along and dosed us?” Clay asked.
“How likely is that?”
“Not very. Let’s try an experiment,” Clay said.
In a few minutes, Clay and Sandra had the graduate students rounded up and standing on the other side of the group of tents from the side the cat was on.
“Just go into the artifacts tent,” Sandy said to them, “and examine everything closely, and tell us what you see when you come back.”
“Why are we doing this? I’m pretty sure the lump I was working on was turning out to be a knuckle bone. I may have found the remains of a fifth human and I need to finish excavating,” the smallest of the graduate students said impatiently. Eileen was small, and unassuming in appearance. She was also a natural leader who, at the tender age of twenty-two, already spoke with a casual expectation of being obeyed. No doubt, the trait would serve her well in the future. For now, it made her a pain in the ass as a subordinate.
“We found something so odd that we want unbiased eyes to examine it independently. To make sure we’re not just seeing things,” Clay said. “Go ahead and get it over with.”
“Well, which thing in there are we supposed to be looking at?” Eileen asked.
“If it’s what we think it is, it should be obvious the moment you see it,” Sandy said.
Eileen harrumphed and led the other graduate students away. Clay and Sandy watched them go to the artifacts tent, open the flap, and file inside.
“I hope we haven’t made a terrible mistake,” Sandy said.
“I wonder if we should have given them some evaporated milk and a tin of sardines to take along,” Clay said.
“And a comb, don’t forget the comb,” Sandy said, and they fell silent. Several minutes passed with excruciating slowness.
The tent lit up green.
“It’s my name, not a two-word sentence! My name!” Eileen yelled, backing out of the tent. She came back alone.
“Uh-oh,” Clay said.
“It’s making them take turns licking it clean,” Eileen said as soon as she was close enough to Sandy and Clay to be heard without shouting.
“What do we do now?” Clay asked rhetorically, staring off into the distance.
“Find some fresh fish,” Eileen said, answering him anyway. “We haven’t got any goats.”
It took an hour and a half for the three to get the fish. They took turns using a crude spear fashioned by duct taping a Swiss army knife to the end of a broom handle and jabbing it at the trout that swam by in a small creek nearby. The effort left them all thoroughly splashed from the waist down, and well-sprinkled from the waist up. But they caught two fish and spent half an hour poring over the impromptu sashimi they made from them, tweezing out tiny bones.
“I can’t find any more bones. Do you think we got them all?” Clay asked as Sandy arranged the slices on an enameled metal camp plate.
“If we didn’t, I suppose the cat will let us know,” Sandy said. “Is the evaporated milk open?”
“Ready to pour, and I have a saucer,” Clay said. “I hope it’s close enough to cream.”
“We could just leave,” Eileen said. The other two stopped in their tracks and looked over at her.
“We can’t just leave,” Sandy said, “there are five graduate students in there, probably in the terminal stages of tongue fatigue by now.”
“You can get more graduate students,” Eileen said. Sandy stared at her, struck silent.
“You can’t be serious,” Clay said, looking scandalized.
“Serious as a heart attack,” Eileen said. “If they escape, they know the way to Tiksi airport. If you really want to, we could wait there for a couple of days to see if they make it. The three of us can take one truck and leave the other one for them.”
“Only one truck has enough fuel to make it to Tiksi,” Sandy said. “The supply drop with the rest of the fuel is still more than a week away.”
“Then they can walk. Do you really want to spend a week with that… that cat?” Eileen said.
“Walk? It’s two hundred and seventy kilometers over rough terrain. We forded, what, six different rivers and streams to get here? They’d never make it,” Sandy said. “And certainly not in ‘a couple of days’ even if they did.”
“Then you go see if the cat wants to be licked some more. I’ll wait right here,” Eileen said.
“So you can drive to Tiksi by yourself and strand us? I don’t think so,” Clay said.
“March,” Sandy said, jabbing Eileen in the back with a finger.
“Like I’d think you have a gun back there,” Eileen said with a sneer.
“There’s a rifle in our tent,” Clay said.
“Same here,” Eileen said. True enough, both the students’ and the instructors’ sleeping tents held rifles for bear-related emergencies.
