When we left our cave I was concerned with the more ancient war of human beings against other creatures who desire to hold a place on earth. I felt, superstitiously, that we had been having it too easy. In our hunting and fishing while we stayed at the cave we’d encountered nothing more dangerous than a few snakes. Once a puma started out of the brush ahead of Vilet and me and took off in almost comic terror. One night we smelled a bear, who might have got troublesome if he could have climbed after our supplies. It was only a black of course, as we knew from the prints we found in the morning. The great red bear is so scarce in southern Moha one never really expects to see him. North of Moha Water he is plentiful enough, one of the chief reasons why that great triangle of mountain country bounded by Moha Water and the Lorenta Sea remains mostly unexplored.

I find it strange, in reading Old-Time books, to notice what unconcern the people of that age felt about wild beasts, who were scarce and timid then, overwhelmed by human power and crowding and incredible weapons. Man in that time truly seemed to be master of the earth. In our day, a few hundred years later, I suppose he’s still the most intelligent animal at large, even still likely to succeed if he ever learns how to quit cutting his brother’s throat, but he is under a slight cloud. We might become masters of the world again, but perhaps we ought to watch out for a certain cleverness I’ve noticed in the forepaws of rats and mice and squirrels. If they’d develop speech and start using a few easy tools, say knives and clubs, it wouldn’t be long before they were explaining the will of God and rigging elections.

Gunpowder is forbidden by law and religion,[16] and this may be just as well, since guns to make use of it are forbidden also by lack of steel, lack of a technology capable of designing and making them, and nowadays by a lack of belief that such instruments ever existed. Since a vast amount of fiction was produced in Old Time, it is wonderful how the Church today can explain away anything unwelcome in the surviving fragments of the old literature by calling it fiction.

We had to remember that some bandit gangs were said to roam the wilderness, though eastern Moha did not have too bad a reputation that way — southern Katskil is lousy with them. Such outlaw gangs care nothing for laws or national boundaries; they live off the wilderness, and now and then take a toll from the villagers. Hardy souls — they kill off their old people, rumor says, and admit new members only after savage ordeals. The gangs are small — in Moha or Nuin you never hear of one attacking a town of any importance, or a large caravan,[17] even for hit-and-run raids. The Cod Islands pirates are popularly supposed to have started from a bandit gang that got clever with small war vessels and then almost grew into a nation. In Conicut I heard the tale of a whole army battalion routed by a couple of dozen bandits who decided the soldiers were encroaching. The story was set in the rather distant past; the begging street-corner storytellers preferred a version in which the bandits had trained teams of black wolves to help them, under the command of a most unusual character named Robin or Robert Hoode.

I knew some unhappy moments when we went away from the cave for good that morning. For one thing I saw few opportunities ahead for playing with Vilet; with the feeling of losing her, I even imagined a little that I was in love with her — her common sense would have taken care of that if I had spoken of it; since I didn’t, my own brains were obliged to handle it, and did so moderately well. Leaving the cave was in many other ways a good-bye—

I know: so is any moment. What happened to the jo who was breathing with your lungs five minutes ago? — or don’t you care?

We spent most of the day in cautious travel through the woods, until we could be sure we were well beyond the village that had been so good as to furnish us with respectable clothes. I did wish I might have learned what happened there when Lurette crashed in shrieking about rape and fire, but I never shall know, so what the hell, write that story yourself if you’re man enough. Then we altered our course, and came out on the Northeast Road at a place where it was climbing a considerable rise, the longer and steeper part still ahead of us. The sun stood behind us in the west; everything lay in a hot bright hush. We saw a few lines of smoke here and there in the south, distant villages. Nothing was moving on the road as we stepped out there in our good clothes — white freeman’s loin-rags, decent brown shirts, Vilet in the remodeled yellow smock. And we heard nothing — no voice, no creak of cart-wheels, no sound of cattle or horse or man. On the other side of the rise ahead of us there could be anything.

Jed asked: “What day is it?”

Bedam if we knew. I said Thursday, but Jed wasn’t sure, and started fretting that he might have let a Friday morning go by without special prayers. He was for having them then and there by the roadside, but I said: “Wait, and hush the clack a minute — I want to listen.”

I wanted something more than listening. I motioned them to stay where they were, and stepped a short way up the road to get clear of the human smell and study the breeze. Even then I wasn’t sure.

I wished something human might join us, but the hot afternoon was quiet as a sleep. It happens Jed was right — the day was a Friday, the day God is said to have rested from the labors of creation, when all but the most necessary travel is forbidden or at least frowned on. And the war was still a fact, discouraging travel, though nothing in the summer air could make you think of it. Finally, it was late enough in the day so that any sensible traveler would be thinking of supper-time behind stockade walls.

When I rejoined the others Sam asked me carefully: “Did you catch it?”

“I think so.” I saw Jed didn’t understand. “We best move right on, keep close together till we come to a settlement. I think I smell tiger.”

How steep was that sunny slope, how very long! I wanted us to climb it quietly, and Sam urged that too, but Jed thought best to pray, and when Sam asked him to avoid making noise and save his breath, Jed merely looked forgiving and went on praying, no help for it.

The road approached the illusion of an ending at open sky. You may see that, wherever a road mounts a hill, and you think of a drop into nothing or of sudden dying. If I could return to that strip of road today and travel it without alarm, without the faint ammoniac reek of the thing that was somewhere near us unheard, I suppose it would seem an ordinary climb. It was not so steep that a single ox couldn’t have hauled a heavy cart to the summit — I dare say that was the standard of adequate road-building in most parts of Moha. Yet whenever the smell seemed to strengthen, or I imagined some hint of tawny motion among the trees at my left, I felt like a wingless bug climbing a wall.

Nor was that piece of road so very long, really — a quarter-mile perhaps, or less. The sun was not noticeably lower when we reached the crest of the rise-we did reach it, all four of us alive-and looked down, and saw a thing that might save us from the tiger, or might not.

We saw a stockaded village, the walls fairly well made, and it stood boldly at the edge of the road, no hideaway wilderness thing but civilized, respectable, important in its own right. It lay far enough below us in the valley so that we could see all but the north end of it, which was hidden by forest growth coming close to the stockade. We saw behind the palings a graceful church spire, the usual design of an upright bar rising from the wheel, and an orderly array of rooftops, including those of quite a few two-story dwellings. Next to the road, on our side, was a generous area of cleared land, with corn-patches, and black spots that showed where they maintained guard-fires at night to keep the deer, bison, woods buffalo and small creatures from ruining their plantings. Far down, yes, nearly half a mile, and for much of that distance, until we reached the corn planting, there would still be trees and brush creating a mystery at our left.

16

The prohibition appears thus in the Book of Universal Law, 19th edition (the latest I believe) published at Nuber in 322: “It is and shall be utterly and forever forbidden on pain of death by whatever method the Ecclesiastical Court of the district shall decide, to manufacture, describe, discuss, create any written reference to, or in any manner whatsoever make use of the substance vulgarly known as Gunpowder, or any other substance that may by competent authorities of the Church be reasonably suspected of containing atoms.” — Dion M. M. 

17

Any group of travelers who follow the roads and keep together for safety is called a caravan. The word seems to have been used a little differently in Old Time. — Dion M. M.