THE HEBRAS AND THE DEMONS AND THE DAMNED

by Brenda Cooper

First contact may go not only not how you expect, but with whom you expect.

I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story too.

My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who remembers the home we left behind. Deerfly. Stupid name for a planet, if you ask me. But we didn’t leave Deerfly over its wreck of a name. Rather, it was too smart for us, everybody there becoming stronger, faster beings, almost becoming computers or robots with flesh, leaving us true humans behind, some of them wearing no more than a thin skin of flesh to fool the eye.

Fremont was too smart for us too. In the time I’m telling you about, we’d been here seventeen years. Instead of doing what a self-respecting colony does, grow, we kept losing people to tooth and claw and cliff.

Real humans had grown up on colony planets like this, but Deerfly had gone tame generations ago.

We needed help. Needed to find some accord with this place before it killed us. It gnawed at me that I’d done little for the colony except backbreaking work and staying alive. I’d left the leading to others, and Fremont needed more from me than that. Since I managed horse farms back on Deerfly, I looked to the animals.

Now, there are a lot of animals on Fremont, but most wouldn’t work for what I needed.

The cats had decided we were dinner the day we landed, and they were too big to be un-decided in any way I could think of. A foot-long scar on my right calf throbbed in the cold of winter—a reminder.

We had a few domestic dogs we’d brought shipboard and more we were planning to birth and raise up. We weren’t going to lack for best friends, for herding beasts to keep goats in bunches, or four-footed pranksters to steal the chickens. But dogs are smaller than humans, and smaller than most beings of tooth and claw here. I was glad of them, but on Fremont they needed protecting just like we did. They’d give us warning, but they’d die trying to save us from paw cats or yellow snakes. And given how we mostly loved them, humans sometimes died saving their dogs.

Fremont has its own four-footed and single-tailed beasts with a canine look. They run in packs, and people call them demon dogs. But they should never, ever be confused for real dogs. These demons have no soul, and they exist to eat. Worse, I’ve seen them hunt, and I’m sure they are communicating with each other more than any of our native animals from Deerfly, or the ones our fathers brought from Earth. Demons don’t speak, but they work like a team with radios. They make humans mildly sick to eat too. So they’re not even good for food.

I had high hopes for the djuri: four-footed prey that run in packs, fleeing for their lives from the demon dogs. It turned out the djuri were too shy to help. Hard to find, always running and hiding and bleating. Not too bright, either, and not big enough to really help us. Humans can look down on them, or maybe look a big one straight in the eye. Well, all right. A few are even bigger than that. The bucks. But still, they’re not hefty creatures. Keep in mind that we can look a paw cat in the eye, too, and they outweigh us and have claws long as fingers and hard as knives. The truly good thing about djuri is they are incredibly good to eat.

That’s pretty much the rundown on the bigger animals we’d seen here so far, except the hebras. They were our last hope for an answer. I took a while to realize this, even though I sat at the edge of the cliff by the promise of our town, looking down over the grass plains every day for two summers. The grass there is scary big, bigger than a man’s head by the end of summer. When it dries, it’s sharp like a million razors trying to flay the skin from anything as soft as a human. I still have scars on my fingers from it, and on my shoulders.

As tall as the grass is, the hebras’ heads rise above it. They’ve got legs that come to a man’s head. Instead of straight backs like horses, their backs slope up to shoulders, and their necks measure the tiniest bit longer than their backs. Their coats are solid, striped, or covered with great spots like the shadow pattern of leaves on the forest floor. Their colors are all variations of gold and green, brown and black, and sometimes the barest bit of red like a red-haired woman being touched by the sun.

Make no mistake. Hebras are prey animals. Paw cats hunt them all summer, and demons get the weak and the slow and the young. But they are so much more. Remember how I told you about the demon dogs? Perhaps being prey on a planet full of thorns made them smarter than any of the horses I ever rode or trained or showed or loved.

