“A deadfall?” gaped Ginger. And then, because there was a resulting emotion which clamored to be felt, he spoke swiftly, carelessly, and smothered it. “Nonsense. There’s nothing like a deadfall in the arts of the blues. There have been no hostile blues for thirty years or more.”
“Devils,” said Ambu. “Devils of the dark, not blues. I have never seen nor heard of such a trap, Lord Ginger.”
“I’ll have to see it before I believe it,” said Ginger. “Er . . . Ambu, bring me a drink.”
Ambu was perceptive. He knew Lord Ginger did not mean water even though Lord Ginger never drank except to be polite or when ill with fever. He poured from a flat metal bottle into a metal cup and the two chattered together.
“Very cold tonight,” said Ambu, sweating.
“Very cold,” said Ginger, drinking quickly.
The beasts of this continent weighed many tons. They were of many kinds, some of them carnivorous, all of them stupid, slothful swamp creatures which did damage because they were clumsy, not because they were vicious. It was a government hunter’s job to kill them because a man had to be skilled to rend apart enough flesh and muscle and bone to keep the brutes from traveling. There were no small animals like leopards or lynxes. On all Venus there was nothing which weighed four hundred pounds and had claws, was cloaked in slimy fur—
“It knew,” said Ambu. “It knew Lord Ginger would stop in just that place when the line halted. And it was on a tree limb above Lord Ginger waiting for him to stop. It knew.”
“Rot and nonsense,” grinned Ginger carefully. “I have never heard of a beast with that much intelligence.”
“No beast,” said Ambu with rare conviction for him. “Probably devil. No doubt devil. Forest devil. Drink again, Lord Ginger?”
Ginger drank again and some of the numb horror began to retreat before the warmth of the liquor. “Well, maybe we’ll take a crack at hunting it when we’ve disposed of this juju thing the village is troubled about.”
“The devil is da juju,” said Ambu. “That is the thing for which they wanted Lord Ginger. That was da juju!”
“The white lord is well?” said a new voice, a tired and hopeless voice, in the entrance to the tent.
Ambu started up guiltily and began to protest to the chief in blue that the white lord was well enough but would talk to no one.
“Never mind, Ambu. Invite him in,” said Ginger. He knew he would get the full impact of this thing now, would remember all about it, would receive the hopelessness of this gloomy forest chief like one receives an immersion in ink. “Greetings,” said Ginger in blue.
“Greetings to the white lord,” said the chief tiredly. “He lives and the village Tohyvo is happy that he lives. The white hunter is great and his fame is mighty. He comes and all things flee in horror before him. The blues beat their heads against the earth in submission and hide their eyes before the dazzling brilliance of the mighty lord.” He sighed and sank upon an ammunition box.
“Greetings to the star of his people,” said Ginger, mechanically. “His name carries the storms of his wrath across the jungle and his power is as the raging torrent. A flash of his glance is the lightning across the storm.” He took a cup of liquor from Ambu and handed it to the dispirited, sodden little chief.
“You met da juju,” said the chief.
“We did,” said Ginger with a tired smile. “On the next meeting da juju will be dead.”
“Ah,” said the chief.
“You have had some trouble with this thing?” said Ginger.
“My best warriors are gutted and mangled corpses in the forest depths. Women going to the river have never returned. Children are snatched from play. And always the dark swallows this thing, always there is only the silent forest to mock. In my long life I have never heard of such a beast. But you have said it will be killed. It is good. It is ended. The mighty hunter gives me back my sleep.”
“Wait,” said Ginger. “You say it makes raids on your village?”
“Yes, mighty warrior.”
“How does it do this?”
“It rides down from the sky. It vanishes back into the sky.”
“You mean the trees,” said Ginger.
“It is the same,” sighed the chief, eyeing the liquor bottle.
“How do your warriors die?”
The chief squirmed. “They fall into pits cunningly placed on the trail and covered over. They are attacked from behind and torn to bits. Da juju has even been known to wrest from their hands their spears and knives and transfix them with their own weapons.”
