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It could have been much worse. It was summer. Also, the ship's captain hadn't been allowed to leave us with nothing at all. Before the shuttles had brought down the last of the people, Tom had sent out scouting parties to look for water and anything else useful. They didn't find any.
And it was almost hot, warm enough to sweat. The things I'd read had emphasized how cold Haven was. But there was summer, a long one. And when the sun is up for more than forty hours at a time, heat can build. I thought it might be early afternoon. The sun was high, but not as high as it should be at noon in the subtropics.
I told Tom what I thought. He squinted at the sky, then looked at me. "Forty hours between sunup and sundown? There was something about that in the little book your wife showed me, but a lot of it was confusing. Do we get forty hours of night, too?"
I'd known people like Tom: Intelligent, but only what they saw around them was real. Information about space or other planets was just noise. "It's not that simple," I told him. "This world is a moon. The planet it goes around, Cat's Eye, is big and hot, hot enough to glow in the dark. When Cat's Eye is up, we'll get both heat and light from it. When it's up but the sun's down; we'll have what's called 'dimday.' It will get cooler during dimday, but not as cool as during truenight." It also seemed to me that the sun would move around irregularly in the sky, because Haven circles Cat's Eye while they're both going around the sun. But I didn't tell him that.
He looked thoughtful, which was much better than if his eyes had glazed over. He was getting used to a new "here and now."
"It's complicated," I added. "We'll learn what we need to by experience." He nodded. Then the last of his scouting parties came back and told him they hadn't found any water. Nobody was surprised, up on a mesa like that.
"We'll go down into a canyon," he said to me. "If there's water to be found, that's where it will be. After we've found water, where do you think we should go? Down into the desert basin, or up on the plateau?"
"The plateau," I said. "We're going to need a lot of food, soon, and the Kazakhs up there are herdsmen. We need to steal some livestock from them. But they're armed, and they're supposed to be fighters. It will be dangerous."
His attention drew inward for a minute, then returned to me. "I'll send a raiding party to the plateau. Do these Kazakhs live in large bands or small?"
A raiding party. The Navajos had known about things like that, 250 years ago. Now- Now I wondered. "I don't know," I answered.
"We'll have to go and find out," he said.
He told his scouting parties to find a way down off the mesa into one of the canyons that flanked it. A way that the women could hike. The canyon needed to have good water and be one that men could climb out of, up onto the plateau. When the scouting parties had left, he went to see how the crews were doing cutting up tents to make shelter pieces. I went with him.
It seemed to me we were lucky to have Tom Spotted Horse as our chief. He sized up problems, made decisions, and gave orders like a marine sergeant.
The sun moved as slowly in the sky as you might expect on a world with forty hours between sunup and sundown. Tom's scouts had found two possible ways to leave the mesa. He selected one, then got the rations, blankets, shelter pieces, and pieces of tent rope distributed among the people. They made packs out of them. Then he formed them up in their units and we started down the trail, with scouts leading the way. The sun seemed almost as high as when the shuttles had left, a little more than three hours earlier by my watch. There were eight rations for each person-that was all we had-and no one was to eat until Tom ordered a meal break.
It didn't pay to think too much about things; you could go into despair. We had to make a decision and do it, and handle the complications as they came up. Or lie down and die. The Di
We didn't have nice backpacks from Wilderness Suppliers. We rolled up our rations inside our two blankets each, wrapped them in a piece of tent cloth, tied it all together with a piece of tent rope, and slung it over a shoulder. Also there were a lot of people-almost all the women-who'd been interned wearing street shoes. Their feet were soon in trouble. Those who wore riding boots or engineer's boots were just as bad off. A few tried to go barefoot, but they put their shoes back on pretty quickly. Marilyn was wearing stout, low-cut walking shoes, but gravel and sand got in them. We took turns carrying Marcel. I offered to carry her pack for her, but she wouldn't let me. She said it would make her look bad to the Navajo women.
The canyon we worked our way down into was about seven hundred meters deep there, according to our map, and the way was steep, treacherous in places. It wasn't like hiking the Bright Angel or Kaibab Trails down into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Those were surveyed, improved, and maintained-almost manicured; I suppose they still are. This was rough, untracked and uncertain. Much of it required scrambling instead of hiking. And we had people, especially women, who'd never hiked in their lives. Some weighed more than a hundred kilos, even after thirteen months on the Makarov. For them, the trail was hell; for some it was impossible. Twice we got cliffed out and had to wait while the scouts hunted for a way to continue. Then we all had to backtrack a ways before we could go on again. Once a scout fell to his death. We also lost eight people who fell when rock slid away beneath their feet and they couldn't stop sliding before they went over an edge.
All the scouts saw goatlike animals. One scout came face to face with something that looked much like a large mountain lion, with thick fur and a ruff-our first cliff lion. It backed away and disappeared when he yelled and threw a rock at it; it had never seen anything like him before.
The plants didn't look so unearthly either. I know now how strange some of them really are, but the strangeness wasn't conspicuous. It looked a lot like some canyon might in Arizona. There was a thing like grass with sharp leaves that cut when you touch them, and another with leaves that stung and burned like nettles, but quite a bit worse. Also there was something that gave people a rash; we needed to find out what it was, so we could avoid it.
The geology was different than I was used to. The rock strata seemed to be volcanic from the mesa top to the canyon bottom; there was nothing I recognized as sedimentary. Most of the strata were basalt; some were vesicular.
Even most of us who wore hiking boots had blisters by the time we reached the canyon bottom and buried our faces in the icy creek we found there. Lots of feet were raw, with bloody socks.
The hike down had taken us seven hours by my watch. I'm told some were still straggling in five hours later, and a few never made it, even with help.
Tom Spotted Horse was one of the first ones down. As others got to the bottom, he gave orders about sanitary practices, and had the people spread out along the creek. They could eat one ration each. During breaks along the trail, he'd had the platoon leaders find out who were the survival hobbyists-those who'd learned and practiced traditional survival skills. Now he sent them out to find material and make fire starters. Marilyn gave him the fire starter from Major Shcherbatov; it could serve to start fires till we had our own. She also gave him the little book about Haven.
Almost all of us took our shoes and boots off, and Tom had platoon leaders check on whose feet weren't too bad. All I had were a couple of blood blisters on the ends of toes, and blisters on the tops of my little toes, from walking downhill. They weren't very sore. Of the men with good feet, he assigned two hundred to be a raiding party. I'd shown him my pistol, so he made me one of them, assigned as an aide to Nelson Tsinajini, chief of the raiding party. Nelson and I already knew each other; we'd talked aboard the Makarov. He'd served in the infantry, making sergeant, and I'd done two years of ROTC at the University of Mi