One day, far below me, the demon dogs hunted hebras. I’d given up digging out the smelter’s foundation for the day, my muscles screaming sore and my back feeling on fire. I stood at the edge of the cliff looking down, letting the cooling breeze of near-dusk tease sweat from my skin. The sun shone bright enough to wash everything dull and soft, with that little extra bit of gold that the late part of the day brings. The air smelled of seeds and harvest and of the fall that would soon touch us.

Below me a herd of hebras grazed, rotating between watcher and eater, the distance making animals with heads towering above my own look small.

A breeze kissed the tops of the grasses, bending them south in ripples. A few lines of grass moved the wrong way as a pack of seven demons surrounded twice as many hebras. I spotted the dogs’ path even before the wily old watch-hebra bugled fear and loathing.

The hebras ran together, almost lockstep, all of them trying for a gap between two of the demons, heading sideways to me, their heads bobbing up and down with their ungainly rocking run.

The dogs raced to make a line in front of the hebras, cutting them off. They began to bay, a high long-winded howl that instilled fear in me even though I stood so far above them the sound was faint and thin.

The hebras turned, all together, a wave of long necks and thin tails.

The dogs flowed behind them.

The tallest hebra let out a short high-pitched squeal, and the hebras twitched and broke into three lines, 180-degree turns, as if they practiced every day. Maybe they did. They had it down, stretching out long, taking turns teasing the dogs. The gap between grazer and hunter widened.

A dog nipped at the last animal in one line, a brown blur flashing momentarily up above the high grass and then falling back down. The target hebra twisted, probably kicking even though I couldn’t see its legs for the grass, and then put on a burst of speed. It passed two other hebras, and a different animal became last, running right in front of the slavering dogs.

I’d been in the grass the week before. It pulled and cloyed and knotted and tripped. But the hebras and the demons slid though it, streams of living beings, barking and baying and bugling.

The air had cooled down a little, but I stood with goose bumps rising on my forearms, transfixed and afraid that if I moved I’d somehow change the outcome of the race down below.

It was nearly too dark to see by the time the first of the dogs stopped, the grass swallowing the hunter as it became still. I lost the place it stood entirely in the space of two breaths.

As the stars and two of our moons brightened in the black sky above me, I realized the hebras had won fairly easily. They were off grazing somewhere else, and the dogs would have a hungry night.

If it had been fourteen unarmed humans against seven demons, I’d have bet on the dogs.

* * * *

Our roving scientists brought back a lot of djuri bones, jaws, and the thick back legs cracked open by teeth. But not many hebra bones. Some. They did die. But not very fast, or very easy.

So I swore I’d figure out how to tame them. Not that we’d gotten within two hundred meters by then. The great beasts were shy of us, and fast.

I couldn’t catch one myself. I was almost sixty already, and slowing. I took my story to the town council, which was led by Jove Alma at the time, a nervous man with a deep focus on making and keeping plans. He thought the tighter he gripped our choices in his and the council’s fists, the more of us would live. Some believed him, some hated him, but everyone obeyed. The previous leader had been a risk-taker and cost almost all of us people we loved. That’s the long way round of saying that catching animals wasn’t in Jove’s plan, and the council turned me down flat. There was a city being built and the chill of winter already clinging to every dawn.

The winter was the second harshest we’d ever had, with snow in town instead of just in the hills and two sheet-ice storms. We lost ten more people. Two froze to death on a trip out into the woods to bring back samples of winter plants, leaving behind two orphans to add to our growing stockpile. The third one who went with them lost three fingers and part of her sanity. Cats ate two adults and a babe, fire claimed a family of four, and one of the men my age hanged himself in the middle of town. We had two less births than deaths that season.

All that long cold I thought of the hebras. Sometimes I glimpsed them down below on the cold grass plains. Fire had flamed the grass flat and low and the hebras sometimes loped like shadows at the edge of the plain near the sea, clearly visible when frost turned the stubble white and hoary in the early dawn. But mostly they hid in the Lace Forest that surrounded us.