Ambu was shivering. He stood on one foot, then on the other. He scratched his back nervously and in the next second scratched his head. His eyes, flicking back and forth from the chief to the white hunter, were like a prisoner’s under torture.
“Maybe devils,” said Ambu.
“Devils,” muttered the old chief. “The mighty white warrior has come. All will be well. All will be well.” He looked dispiritedly at Ginger and crept out of the tent.
Ambu pointed to a case which contained a radiophone. “Lord Ginger talk Yorkville and ask for men?”
Ginger startled himself by almost agreeing. He had never asked for help. He was Ginger Cranston. He looked at the radio case like a desert-stranded man might gaze thirstily at a cup of water before he did the incredible thing of pouring it out on the ground.
“We won’t need any help,” said Ginger with a smile. “All I need is a night’s sleep. Have the chief throw out beaters in the morning and pick up the beast’s track. Meantime, good night. NO!” he added quickly and then calmed his voice. “No, leave the lantern there, Ambu. I . . . I have some notes to make.”
Ambu looked uncertainly at his white master and then sidled from the tent.
The giant trees stood an infinity into the sky, tops lost in the gray dark of swirling vapors. Great tendrils of fog crept ghostily, low past the trunks, to blot with their evil odor of sulphur and rot what visibility the faint light might have permitted. It was an atmosphere in which men unconsciously speak in whispers and look cautiously around each bend before venturing farther along the trail.
The beaters had come back with news that da juju had left tracks in a clearing two kilometers from the village and they added to it the usual blue exaggeration that it was certain da juju was wounded from his encounter with the mighty white hunter.
The party stepped cautiously past an open space where some wrecked and forgotten space liner, which furnished the natives with metal, showed a series of battered ports through the swirling gloom, a ship to be avoided since its dryness offered refuge to snakes.
Weak and feverish, Ginger occasionally stopped and leaned against a tree. He would have liked the help of Ambu’s arm, but could not, in his present agitated state, bring himself to ask for it.
Step by step, turn by turn of the trail, a thing was growing inside Ginger Cranston, a thing which was like a lash upon his nerves. His back was slashed with the wounds he had received and the wounds burned, burned with memory.
His back was cringing away from the thing it had experienced and as the minutes went the feeling increased. At each or any instant he expected to have upon him once again the shock of attack, from behind, fraught with agony and terror. He tried to sweep it from him. He tried to reassure himself by inspecting the low-hanging limbs under which they passed; but the memory was there. He told himself that if it did happen he would not scream. He would whirl and begin to shoot. He would smash the thing against a tree trunk and shatter it with flame and copper.
He was being careful to discount any tendency toward weakness and when, on a halt, he had found that each time he had pressed his back solidly against a tree, he thereafter turned his back to the trail and faced the tree.
Ambu was worried. He padded beside Lord Ginger, carrying the spare gun, wanting to offer his help, wanting to somehow comfort this huge man who was now so changed.
“Hot, eh?” said Ginger with a smile.
?
??Hot,” said Ambu.
“Ask the trackers if we are almost there.”
Ambu chattered to the men ahead and then shrugged. “They say a little way now.”
“Good,” said Ginger, carefully careless.
The trail began to widen and the river of syrup which ran in it began to shoal. The clearing was about them before they could see that it was and then the only sign was a certain lightness to the fog.
“Tracks!” cried the blue in advance.
Ginger went up to him. He wiped his face beneath his swamp mask and put the handkerchief carefully away. He knelt casually, taking care that his thigh boots did not ship mud and water over their tops. Impersonally he regarded the tracks.
There were six of them in sets of two. The first were clearly claws; two and a half feet behind them the second set showed no claws; two and a half feet back from these the third and last set showed claws again. The weight of the thing must be less than three hundred pounds.
