mudders starve?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t think the mudders will starve.”

  “But what else would they do? Would they go back to the stew?”

  “They’ll never go back to that foul food. The stew’s made for us now, not for them. It’s crucial that you pull the trigger the next chance you get, Cayden. Killing’s the last purpose left to us. It’s the last chance we have to give something back. My legs aren’t going to let me be with you the next time you march into the grass. You’re going to be on your own. But you have to promise me that you’ll pull the trigger.”

  “Why is it so hard? It should be a simple thing to do.”

  Wyatt’s chuckle surprised Cayden. “People always think that before they find themselves standing in the middle of the veld gazing at the incredible creatures the genetic hatcheries keep throwing into the new wild. Those genetic engineers you’re so fond of Cayden must feel as ashamed and sad about how we wasted the first creation as the rest of us. So they work to make amends for our sins that cannot be forgiven. I suppose they can’t be faulted for trying to improve on what came before. They mix all those cells and all those nucleotides together in their great pots, and out comes the midnight turtle, with that shell that glows brightest when the moon’s full. They clap their hands, and out of their test tubes springs the Phoenix parrot, with that bird’s strange luminescence hanging in the air for hours to show where the bird has flown. They play with their science, and so the eyeless, albino bear hunts so well through the new synthetic forest.”

  Caydon sighed. “They make the new wild too splendid. They don’t have to pull the trigger. They don’t have to destroy what they create, and so they don’t know how all the grace they sew into their creations torments the hunter.”

  “They know,” Wyattt growled. “I used to think the way you do. When I first hunted in the new wild, I believed those geneticists didn’t realize how hard they made it for those of us who signed on for the expedition, but I think differently now after my time in the grass. Those geneticists were mentored by a generation of researchers and scientists who attempted to warn humanity of the peril our kind brought to our ecology, of the peril we brought to ourselves. That earlier generation was scorned and mocked for their efforts. As a boy, I remember the things my father said of such people, how he scowled and laughed each time one of those scientists suggested that the industry in which my father pla
ced so much faith threatened some delicate species of snake hidden in some biosphere my father would never see. My father never realized, even when the symptoms surrounded him, how sick his world had become by the end of his lifetime. My father never saw the strands that connected everything together, and so those scientists might as well have attempted to convince him of the existence of fairies and leprechauns. My father couldn’t accept, no matter how many records were archived or how many numbers were gathered, that the climate turned warmer, or that drought and overpopulation swelled hunger into war. So my father hated all those researchers and academics who chided him for the smoke his old world’s industry belched into the sky, or chided him for the wasteful pleasure his time took from killing all the elephants for their ivory, and for fishing manta rays into oblivion for the rumor that their fins stoked a man’s sexual powers. Only a rare soul listened to those who tried to warn us, son. And of those who listened, even fewer understood what those scientists warned.

  “That generation of scientists must’ve never forgotten the hate shown to them when they attempted to save the old world, and they must’ve resented the rest of humanity all the more when the ignorant men and women who had for so long ignored them begged for their assistance in the end. Those scientists must’ve despised everyone who promised to give them anything to save the world years after it was too late to do a thing to pull it back. Those scientists had to eat the same mudder stew as the rest of us, no matter how they tried to preserve the harvest and the hunt.

  “I think those scientists passed that hate to the generation of geneticists who followed them. I think those scientist asked the geneticists to remember them when they crafted their new forests of synthetic trees and artificial monkeys. I don’t doubt that those old scientists who were forced to watch the first creation choke on its last breath taught their successors how to punish the rest of us, who laughed when they tried warning us how the sky was falling.”

  “I didn’t laugh,” Cayden snarled.

  “It doesn’t matter now whether you did or not,” Wyatt snorted. “I think those geneticists try to make each creature they hatch from their laboratories more and more lovely to punish us. They give the new nightingale its wonderful song to torment our guilty ears. The copper hawk thunders through the wind to make us feel weak. Those geneticists know exactly what they’re doing when they make the genolope so graceful. They want us to hate ourselves for what we made of the first creation. They want our hearts to shatter each time we must pull a trigger to feed the clones who follow us into the grass.”

  For a moment, Cayden thought he might simply walk away from that expedition, set his rifle down and carry his injured father back home, where they could eat their bowls of steaming mudder stew and never again worry about facing a swarm of frenzied razor boar, or attempt to cover their tracks from the cunning splicer-lynx. He played no part in the first creation’s waste. Why should he suffer each time he tried, and failed, to pull a trigger and take one of the new wild’s animals? Why should he choke on the shame?

  But then he thought again of Kendra, of how the savanna sun tinted her skin, and the taste of the grass on her lips, and of the thrust of her hips. The old world was dead, and the new wild only newly born. Yet an order remained that bridged those two ages, an order that gave purpose to both mudder and man. Cayden accepted what his father told was his duty. Cayden accepted that it was his responsibility to pull a weapon’s trigger.

  Cayden stared into his father’s eyes. “I promise I’ll take that shot the next time I get the chance.”

  Wyatt looked pleased. “Remember, boy, it’s the only purpose left to us in the new wild.”

  Wyatt closed the palanquin’s curtains, and the mudders again elevated the old hunter’s carriage over their shoulders. Cayden fell back into the line, where he preferred to walk beside the clone guides. His thoughts brooded upon the punishments the geneticists delivered to humanity while they introduced one magical creature after another into the coming world. None of the other hunters appeared ashamed or troubled following their failures on the hunt. Perhaps they possessed a healthier attitude on their journey, a way of looking at things that allowed them to enjoy a savanna vacation without worrying about the duty of killing and feeding. Perhaps Cayden only needed to relax. Perhaps he placed too much concern on securing the approval of his father, who was an old man, old enough to recall how the world had once been, old enough to remember when man and woman tasted more than tepid, mudder stew. Perhaps Cayden should not have judged himself so harshly.

  But try as he might, Cayden couldn’t shake his shame from his shoulders as he walked with the mudders over those miles that took them back to the tent camp. He had again failed to pull the trigger that day, no matter how the razor boar threatened his father. So he marched on his own feet, no matter how his toes throbbed and how his boot blisters burned.

  He still believed he deserved no cushion in those carriages the mudders carried upon their shoulders.

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