Come spring, we stopped huddling together in the buildings we’d made for guild halls and finished up some of the houses. I built mine at the edge of town, as close to the cliff as the town council would let me. Mornings, as dawn split the sky open, I sat and watched the fading moons and the greening grass below. The hebras returned, sleeping on the plain, two watch beasts circling the sleepers restlessly, heads way up. I was pretty sure they traded off watches just like we did, and for the same reason. It made me feel kindred.

One morning when the grass was knee-high to a human and the first spindly-legged baby hebras clung to their dams, Jove came and stood silently beside me, looking down at the plains. His gaze was unfocused, as if he saw the whole thing and the sea beyond, but not the hebras right below. “Three of the orphans got in trouble last night. Fought each other and one’s fetched up in the infirmary with a broken leg.”

He’d hate that. Jove hated all disorder. I waited him out, curious what he’d say next.

“Council met, and we figure you got room for two boys.”

Shock gave way to liking the idea pretty fast. I’d never married, never had kids, just managed farms and hired help. But there was no help to hire here. My ancestors had farmed Deerfly by making babies, back in the days before there were too many bots and androids to count and people didn’t have any work to do that looked like farming except training exotics. So I didn’t stand and blink stupidly at Jove for long, but instead I just said, “Thank you.”

He looked surprised at that, like he’d been expecting resistance, so it was his turn to pause for a beat too long and then say, “Thank you,” himself. He smiled before he walked away, the sun fully risen now, shoving his shadow behind him as he walked back to town.

The boys were Derk and Sho. Derk was thin and wiry, and won the boys informal footraces. Sho plodded and had so much patience I couldn’t imagine what had made him part of the fight at all until one day I came across two other boys teasing him in high, mean voices for being stupid. They were wrong, I already knew that. But sometimes being the silent type means people make their own decisions about who you are.

Sho and Derk had school and then work every day, but since they were only twelve, they had energy to spare in spite of the harsh schedules. It only took a few days before they stood beside me at the cliff’s edge, looking down at the herd.

Sho started drawing hebras in the dirt with sticks, and they both started naming them.

As the days got longer, we gave up sleep to pick our way down the steep path between Artistos and the wide road on the plains where we’d trucked tools and technology from the shuttles at our makeshift spaceport.

The boy with the broken leg, Niko, recovered enough to follow us down the path and soon all three of them laughed together, their raised voices surely spreading all across the plain. Soon half the teens and a few of the old singles from town began to join us at the crack of dawn.

Some of the watchers wanted to catch a hebra, some to stun one. Those weren’t the right answers. I knew it deep in my gut, found it hard to say why I knew so hard, so I just told them, “If we scare them off, they might never come back.” I never let them get close to the herds, just to watch them. The boys helped me—all three of them now living with me, and acting like herd dogs to the new people.

The trail from town to plain lay nearly naked against the cliff, a thin ribbon of dirt with no place big enough for predators to hide. We could stand safely or sit on small rocks and talk. The hebras knew we were there, sometimes lifting their heads and pointing their broad, bearded faces at us. I wanted them to know we weren’t their enemy. We kept it up all summer, the crowd straining against my calls for patience. Sho stood beside me, facing them, telling them off with his eyes and his stance, and they listened. Derk and Niko stood quietly at the rear, watching everyone and all the hebras, eyes darting from one to one to one, keeping count and order.

Some of the boys were fascinated with the hebras’ beards, maybe because they had the first hint of stubble on their own chins. They started drawing pictures of the girls in town with beards and longish necks, and giggling.

The grass stretched its fairy-duster seedpods toward the autumn sky, tall as me if I stood inside it. Demons started hunting more, sometimes running the hebras twice a day. The herd lost one old hebra and one very young one that twisted a leg. The pack lost one old dog and two pups. So in a way, the hebras were winning. Except, of course, that one hebra fed all the dogs and dead dogs didn’t feed the hebras anything.

The cats stayed away. I suspect our scent and presence did that. They were just as quick to hunt us as they would the hebra, but they liked us in small groups. There were about twenty humans on the path most mornings.