“Want to race?” Clay said to Eileen, eyeing her short, stubby legs. Clay had run track as an undergraduate; everyone knew because he wouldn’t shut up about it once he had a couple of drinks in him.
“Fine,” Eileen said, resigning herself to serving the cat dinner.
“Though you bring an interesting point to mind,” Clay said. “Should we bring the rifles?”
“Maybe,” Sandy said. “Are you a good shot when you feel like you’re on fire?”
“Cats sleep all the time,” Eileen said with a wicked gleam in her eye.
“But it’s expecting us right now,” Sandy said.
“Right,” Clay and Eileen said together. The three took dinner to the cat’s tent.
In the tent, four of the graduate students sat on the floor rubbing their jaws. The fifth, a skinny young man with a shockingly large and bushy beard, held his shaggy facial hair out of the way with one hand while he carefully licked down the length of Kwirrrf’s tail, which rested on the tabletop to allow proper licking leverage. The bearded man’s tongue was streaked with gray down the middle.
“Tank guud,” he slurred as he straightened up, clay-coated tongue still protruding from his mouth.
“Leave me, whatever your name is,” the cat said to the bearded student.
“Dick,” he said, a little more clearly as his tongue regained moisture.
The cat’s eyes flashed green and the student screamed. While the light hadn’t harmed Sandy and Clay aside from causing pain, this time the cat’s glare withered flesh. In moments, all that remained of the student was a small mound of ashes.
“That was his name,” Eileen said quietly. “Dick is short for Richard.”
“I’m not convinced that was the sense he used that word in,” Kwirrrf said, pretending that he hadn’t misunderstood. “It hardly matters, there are plenty of you here for my purposes. Feed me, and then you three prepare to convey me to the nearest human settlement. You four lickers may remain to guard me as I sleep.”
The four students looked at each other, their thoughts painfully obvious.
“Try it,” Kwirrrf said, “and see if you don’t end up like Dick.” Clay and Eileen set the food down in front of Kwirrrf. He sniffed it. “Tolerable. I hope the nearest settlement has some dairy animals, this milk is hardly fresh and is certainly not cream. Still.” He lapped at it. “Go get a chariot ready, we’ll leave after I’ve eaten and had a proper nap.”
“He’s been napping for ten thousand years,” Eileen growled under her breath as she, Clay, and Sandy left the tent.
“It’s a cat,” Sandy said. “What do you expect?”
They packed the truck with the fullest gas tank, and siphoned the fuel from the other into jerrycans. They pulled down the two sleeping tents and tied them to the roof of the truck; they’d need somewhere to sleep along the way. Without roads, the trip to Tiksi would take four or five days. They tied as many of the supplies as they could to the outside of the vehicle. They’d need as much of the passenger compartment free as possible to accommod
ate seven people and a cat. Someone would end up riding on another person’s lap, but once they were done packing they figured everyone would fit.
They were finished and waiting when the cat emerged from his tent, seated on a cushion borne aloft on a folding table's top, a graduate student at each corner.
“My God,” Clay muttered as it approached the truck.
“That’s what it wants, yes,” Sandy whispered. “Worship.”
“Like the ancient Egyptians, but more literal,” Eileen said.
The awkward palanquin reached the truck, and the graduate students tried to set it down smoothly. They failed, and Kwirrrf tumbled off the cushion onto the mucky summer tundra turf. The cushion spoiled the cat’s attempt at a nonchalant recovery by landing on top of him, forcing him to squirm out from underneath. While he squirmed, the four fled.
The green cat-glare caught them halfway to the tents and they fell to the grass screaming and frantically slapping at nonexistent flames.
“Don’t you think that’s enough?” Eileen said after ten or twenty long seconds had passed. The green glare faded.
“I suppose. That’s an odd chariot. Where are the horses kept and why aren’t they here now, ready to go?” Kwirrrf asked, tail lashing in short, angry strokes.
“It’s self-propelled,” Clay said. “What, you’ve never—ow—heard of a truck?” Sandy elbowed him halfway through the second sentence, but of course he stubbornly finished it. She winced, but no green glare was forthcoming.
Kwirrrf lifted the meaning of ‘truck’ from Clay's mind and winced at the psychic mass of related concepts tied to