After Arno had left, I lifted again, almost to the cloud cover this time. Then we flew around over the countryside looking for places to hide, places that would be all right when the weather cleared, and where we'd have the best chance to go undetected by the locals. I recorded the coordinates of a few possibilities, but none of them really seemed very good. While this part of Normandy was considerably more forest than field, there was always a castle and an area of farmland not too far away from any hiding place, and the natural openings mostly looked more or less marshy.
Besides that, one of us on the ground would have a hard time finding any given one of the hiding places if he needed to go to it; there just weren't any good landmarks. Not including Bubba, of course; he wouldn't have any trouble at all.
Afterward, we still had most of the afternoon left, and I felt restless. It seemed like there ought to be something valuable for me to do that would take advantage of the stormy weather. Mom went into their sleeping room and settled down with the learning program, while dad sat beside me and watched out the window.
So I flew back down the River Orne to the coast. Along the ocean there were cliffs behind the beach, and I found one hiding place that looked pretty secure. There was a cliffy little ravine that cut back into the tableland and came out about three-fourths of the way down the beach cliff. The tableland above the cliff was forested, and there were clumps of trees in places in the bottom of the ravine, so there were lots of places in it that couldn't be seen from the air. An Evdashian orek would have a hard time climbing in there from above, and from below it would be impossible without mountain-climbing equipment. The brook that ran down it was tiny, even in this weather, leaving plenty of room to park on dry rock. We could hide in there for months.
Of course, we didn't have months, and hiding wasn't what we'd come to Normandy for. But I felt a little better knowing about it, just the same.
Then, just for the heck of it, I flew on northeastward up the coast a way, to see what was there. Basically, it was more of the same.
Meanwhile, something was still bothering me. I decided it was the waiting. I didn't really know whether twenty days was plenty of time, or too little, but it seemed as if we ought to be doing more—that we ought to be hurrying.
On toward evening, we landed in the driest-looking opening I'd found in the neighborhood of Arno's father's fief, Courmeron. The rain had about stopped, but the sky was still dark and cloudy, with occasional drizzles and showers. Dad suggested that I get some sleep if I wanted to, and I did. I can almost always go to sleep if I want to, just by lying down and closing my eyes, and it's better than biting my nails.
Over the next three days, Arno went to three different castles. We took him to the first one and he rode to the other two. He didn't have much to say when we saw him, but he seemed to feel good about his progress. He was sizing things up, he said, and being mysterious to get people interested.
I didn't feel good about it, though. He hadn't shown us one recruit yet, and time was passing.
Meanwhile, we heard a little radio traffic between chasers and between the corvette and the chasers, and they sounded pretty bored. Our instruments showed us that the chasers, when they'd talked, were still down south in Provence. So we stopped worrying so much about being seen by them, although we still didn't take chances. Hopefully, though, if they came north, we'd hear about it in advance.
Also, even after the storm moved out, the weather mostly stayed showery, so we didn't worry much about local hunters running into us. And, of course, when Bubba was around, we had his special security talents.
But some of the time he wasn't around. He spent a lot of time at night exploring the countryside.
Another thing with Bubba—this was his idea—he tried the learning program and it worked about as well for him as it does for humans. So he learned the Provençal/Norman French hybrid, now more and more Norman French, that we had in the computer. Knowing the language is helpful to a telepath because people often think verbally, even when they aren't talking.
To pass the time, we humans started practicing "hand-foot art"—a system of unarmed fighting that was illegal now in the Federation. It had evolved on some planet or other, during the old imperial days, for self defense against personal assaults by imperial troops. Systems more or less like it had developed on several planets, actually. Later they spread around some.
It became a tradition in some families, including dad's, and when the Glondis faction took over the government and outlawed the practice, the main result was that it was practiced secretly instead of openly. Dad taught mom and, later, Deneen and me. We were rusty now because we hadn't done it for a while—not since we'd left Evdash—but I got right back into it again. My parents had to work back into it more gradually; dad was fifty and mom was forty-one.
I wished Deneen were there to spar with. She was the most skilled in our family—the quickest and most flexible, and as precise in execution as dad was. I'd never used it in an actual fight; we were forbidden to except to save our lives. On Evdash, they didn't even know that hand-foot art existed, and it would have marked us as off-worlders for sure.
So the closest thing we'd ever had to real fights, with real contact, had been with a padded robot that dad designed and built. His name was Lurt. Lurt was programmed to do various moves in scrambled, unpredictable sequences, depending partly on what you did to him. Lurt could be set for various levels of quickness, but he couldn't hit too hard. And you couldn't damage him at all.
Before dawn on the fourth morning, Arno was waiting at the meeting place when we arrived. The previous days we'd been there first. And this time he wasn't alone: he had three sergeants and a knight with him. He wanted them to see us, and more especially to see the cutter come in and land, so they'd know it was real and that he wasn't crazy.
They all wore hauberks and helmets like Arno, and swords, and they all looked tough and dangerous. But I sort of got the idea that Arno could take any of them in a fight. One of them, Brislieu, was quite a bit bigger than the others and looked enormously strong. But Arno had a kind of air about him that made me think he was the most dangerous—surely the smartest and most controlled. When we shook hands, each of them had a grip a lot stronger than mine, and I was considered strong back home. And like Arno's, their right hands were heavily callused. I supposed this came from lots and lots of practicing with heavy swords all their lives.