Once a week or so Jove came and watched, always walking away before the bells rang for breakfast. I knew what he was thinking, but it did no good to push Jove, and thus no good to push the town council. But if the plains burned below us, we’d have to wait another year to capture even one hebra.

One morning after Jove ghosted away from us, Sho asked, “Is he scared of catching one?”

“Hard work to run a colony. He has to choose.”

“He should see how much we and the hebras need each other.”

I suspected the boy had the right of it, but it does no good to downtalk leaders. “Jove is a busy man.”

“Can you ask him for some rope?”

“What are you going to do with rope?”

“Catch a hebra.”

“Probably not. You think about how to do that, and we’ll try your idea if I can get rope. Rope is dear.” We had what we’d brought, and some we’d made. But none of our homemade rope was strong enough for this.

“Please ask.”

The persistence of boys. “If an opening comes up.”

About noon that same day, Jove came by to watch us raise the roof on the smelter. The metal slabs had come all the way from Deerfly and been brought in pieces from Traveler in one of the little shuttles a year ago. Jove stood to the side as we used chain to hoist the metal, the chain sliding over a tall wooden post-and-beam structure we’d lashed together just for this job. Even with the leverage, it took three men sweating to get the last and largest section up and held while three more of us fastened it with nails also brought from the ship.

At the end, Jove came and stood silently beside me. “Good job, Chaunce. Now we can make our own nails.”

“That’s what we did all this work for? Nails?”

“And hinges. And maybe bits for those animals down below.” He nodded at the roof. “One of your beasts might have pulled that easier.”

It wasn’t a use I had thought of—I’d been thinking of riding them. I felt doubtful they’d be pullers. But if they were—we could make wagons and flatbeds and farm tools. The thought was good. “Can I have some rope?”

“You might get hurt. Or die. The boys might die.”

“We’ve gotta find accord with some of the wild things here. We can’t fear them all forever.” But then, he’d lost a wife to a pack of demons, found her in pieces three days after we landed. Years had passed, but some memories burn your soul.

He toed the ground for a while.

I could get enough of the council to override him if I really tried. But he was a good leader, and I’d learned that if you undermine a good leader you can be rewarded with a worse one.

He swallowed and looked off at some distant spot in the sky before he said, “Let’s go get it.”

I had plenty of time to think, lurching home in the darkening night with three hundred feet of rope coiled over my right shoulder. I understood Jove’s issue: Time breathed down on us. We were failing, dying by bits each year as we missed goals, became food for the local predators, fought amongst each other, and tried ever so hard to learn the dangers and opportunities here. We needed more stout, warm buildings, to retrieve the rest of our supplies from Traveler before the shuttles ran out of fuel, to build better perimeters, and to breed more children than Fremont took from us. Taking the three boys out on the plains represented a hefty risk of our future. Better to risk boys than girls, but still . . .

When I dropped my load of rope on the ground outside the house, the three of them tumbled out right away, faces full of excitement. They’d been planning. Sho came up to me and said, “We can’t get that over their heads. We can’t get it around their legs or we might break them.”

I considered. I’d been thinking of horses. But we were not cowboys. I’d never tried to catch a wild animal in my life. Ran from a few here. The animals on my farms had been born in warm stables and grown up unafraid of me. This was a puzzle. “We can’t cut the rope too short or we’ll never be able to use it for anything else.”

So we made walls on two sides, using the cliff as the third.

We lost a whole day hiking to the Lace Forest and finding four big logs, dragging them back, and posting them upright into the ground. About the time we finished that, the work crews had broken for the day. They helped us string and tie the rope walls, the lowest rope at hebra-knee height, which was about our waists, and the highest something I could barely touch with my hands.

When we finished, the dark brown rope stood out against the pale green grasses of late autumn. The corral did not look like it would work for much of anything. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to get them anywhere near it.

Now we had to do what Jove was afraid of. We had to walk through the tall grass and get the hebras to walk away from us and into the makeshift corral. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this—maybe we should have tried to get close without rope. Maybe we should have tried to find them in the winter woods. At any rate, it no longer mattered what we should have done. The shadow of night was knifing across the plains, and it was time to beat it up the cliff and bed down.