A prickle of knowing went up the back of Ginger’s spine. These tracks were perfect. They had been placed in a spot where they would retain their impressions. And from here they led away into the trees; but to this place they did not exist.
“Devil,” chattered Ambu.
A devil was very nearly an acceptable explanation to Ginger. No six-tracked animal was known to him, either on this planet or any other.
Suddenly he stood up, no longer able to bear the feeling of attack from behind. He turned slowly. The dark vapors curled and drifted like veils through the clearing.
“Get on the track of it,” said Ginger in blue.
The trackers trotted out, too swiftly for Ginger to keep up without extreme effort, but Ginger made no protest.
He told himself that the fever made him this way, but he had had fever before. Deep within he knew that the beast had a thing which belonged to Ginger, a thing which Ginger had never imagined could be stolen. And until he met that beast and killed that beast, he would not recover his own.
The tracks led on a broad way, clear in the mud, with a straight course. Uneasily, Ginger watched behind him, recalling the words of the chief that the thing often backtracked. But there were no overhanging branches in this part and that gave some relief, for they had come up a gradual grade and the trail was flanked with tall, limber trees which barred no light. Here the ground was more solid even if covered with thick masses of rot and the combination of greater light and better footing caused a weight to gradually lift from Ginger’s back.
And then it happened. There was a swishing, swooping sound and a scream from Ambu! Ginger spun about to scan the backtrail—and to find nothing. Ambu was gone.
Ginger looked up. In a cunningly manufactured sling, not unlike a rabbit snare, held by one foot, was Ambu, thirty feet from the ground, obviously dead, his head smashed in from its contact with the trunk of the tree which, springing upright, had lifted him.
After a few moments Ginger said in a controlled voice, “Cut him down.”
And some hours later the group crawled back into the compound, carrying Ambu, Ginger still walking by himself despite the grayness of his face and the strange tightness about his mouth.
With each passing day the lines on Ginger Cranston’s face deepened and the hollows beneath his eyes grew darker. It was harder now to bring a proper note of cheerfulness into his commands, to reassure when all chances of success diminished with each casualty to the hunting party.
There came, one dull drab day, the final break with the blues. Ginger Cranston had seen it coming, had known that his own power had grown less and less in their eyes, that their faith in the great white hunter had slimmed to a hopeless dejection. Da juju had sapped the bulwark of morale and now the battlement came sliding down like a bank of soupy Venusian mud. Ginger Cranston woke to empty tents. The villagers said nothing, for there was nothing to say. The great white hunter was defeated. It was inevitable that the remainder of his crew would desert and it was not necessary that the way of their going be told, for the blazing mouths of guns could not have driven them back. Seven had died. Five remained to flee and the five had fled.
“Bring me trackers,” said the haggard white man.
The chief looked at the mud and regarded it with intensity. He looked at a pegunt rooting there as though he had seen such an animal for the first time. He looked at a tree with searching interest.
“I said trackers!” said Ginger Cranston.
The chief scratched himself and began to sidle away, still without meeting the eyes of the white man.
Ginger struck out and the chief crumpled into a muddy, moaning pile.
“TRACKERS!” said Ginger.
The chief turned his face into the slime and whimpered. In all the village not one blue could be observed, but one felt that all the village had seen and now dispiritedly sank into a dull apathy as though this act of brutality, borne out of temper, was not a thing to be blamed but merely a thing which proved that the great white hunter was no longer great. With all the rest, da juju had him, had his heart and soul, which was far worse than merely having his life.
Ginger turned away, ashamed and shaken. He pushed his way into his tent and mechanically wiped the rain from his face, discovering abruptly that he wept. He could not now gain back the thing which da juju had. His means were gone with his men. He could hear the chief whimpering out there in the mud, could hear a wind in the great trees all around the place, mixed with the toneless mutter of the drizzle upon the canvas.