There wasn't a lot to say to them. They were there mainly to know that we were real, and Arno had already told them as much as he wanted them to know. After we'd talked for a few minutes, dad and I went back into the cutter and lifted to about twenty feet as a demonstration. Then they started off for another castle, and we went to our next meadow hiding place. We weren't to meet Arno for two more days, and time was shrinking, but at least his progress was visible now.
Bubba did some recruiting, too. The next day he didn't come back from his night's excursion until on toward midday. I'd just been wondering about him when I glanced out the window and saw him sitting about fifty feet away, staring at the cutter as if mentally commanding someone inside to open up.
And just back of him, at the edge of the trees, were four of the local wolves! They weren't as big as Bubba, though one of them came close to it. They were gray, compared to his russet brown, and their heads weren't as massive, either in actual size or in proportion to their bodies. But overall, they looked a lot like him.
He saw me looking and came over to the cutter, next to where the ramp would be when I sent it down. I did, and went out on it.
"Hello, Larn," he said. He didn't wait for any questions. "I want you meet four friends of mine, and they meet you."
I got the feeling that this meeting was important to Bubba, and also that it was delicate business. I could guess why. The wolves here had had bad experiences with men. Arno had said as much once when I'd explained that Bubba's species had been wild until recent times. That's when Arno had taught me the Norman word for wolf—leu—and distinguished it from chien, their domesticated canid.
So I got down on my knees and hugged Bubba. Then we started to tussle and he knocked me over and we rolled around for a minute, rassling. We'd rassled lots of times before, but this time it had a special purpose. We were demonstrating our trust and closeness, and that neither of us was subservient to the other.
My parents had heard Bubba's voice but not what he'd said, and looked out the door. "Don't eat the captain," mom said to him. "Or I'll be terribly upset." She stepped out on the ramp with dad, and Bubba and I separated and I got up.
"Klentis, Aven," Bubba said, "I want you meet four my new friends."
The local wolves were still sitting at the edge of the trees, taking this all in. Dad raised both hands overhead with his open palms toward them, as if to show he wasn't holding any weapon. "Welcome," he said to them. The word wouldn't mean anything to them, but presumably they'd get the idea.
"Are they telepathic?" I asked Bubba.
"Yes. That how they accepted me leader. I not even have to fight. They read me, know me smartest."
"Their leader?" mom said. "You're not, um, leaving us for a new pack, are you?"
He grinned. "While we in this place, I stay with them most of time. They interesting, they good people, and they maybe help us. But you people my pack; we have more in common. When you leave planet, I go with you."
"Good," I said. "You had me worried for a minute. What did you mean, they maybe help us?"
"They maybe help you catch enemy chaser."
"Really?"
"They not foolish—not waste their lives. Not like some canids. But if pretty good chance help you, and I lead them, they do it. Probably."
"But you're not sure," I said.
Bubba did what he does instead of shrugging—he twitched the hide on his shoulders. I don't know whether it's an actual espwolf thing or something he thought of on his own to help communicate with humans.
"They say they would—they believe it in their minds. But if things so dangerous they not in control of selves..." He shrugged again. "They very good people. Pretty smart, too. Not reason so good as you and me, but more than most animals. And they have honor."
It occurred to me that I'd never heard him say "honor" before. He's always had it, and so have we, but it just hadn't come up in conversation. I wondered how he'd score on a human intelligence test. Or how I'd score on an espwolf intelligence test! Deneen swore that he was the most rational member of our family, and from her, that really meant something.
Meanwhile, there he stood grinning at me! The rascal knew everything I'd been thinking. Then he glanced back at the local wolves, and apparently thought something to them because one by one they stood up and walked toward us in a row, the biggest one in front. Dad and mom came down the ramp to meet them. All four circulated among us, sniffing us. We did our getting acquainted with our eyes, looking them over, noticing the ways they differed from each other.
"Bubba," Mom said, "the way the human mind works, we like to have names for people. It helps us sort them out when we think and talk about them. Will they mind if we name them?"
He stood for a few seconds as if listening, then shook his head. Mom looked at the biggest.
"I'll name you 'Biggest,' " she said, "because you are." Then she looked at the others, one at a time. "And you are 'Blondie' because you're so light-colored. And you are 'Slim' "—Slim was rangy and long-legged—"and you are 'Wise Eyes.'
"Are those names all right with you?' she finished.
They looked at her steadily without moving. "They heard you," Bubba told her, "and it all right. The idea of names strange to them, but they content with it."
"What about the rest of the pack?" dad asked. That took me by surprise; I'd assumed these were all of them. Then I realized that only one of these, Wise Eyes, was a female. It made sense that there'd be more than one female.
"They in den place, with little ones. We go back to them now; you stay here." The five big canids turned then and trotted toward the nearby trees. Partway there, Bubba paused and turned to look back at us.
"These people fear and hate humans of this planet," he said, "who always try hunt them down and kill them. But they know intentions, good, bad. They say again they help if they can."
Then the wolves disappeared into the forest, leaving us staring after them, and wondering what Bubba had said that made them willing to help.
They also left me thinking. It would be tough to be a less intelligent large animal sharing a habitat with primitive man and competing with him. By the time he felt secure enough and civilized enough not to try to wipe you out, you could easily be extinct.