No Enemy But Time by Michael Bishop

Author:Michael Bishop [Bishop, Michael]
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: sf
Published: 2010-10-16T22:00:00+00:00

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whenever he could, but his mother's increasing frustration and bad temper kept deflecting her into stupid games of tag with their tormentors.

Most of the hyenas, I noticed, were sitting some distance away, watching. Their eyes were yellow agates in the moonlight. The dog work of harassment they left to a pair of agile bullies who stood nearly four feet high at their shoulders. The noise from this scrimmage—the lunges, snorts, and foot feints—seemed somehow remote. Abstractedly I wondered if a kill on either side would take my mind off Helen, and if the Minids could get in on the spoils. So far the contest had engendered only sound and surliness, most of it from Mamma.

This changed. When the female thundered to her left to rout one lean hyena, Junior rashly attacked the renegade nipping at his flank on the right. His charge took him forty or fifty feet toward the hyenas lounging in the low grass east of the water hole. Several of these creatures sprang up to capitalize on his folly. Almost before I could blink, the calf was down, thrashing and squealing as a pair of his assailants dragged him along by his skinny tail and one hind leg. The remaining hyenas rushed in to rip open Junior's belly.

The calf's high-pitched protests turned Mamma around. Stampeding to his rescue, she bayonetted one monstrous hyena with a dip of her snout. With a resounding crack that probably signaled a broken spine, the wounded animal flipped brains over butt to its back. As the other hyenas scurried for safety, Junior was able to regain his feet. He trotted to Mamma for consolation. The set-to was over, for the hyenas had lost the will to test the huge female again. Secure in their triumph, Mamma and Junior angled off into the bush. Their departure was dignified, even lordly.

Once they had gone, the hyenas moved in to tear the guts out of their fallen mate. Jockeying for position, they nudged the carcass, quarreled viciously with one another, and fed.

Alfie, in the tree next to mine, periodically hurled a piece of debris at the hyenas—a fruit husk, a scab of bark—but with more symbolic than real effect. The hyenas went on gorging themselves. As they were finishing up, several of them broke away and crept down to the water hole to drink. Stranded aloft, we intensified our efforts to drive them off, hurling whatever came to hand: rotten limbs, nuts, berries, old birds’ nests, the works. We also assaulted the hyenas vocally, carrying on like banshee divas at an operatic wake.

This aggressive strategy boomeranged. The hyenas—the entire pack, at least a dozen—withdrew from the roiling water hole without really surrendering it to us. They either prowled the edges of the thicket or lay in the grass out of missile range. Our dissonant abuse did not greatly upset them. They were prepared to wait us out.

Vultures settled out of the air, as if from the mother-of-pearl uterus of the moon, and the night kindled with insect song and lethargic wing beats.

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