37 The Wolf Tree War (1/2)

Amanda Queen lay on the ground behind a small bush and watched the new settlers through its branches.

There were four of them this time, three guys and a girl. All young and fit. What was more, they clearly knew their way around. Their settlement was just a few days old, but they'd already built three huts out of branches and vines.

They had also made clothes - shifts made out of cow skin. There was a lively fire burning in front of the huts, with meat cooking on the flat stones arranged in a circle around the dancing flames. They definitely had a lot of meat to cook: the two cow carcasses some distance away still had plenty of flesh left on the bones. A couple of cows grazed right next to them, seemingly unconcerned.

Worst of all, the new arrivals already had stone tools, and weapons. Amanda saw one of the guys use a crude knife to sharpen the point of a wooden spear. The knife was basically a flat, sharp-edged stone mounted in the cleft of a short, thick stick. But it worked, and the spear looked like it would work, too.

This was too much, simply too much. The Amazons had already fought a dozen battles and skirmishes with new settlers arriving on the land claimed by the Amazon Empire. A lot of people had taken items from the cube in the Wolf Tree Nature Area, located in Seattle's Discovery Park. And it looked as if most of them had decided to give the New World a try.

The first couple of skirmishes consisted of throwing a few stones at single, naked, shivering guys that ran from the attacking Amazons. No one really got hurt, and it was a lot of fun.

Then, three days into their adventure - a month by the New World calendar - the Amazons met resistance. The two guys that they attacked obviously spent a lot of the time at the gym back on Earth. They were bulging with muscles and full of confidence. They dodged the flying stones and actually attacked the five Amazons.

It was lucky that Sharon had scored a good hit on one of the charging guys - her stone hit him right in his eye. He'd shouted out and stopped and instantly two more stones hit him, one on the head. He began to retreat, screaming oaths.

The other guy had managed to reach Betty. Betty Blue - the Amazons' keyboard player - was the weakest link in the chain. She hesitated instead of smashing the stone she held into the guy's unprotected testicles.

”I couldn't even SEE them,” she tearfully stated later on, when Amanda gave her a hard time about it. ”I guess they shrank so much from the cold that basically they just disappeared.”

Betty was punished for her indecision. The guy swung a practiced fist and knocked her out cold. He was about to turn on Linda when Fiona hit his head with a stone. He shouted and raised his arms to cover his head and that was when Linda did what Betty had failed to do. He screamed horribly and began to run away, too.

At this point Ace, the Alsatian they had taken from the pet store, finally decided to join the fray. He ran out from behind the bushes where he had been hiding, barking and growling like he meant business. The two guys ran away, screaming imprecations and promising to return for revenge. The guy that had knocked Betty out must have established a world speed record in running with one hand clasped to his balls.

The Amazons gave chase, but gave up fairly quickly. They were tired: they had already spent many hours in the New World without food or rest when they ran into the two men.

The two guys did not show up again in the Amazon area of operations. But others did, with increasing frequency. The Amazons attacked again and again, and drove them away. But they were getting tired of it all. Founding the settlement had been very hard work. Initially, all they did was constantly look for food and anything that could be used as a tool.

They'd slept huddled together under a blanket of dead leaves, and woke up tired and stiff with cold. They were almost constantly hungry. It took them a month to build a large, narrow hut they called the Hall. Getting the roof up was the hardest part of all.

They had a lucky break with stones: they'd found several that struck weak sparks when hit against each other. They also found plenty of flat stones near the sea shore, and Sharon proved to be expert at making stone blades. She would stand a stone on its end on a flat rock and hit it with another stone and the flat stone would split into sharp-edged halves.

They also found a way to catch fish, which were plentiful and very stupid. The Amazons built a three-sided fence in shallow water with sticks pressed into the seabed. Then they painstakingly wove a gate out of thin, elastic branches. They found that sprinkling some chaff on the water in their makeshift cage was enough to attract fish. Then they would slam the gate down and catch the trapped fish. Their hands were soon covered with scratches and wounds from the fins.

But it was worth it. They were all sick of eating rabbits and guinea pigs. They'd replicated a few chicken, but Ace and Ara - the two Alsatians they got from the pet store, a dog and a bitch - killed the chickens, and ate most of them too.

All in all, the dogs were a disappointment. They were hungry all the time and failed miserably as attack dogs. On a couple of occasions they'd even approached some newly-arrived settlers with their tails wagging!

Back at Amanda's house in Seattle, the implanted canines were also providing reasons for worry. They'd been replicated well over thirty times each; the Amazons in the New World were all wearing dog fur. The dogs in Amanda's home were exhibiting symptoms of canine schizophrenia. They barked and bit and howled for no reason at all. It looked as if they'd have to be put down.

In summary, Amanda really had plenty of things to worry about even before she discovered the new settlers. As she retreated from her observation point and walked back to the Amazon settlement, she glumly decided to call a general meeting at her house to discuss this new development.

She was home in less than half an hour: there was no way she would tolerate another settlement so close by. But she knew her girls had lost much of their enthusiasm for fighting, and so had she.

It was because of that last skirmish they'd fought, against a young couple - a guy and a girl. They'd had to kill both of them. The guy had the misfortune to split his head open on a rock when he fell down, and the girl just went crazy. They had to kill her, or she would have killed them all, one by one.

The hut, the Hall was empty. All the girls were gone to attend to various tasks, and they had taken the dogs with them. But they had left a message scrawled with a stick in the soft bare ground near the hut entrance: