A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1812

Trapping Run

The range where bands of wild sims could continue to live their lives much as they had before Europeans came to North America continued to shrink as human settlements pushed westward. Few bands remained entirely untouched by human influence. Sign-talk, for example, spread from band to band, even in areas where no people had ever been seen, because it was a conspicuously better means of communication than the subhumans’ native assortment of noises and gestures.

Some trappers and explorers were friendly with the wild sims through whose lands they passed. Others, manifestly, were not. Bands of sims, naturally, often responded in kind, being well-disposed toward humans if the first person they met had been friendly to them, and hostile even to those who would not have harmed them if their first experience with humans had been a bad one. In this as in so much else, sims revealed how closely they resembled people.

In colonial days, and in the early years of the Federated Commonwealths, sims’ differences from us counted for more than their similarities. This was an attitude not without its good points for, as we have seen, it helped emphasize the essential likeness of all races of people. It also resulted, however, in the ruthless exploitation of sims by humans and, on and beyond the frontier, sometimes in sims’ being hunted as if they were no more than wild beasts.

Trappers acquired a particularly evil reputation for their treatment of sims. And yet, as events transpired, it was a trapper who began what came to be known as the sims’ justice movement.…

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

Silent as drifting smoke, the sim stepped into the forest clearing where Henry Quick made his camp. The sim’s hairy hand grasped a steel knife; its arms were bloody to the elbows.

Something—perhaps the first hint of its strong odor cutting through the damp sweetness of the air in the clearing—told Quick of its presence. He turned. He was a dark, stocky man whose deliberate motions belied his name.

“Sit by the fire,” he said, though he knew his words were wasted. It did not matter. As he spoke, his fingers moved in the hand-talk even the wild sims here beyond the Rockies used these days. Their mouths could not shape human speech, but hand-talk let them convey far more complex ideas than did their native hoots and grunts and cries.

As the sim hunkered down beside him, Quick shook his head, surprised he had spoken at all. When he was out on a trapping run he seldom talked, even to himself, and when he did he was as apt to use signs as words.

He shrugged. Nothing wrong with talking, if he felt like it. As if to prove the point to himself, he spoke out loud again: “What do you have there for me?” Once more, his fingers echoed his words; not enough people yet crossed the mountains for the sims hereabouts to have learned to understand English.

The sim grinned, displaying broad yellow teeth. Good fur, it signed.

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