I slept fine, but before first light all three boys came to my room. Derk, the biggest, rested his arms on Niko’s and Sho’s shoulders. “Sho was dreaming of hebras, and when he came to wake me up, I was dreaming about them too.”

Sho nodded. “We dreamed they got caught in the walls we made and the dogs got them, rising up over their back legs and standing on their backs.” He stopped, his eyes wide. He might cry if I let him keep worrying, and then he’d lose face and maybe be the next one to end up with a broken leg.

“And biting their necks.” Niko added, not helping.

“Did you dream too?” I asked Niko.

He shook his head. “No. But I’m worried about the hebras.”

“Well, I’m glad you care. That should make it easier to catch them.”

“Really?” Sho asked.

“Yes,” I assured them all. Might as well believe in success. It couldn’t hurt.

“Can we sit in here with you?” Niko asked.

So I let them stay. In ten minutes they had fallen asleep all over the bed like a litter of puppies, and I got up to watch for the light and pack us all a good lunch. The apple trees had come in well this fall, and Jove’s new wife, Maria, made excellent goat’s-milk cheese. We’d be set if we added a bit of fresh bread from the communal kitchen. Even though the morning shadows were still black ghosts, the first loaves should already be out. I shrugged into my coat and opened the door.

I nearly jumped as a shadow moved nearby. Jove. Wordlessly, he held out three loaves of bread.

“I don’t need that many.”

“Yes, you do. I gave everyone on your shift the day off.”

I raised my eyebrows and spoke more boldly than I ever had to him. “Big risk for you.”

Although I really only still had moonlight to see by, I swear his cheeks reddened. “I had trouble sleeping. I kept doing math in my head. Doing just what we’re doing, if we keep dying so fast, there won’t be anything left of us in two hundred years.” He looked directly at me for the first time in a few days. “I remember what you said when you brought your ideas to us. Last year. We have to risk.”

I could barely imagine what that cost him. People followed him because they were afraid. Like him. And now he was being brave. This would change us, and only success would change us for the better. The stakes had just risen.

Together, Jove and I made up sandwiches for thirty people. My shiftmates started gathering outside, stamping against the morning cold, dressed in layers against the heat that would follow by midday. They chattered amongst themselves, a few nervous, a few excited. Laughter broke out over and over.

The boys didn’t want anything more than excitement for breakfast, but I got them each to take a bread heel down in their coat pockets against the hunger that would threaten them as soon as we stopped and waited. At first I worried that Jove would try to take over, although in truth, neither he nor I knew much of anything about hunting hebras.

He didn’t take charge. He stood to the side, curious and watchful and very silent. People looked to him at first, and then when he looked to me, they did too. A relief and a worry.

We handed out stunners to all of the adults, two to the good shots. Half of our total stock, a firepower that scared even me. The stunners quieted everyone a bit. One shot would stop a human, two a demon, three a paw cat.

The hebra herd watched us come down, and of course, we watched them.

I expected them to think it was like any other morning, since we always came down at dawn to watch. But they scattered before we were even halfway down. Maybe because we started later than usual. Maybe just something in the way we walked, like we had a purpose instead of a simple curiosity.

Jove spoke what I was thinking. “Maybe they don’t want us any more than the rest of this cursed planet wants us.”

There were twenty-five of us total. I broke us into groups and sent four groups of five off. I thought about keeping Jove with us, but since I was keeping all three boys I decided I needed a shooter I could count on, and so I sent Jove off with the group that I figured would be safest. So that’s how me, the three boys, and my second in command from the smelter project, Campbell, all went over to stand downwind of the rope corral.

