"I presume we can cross the river?" Doreen said.

"Oh, yes," Hollard said simply. "A matter of firearms and combat engineering, really."

The game path was narrow, where it led down from the ridge above the bay of Port Luthuli. Marian smiled to herself as she looked around; in the twentieth century she'd been born in, this had been a very exclusive-and very white-suburb of Durban, South Africa. Her party was strung out along the slope on a dense-packed trackway of sandy earth, with trees towering a hundred feet and more on either side. The ground was thick with brush, including a particularly nasty type with hooked thorns that made it impossible to move off the trail; one of the Alban Marines had named it the wait-a-bit bush, for what you had to do whenever it snagged your clothing.

She shifted the rifle sling a little with her thumb and looked backward. Swindapa was next in line behind her, then a Marine who'd stripped to the waist in the humid heat; behind him were the ones toting the kills of the hunt, carrying the gutted carcasses on poles that were thrust under their bound feet. Marian smiled again, letting it grow into a rare public grin.

Damn, but it does look a lot like a Tarzan-movie safari, she thought.

Except, of course, that the one in the lead with the rifle and khakis and floppy hat was black as coal, and the native bearers were white. Nordics at that…

Great black hunter and faithful companions. Daddy would have laughed himself sick.

Swindapa caught her eye and looked a question. Marian replied with a gesture that meant "later" between them; the Fiernan found uptime racial divisions hilarious.

The answering smile died away to a frown, and Swindapa looked back over her shoulder. Marian threw up a hand, for a halt and silence. She couldn't hear anything, but Swindapa's ears were younger, and better trained.

"Pass," she said, waving a hand; the party filed by her. "What do you think it is, 'dapa?"

"I don't know," the blond woman said. She took off her hat and threw herself down on the ground, pressing an ear to it. "Whatever it is, it's heavy and coming this way." The frown grew deeper. "But those… those are footfalls, I think. People."

"Uh-oh," Marian said, unslinging her rifle and scanning the brush.

Nothing, except the insects and swarming colorful birds, and grunts and whistles and screeches crashing off in the bush.

The Fiernan came upright, checking the priming on her rifle. Marian raised her voice: "Corporal, you and the party with the game continue." It was only about a mile and half to base by the water's edge. "Miller, Llancraxsson, get your weapons ready, but do not fire without orders." The path was far too narrow for that; Swindapa's shoulder was nearly touching hers. "Be ready to pass your rifles forward, in fact."

Now she could hear the thudding too, or feel it through the soles of her feet. Salt sweat ran down onto her lips, and she licked it away. The sight of two small human figures a hundred yards away was almost painfully anticlimactic. A little closer and she recognized them, the race if not the individuals; San, the little yellow-brown hunters Europeans had-would have-met at the Cape twenty-five hundred years from now. Here and now they were the only inhabitants of southern and eastern Africa; Islander ships had met them all the way from what would have been Angola around up to Somalia-that-wasn't. They varied a lot from place to place, but they weren't usually hostile if you didn't give them reason to be; the ones near Mandela Base traded eagerly with the Nantucketers.

"That can't be all…" Swindapa began.

One of the San hunters was helping the other along; a sprained or broken ankle, from the look of it. They were looking back over their shoulders, too; so intently that they weren't aware of the Islanders until they were barely fifty yards away. Then the hale one looked up, saw the strangers, gave a cry of despair, and launched himself at a tree by the side of the trail. Agile as a sailor in the rigging, he disappeared up it in a single swarming burst of speed.

"Maybe they had a bad experience with the Tartessians," Marian murmured. She let the rifle fall back on her shoulder, turning the muzzle away from the San hunter, and held up her left hand.

"Peace," she said, and used the equivalent in the tongue of his Cape relatives, or as close as a tongue reared on English could.

He probably can't understand it, she thought. It was two thousand miles away, after all, and her accent was probably terrible. But the sound will be more like what he's used to than English.

The small man looked at her, then over his shoulder, then he hobbled toward the Islander party, using his bow as a crutch. As he came he was shouting something in his sibilant clicking tongue, pointing behind him. When he fell nearly at Alston's feet he squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over his head.

"Uh… ma'am?" one of the ratings behind her said. "Maybe if something's chasing him, we ought to move?"

"I'd rather see it coming, Miller," she said. "Quiet now."

A noise came echoing down the trail, a long shrill sound like… like a trumpet. Trumpeting… what sort of an animal trumpets… oh, shit.

Marian and her partner were experienced hunters. The problem was that neither of them had hunted elephant.

Clairton, she remembered, at Mandela Base. Of course, Clairton said that the best way was to get behind them and brain-shoot them just behind the ear. That's a really big help right now…

The ground-shaking thudding grew louder, and the shrill, enraged squealing sounded again, ear-hurting loud. Can't run, she thought. Elephants were a lot faster than people, and they could trample through thick brush that would stop a human cold. Swindapa was chanting under her breath, a song of the Spear Mark, asking the spirits of her kills to witness that she'd never hunted without need or failed to sing home the ghost of the dead beast.

"Jesus," Marian said, the words passing through her mouth without conscious command. "That's big."

The animal that turned the curve of the trail two hundred yards upslope was big. Thirteen feet at the shoulder, maybe fourteen. Jesus. An old male, with sunken cheeks and one tusk broken off a few feet from the tip. There were black stains dribbled down below its eyes, marking them like kohl-the sign of a beast in musth. It slowed as it saw and scented the newcomers, tossing its head from side to side for a better view, raising its trunk and letting loose a squealing blast of rage. Then the absurdly tiny tail came up, the head went down, and the elephant charged-swinging along with a steady, quick stride, each pace taking a good ten feet, faster than a galloping horse.

And me without a peanut on me, some distant part of her gibbered. Then her mind was empty, calm as a still pond, the way Sensi Hishiba had taught. She was on the mats again, the katana rising above her head…

Third crease down from the top on the trunk, the only spot you could get a brain shot frontally. There was a lot of thick hide and spongy bone in the way, but there wasn't any choice. Breathe out, squeeze the trigger.

Crack. Crack.

"Gun!" she shouted, shoving the empty Westley-Richards behind as Swindapa fired beside her.

The elephant tossed its head, trumpeting again, staggered. Then it came on, a moving cliff of gray-brown wrinkled hide, looming taller and taller, tall enough to reach into a second-story window. Eighty feet away, sixty, forty. Long spearcast away, and the six tons of living destruction would cover it in seconds. Three heartbeats away from the crushing and the pain.

Cool beechwood slapped into her palm, and she brought the rifle around with careful smoothness.

Munen muso-to strike without thought or intention. Sword or hand or gun, there was no difference. The sights drifted into alignment, and there was all the time in the world. The rifle, the trigger warm beneath her finger, the bullet, the path of the bullet, the target, all were her and not her. Munen muso, no-mind.