Lankar of Callisto

As for me, well, I had scrapes and cuts and bruises, too, and one skinned knee and one knee that sent sharp pain lancing through _ me if I wasn’t careful to walk just so. But nothing seemed to be broken and nothing was bruised that wouldn’t heal in a few days, so I decided that I had acquitted myself well enough in the encounter and had come out of the battle in pretty good shape, considering.

Neither one of us was any too limber on his feet, so we made that little clearing between the trees our temporary base. My leaf-apron had been torn off in the battle, so I put together a new suit of Robinson Crusoe do-it-yourselfs while I was resting up from the combat. And then I seriously applied myself to the problem of making fire, since we had about half a ton of raw meat sitting there begging to be turned into sizzling steaks.

Even more than with the fact that I managed to come through that grunting, squealing, roaring, bloody battle with flying colors, and got in a few shrewd licks of my own, the last of which seemed to have broken the vastodon’s skull, I am impressed with the fact that I actually made fire. This seems to me my greatest single accomplishment on Callisto, although opinions vary on this point, and both Taran and Glypto, to say nothing of Zantor, are more impressed by my almost impossible feat of making friends with a wild othode. The winning of Bozo does not impress me as being such a feat as my friends think. My wife will tell you that I have a wonderful way with dogs, and can turn a waryeyed German shepherd with half-bared teeth into a wriggling bundle of eager friendliness by just speaking to it in a warm, low, confidential tone for a few moments; and all through my boyhood I was frightening my mother silly by walking up to strange dogs on the street and making friends of them before she could think to call me back.

No, winning over Bozo wasn’t so hard. In fact it was easy. He gave his love to me, actually; I didn’t even have to win it. But making fire in the wilderness was an accomplishment in which I take pardonable pride.

There were flinty-looking, jag-edged, broken stones protruding from a slope where rain water or general erosion had eaten away the topsoil, exposing shale. I tried knocking some of these together and occasionally struck sparks. Then, digging around under the trees for dry grasses and dead, crisp leaves, I made a pile of these and built a sort of wobbly teepee atop them with twigs and broken branches. Then it took patience to strike sparks again and again into the crisp leaves until at last one of the sparks caught. And when it did I nursed it along by the simple expedient of blowing upon it; finally the whole bonfire went up like a mass of tinder and for a few minutes there I thought we had a forest fire on our hands.

All the while Bozo sat there, regarding my actions curiously, head tipped first on one side and then on the other, watching me make magic. I was half-afraid the fire would frighten him into retreat and that I was going to have to spend the rest of that day trying to coax him out of the woods, but such was not the case. Although he seemed to have a healthy respect for my fire, and treated it with caution, he did not seem particularly afraid of it.

Then, trimming off fallen branches, I finagled together a standing frame out of four lengths of wood whose ends were buried in holes dug in the ground with a pointed stick and then wedged in firmly, the raw earth patted down good and hard. Using the jagged pieces of broken stone, I sawed with considerable labor through the leathery hide of the vastodon, and hacked off some crude chunks of meat which came away in pieces rather than in nice steak-sized slabs. These I stuck on a long thin branch, making a sort of shishkebab out of them. Then all I had to do was balance this gobbet-laden stick atop my frame above the fire, and remember to turn it over once in a while until all the pieces were nicely done.

It was delicious, too. And as I relaxed, my back propped up against the slope, my belly full of tough, chewy, but crisp and juicy elephant-boar steak, I paid my compliments to the chef with a hearty and unembarrassed belch. Not bad (thought I) for an ex-Boy Scout who got pulled out of the corps in his first week, when he got hit in the eye by a football!

Bozo, who had filled his own belly in his own way, after one disdainful sniff at the blackened, dripping meat I pried off my cook-pole with gingerly fingers, relaxed beside me, urping a little from time to time, staring into the fire, blinking sleepily, lazily enjoying having the loose flesh behind his ears rubbed with greasy fingers.

The old rascal must have decided, when I had said goodbye to him back in the clearing where we had spent the night, that it was not yet time for farewells. He must have known somehow that this was one unathletic amateur Robinson Crusoe who genuinely needed a Dog Friday. And he must have followed my trail all that day, creeping through the brush behind me, alert for danger. Had it not been so, I would never have survived the charge of the elephant-boar, and I would not be alive now and writing these words. I owed a lot to Bozo―not that he wanted much of anything. It satisfied him just to be near me, just to have me talk to him in that low, warm voice, and it was enough for him to know that I was there when he wanted to have the loose folds of flesh behind his ears rubbed.