The boys ate their bread. Campbell and I watched, keeping companionable silence. The boys fidgeted. Campbell and I made them stretch in the grass, crawling and parting the fronds, reminding them to close their eyes and mouths as they moved through it, like swimmers. We sent them one by one up onto a small pile of rocks to look around the plain and see if they spotted the hebras (or anything else). They got bored and hungry and finished their bread heels and drank half the whole day’s water supply. Derk got bit by something nasty and flying and a welt came up on his arm. He didn’t complain, though. Good kid. It warmed and we stripped off our outer layer of coats.

The first group came in, including Jove. He shook his head at me. “Nothing.”

The second and third groups found each other and came in together, then the fourth. No one reported seeing anything bigger than a jumping-prickle or a long-tailed rat. We made a long string of humans and sandwiches at the base of the cliff, still downwind from the ropes. We rested on warm rocks. The three boys abandoned me and Jove. I figured they’d be watched well enough between so many of us. Besides, they too had seen cats bring down a baby hebra this spring. Surely they’d be cautious.

“Did you see anything interesting out there?” I asked Jove.

“Grass.”

Well, true enough. His right cheek showed a set of thin lines where he’d seen the grass too closely, and one had been deep enough that it was slightly crusted with blood.

“You should clean up before that starts itching.” I dug an antiseptic cloth out of my bag, adding a bit of water from my canteen to bring it to life. Some plants here were the antidotes to other plants, and we had a whole team of botanists doing nothing more than cataloging everything we learned. This was one of their gifts. Jove took the cloth, and while he wiped up his cheek and a deeper cut I hadn’t noticed on his forearm, I said, “They know we’re here. They’ve been grazing here every day for two years except winters and today—maybe they’re territorial and this is the territory for this herd. They’ve been watching us watch them, but they don’t like us all the way down here.”

“What next?” he asked.

We still had half of this day. “Let’s try again today, send everyone in one group except me and Campbell and the boys. Have you all go together along the road so you get farther away, and then make two teams and go forward. Maybe you can get far enough out for the hebras to be between you and me. Just don’t spook them. Sometimes they sleep during the day, but they’ll have watchers.”

He handed me back the cloth instead of just putting it in his own pocket.

I took it.

“How do you know what they do during the day? You’re always working.”

“I ask around the fire at night. Almost no one sees them during the day. One theory suggests they go into the woods, another that they sleep when the big predators sleep. I kinda like—”

A scream cut my sentence off. One of the boys. “Demons!”

No! They slept during the day. I knew that. Everybody knew that. Dammit—what did I know? I leapt up, dropping the rest of my lunch, and scrambled to a higher rock behind me. Our line—stretched out maybe twenty meters—did the same, people backing up against the cliff.

“To me,” I called. The demons would try and surround the ends first, to isolate a single person or two and then kill them easily. I tried to recall who was where, couldn’t remember. Lousy leading.

A demon bayed as if answering me, the same call I’d heard from the cliff, shuddering. It was worse down here, and diffuse, like the wail came from all around, the grass and the plains themselves hunting us.

I couldn’t tell where the demon was.

The boys.

Derk and Niko came running up to me, panting, standing one at each side of me, looking out. They trembled, but neither cried.

“Where’s Sho?” I demanded, voice high and worried.

Another bay, and a yip. People gathered around us.

Derk found his breath. “Up. On the cliff.”

Indeed, over the chaos of gathering, drawing stunners, screeching for each other, demons yipping and baying, I heard the high slip of Sho’s voice.

I looked up.

He stood three meters above me, his feet dug into the cliff, apparently balanced on a ledge too small for me to see from below. He hung onto a tree growing thin and spindly out of dirt caught between rocks, leaning out. Close to falling. Now that I was looking at him, I could see he was screaming details. “Six of them. To the right.”

I looked right. My head was above the grass, but barely. The stones we’d sat on made a small clearing, the grass close enough to throw shadows at our feet.

Sho would see them coming for us, but we wouldn’t know until the grass parted in front of our faces.

The demon cries were still a bit away, but confident. Maybe the demons didn’t care we were all together.

“One almost there!” Sho cried. “By you, Chaunce.”