In the metal mirror which hung on the pole, steamed though it was, Ginger caught a glimpse of his countenance. He started, for that which he saw was not in the least Ginger Cranston; it was as though even the bone structure had somehow shifted to complete another identity. He had no impulse to strike the mirror down—he was tired, achingly, horribly tired. He wanted to crawl into his bed and lie there with his face to the blank wall of canvas and never move again.
Shame was the only active emotion now, shame for the thing he had done just now, for the chief hardly came to his shoulder and the mud-colored body was twisted by accident and illness into a caricature of a blue. Ginger took a bottle from a case and went out again into the rain.
He knelt beside the chief and sought to turn him over and make him look. But the resistless shoulder was a thing which could not be turned and the low, moaning whimper was not a thing which would stop.
“I am sorry,” said Ginger.
But there was no change. Ginger set the bottle down in the mud beside the head and went back into his tent.
Slowly, soddenly, he sank upon the rubber cover of his bunk looking fixedly and unseeingly at his fouled boots. Da juju. The devil, Ambu had called him. Had not Ambu been right? For what animal could do these things and remain out of the range of a hunter’s guns? Da juju—
There was a slithering, harsh sound and Ginger, blenched white, came shaking to his feet, his light gun swinging toward the movement, sweat starting from him. But there was no target. The thrown-back flap of his tent had slipped into place, moved by the wind.
He was nauseated and for seconds the feeling of claws digging into his back would not abate. He struggled with his pent sanity, sought nervously for the key of control which, more and more, was ever beyond the reach of mental fingers. The scream died unvoiced, the gun slipped to the bunk and lay there with its muzzle like a fixed, accusing eye. Hypnotically, Ginger Cranston looked at that muzzle. It threw a twenty-millimeter slug and would tear half a head from a Mamodon bull; the bullet came out when the trigger was pressed, came out with a roar of savage flame, came out with oblivion as its command. Limply Ginger regarded it. He knew very little about death, he a hunter who should have known so much. Was death a quiet and untroubled sleep which went on forever or was death a passing to another existence? Would the wings of death carry something that was really Ginger Cranston out of this compound, away from these trees, this fog, this constant rain, this . . . this beast?
Funny he had never before considere
d death, odd how little he knew, he who had been so sure and proud of knowing so very much.
Death was a final conclusion—or was it a beginning? And if he took it now— Suddenly he saw where his thought led him and drew back in terror from the lip of the chasm. Then, as one who wonders how far he would have fallen had he slipped, he crept cautiously back and thoughtfully regarded the bottomless, unknowable deep, finding within himself at this strange moment a power to regard such a thing with a detached attitude, to dispassionately weigh a thing which he believed it to be in his hand to choose.
He seemed to fall away from himself in body and yet stand there, an untouchable, uncaring personality who had but to extend a crooking finger and call unto himself all there was to know. Suspended in time, in action, in human thought, he regarded all he was, had been, would be. There were no words to express this identity, this timelessness, only a feeling of actually existing for the first time; layer upon layer of a nameless something had been peeled away to leave a naked, knowing thing; a mask was gone from his eyes. But when he again came to himself, still standing beside his bed, still staring at the gun, he was muddy, weary Ginger Cranston once again who could feel that something had happened but could not express even in nebulous thought any part of the occurrence. Something had changed. A decision had been born. A plan of action, a somber, solemn plan was his.
About his waist he buckled a flame pistol and into that belt he thrust a short skinning knife. He pulled up his collar and strapped his swamp mask to it. He picked up his gun and looked into its magazine.
When Ginger stepped from the tent the chief was gone but the bottle sat upright in the mud, untouched, a reproof which would have reached Ginger a few minutes before but which could not touch him now. For perhaps an hour, even a day, nothing could touch him, neither sadness nor triumph. He was still within himself, waiting for a thing he knew would come, a thing much greater than shame or sorrow. He had chosen his death, for he had found it to be within his realm of choice and having chosen it he was dead. It mattered little what happened now. It mattered much that da juju would end. But it did not matter emotionally. It was a clear concern, undiluted by self.