I raised my stunner, hand shaking. I’d fired at a demon once, missed as it came right at me fast as lightning. Louise had been behind me and she hadn’t missed. Now the boys were behind me, small, no stunners.

The dog burst through the grass, long and sinewy, teeth bared, eyes black and full of hunger.

I fired.

Someone else fired.

The dog fell. Its coat rippled as another shot hit it.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t waste shots!”

“There!” Sho.

A second dog burst through in almost the same place, its body landing on the other one. This time we used four shots.

Derk pushed past me, knife in hand, bent on killing the stunned animals.

To my right, someone screamed, and in a moment of shock I heard the slick of another stunner and another thump. Who screamed?

A hebra bugled, high and long. The same sound I’d heard a hundred times when this hunt played out below me and I merely watched.

“Back!” Sho screamed. The watch hebra. That’s what Sho did for us.

Sho and a real hebra. What was the hebra doing here?

I backed.

Derk ducked, his right hand now covered in demon blood.

A head rose over mine, above the grass, the neck long and thin, a white beard like my grandfather’s last.

I backed faster.

The hebra passed between me and Derk in its lurching fast run, bigger than I expected, an animal the color of spring grass with gold spots on its knobby knees. It breathed deep and rattling but ran strong. A dog followed it, too fast for me to bring up my stunner.

The woman next to me, Paulette, screamed in joy, clapping.

“Watch!” Sho still sounded scared. “Stay back!”

More hebras, the whole herd of them, and dogs, all running together. The dogs had given up on us. They moved away a bit, the hebras now silent except for deep, sharp breathing, the dogs yipping and baying on their heels.

“Shoot the dogs!” I couldn’t tell who yelled, the command a shiver down my spine.

Instinct told me. “No! The hebras can do this.”

I stood as still as I could, the grass waving around me, the sounds of animals racing through it and the call and yips of hunter, hunted, and humans all distinct and all around.

A high-pitched squeal touched my heart. A hebra. I heard its body fall, a sound like a sack of flour thrown from the roof of a storage barn. Me and Jove and Campbell raced toward the fallen hebra. A dog passed right in front of me, its tail slapping me sideways. I raised my stunner and hit its flank.

It cried in pain, stopped, stood still, didn’t fall.

I hit it again.

It mewled, sounded like a child needing help, like it didn’t understand, and then it fell.

Ahead of me, the fallen hebra struggled up, blood dripping down its leg from a slash in its thigh. Shaking. Not broken.

Someone else dropped a dog to my right.

Two other hebras raced past us, screaming.

The few dogs left didn’t draw off this time. They circled the beast that had just gotten up. One of its knees bled too.

There were four demons left. Few enough they should know better. Maybe the smell of blood drove them crazy.

Someone I couldn’t see stunned another dog.

A dog somewhere let out a high, sharp bark and in heartbeats the pack was gone. They might have never been there, the grass closed across the memory of their hungry mouths and long, powerful legs.

The injured hebra took a step and then another. Gingerly.

Two hebras walked through the grass, oblivious to us, and placed themselves on either side of the wounded one. One of the two strongest watch hebras came up to stand between me and the threesome, looking down at me. I stood there, craning my neck up, sweating, my ankle throbbing lightly from a sidestep I’d taken. Its shoulder rose above my eye, its front knee about at my chest. Its fur looked coarser than I’d expected.

I kept my gun down.

Even though its sides heaved, it looked at me as if speaking sentences. They had no language we could understand, but they were at least as smart as the herding dogs. And some days I thought the collies were smarter than me. I knew I was in the presence of something good, even on this hellhole of a planet.

We would never capture such beasts in a rope corral. But they had allied themselves with us in that moment, voted with their thundering feet and high bugle calls. We would come to some kind of accommodation, some way to trade them safety for safety.

These are the things that went through my head as I watched the beast watch me.

The boys came up beside me and still the hebra watched, the plains silent now except for the ever-present buzz of insects. It took a long time before the hebras moved off, stately, visible above the waving dry grass for a long time.

Copyright © 2010 Brenda Cooper