Read Online Adventures by Mike Resnick - Free Book Online

you up every night. Nothing personal, you understand.”
    “I understand. You've no idea how comforting it is to be able to talk about this with someone,” he said, just as I was drifting off to sleep. “You know, some missionaries have set up a hospital over in Masindi, and they probably have a fair supply of blood there. I don't suppose we could—”
    “No, we couldn't!” I said, and fell asleep.
    We spent the next day foot-slogging, and by mid-morning of the second day we had reached the outskirts of the Lado Enclave. We made camp early and fell to studying Captain Michael Holmes’ map, trying to figure out the quickest way to get to the nearest of the herds. Finally we bedded down, and were up about an hour before sunrise.
    We began finding piles of fresh elephant dung about noon, and within about two hours had snuck to within a quarter mile of a herd of maybe two hundred of the beasts. Herbie lay down on his belly, tested the wind with a handful of dry dirt, and began inching forward. I looked at him for a minute, then did the same.
    Since I was bigger than Herbie I began getting a little ahead of him, and I stopped when we were about eighty yards away from a huge bull with enormous tusks. Then, just as I was about to suggest that we were close enough for a shot, Herbie sank his teeth into the side of my neck.
    I let out a yell, and all hell broke loose. The elephants stood in a circle, trunks extended, trying to figure out where the noise had come from, and then three or four of them started running straight at us.
    I jumped up, more mad at Herbie than scared of the elephants, and pointed down at the little vampire, who was nibbling on my Achilles tendon.
    “He's the one!” I screamed at the oncoming elephants. “Just run right by me and flatten that little bloodsucker!”
    The elephants wheeled around like quarter horses and raced off in the other direction the second they saw and heard me, and a moment later there wasn't an animal to be seen anywhere, except for the one who was slowly getting up next to me.
    “I don't know what happened, Lucifer,” he said. “I've never done that in the daytime before.”
    “You damned fool!” I screamed. “You could have gotten us both killed!”
    He just hung his head and looked so sad that all the anger evaporated right out of me.
    “All right,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Just try to give me a little warning next time we're sneaking up on a herd of elephants, okay?”
    Well, the next time didn't come for almost a week, during which time Herbie tried marching to his different drummer more and more often, especially if I would nick myself while shaving. But finally one morning we found about a dozen young males and one real old one with huge tusks lolling in a small wooded glen.
    This time I made sure Herbie went ahead of me, and when he got within about forty yards of them he cut loose with a couple of shots and dropped the old tusker. I ran up to look at the corpse, and discovered that Herbie was nowhere to be seen.
    “Herbie!” I called.
    “Up here, Lucifer,” he replied, and I looked up and found him perched in a tree about twenty-five feet above the ground.
    “What are you doing up there?” I said.
    “There's always a chance that one of the others will come back,” he said, “and you've got all the rest of the bullets.”
    “That shows a lot of foresight,” I said.
    “Thank you, Lucifer.”
    “What am I supposed to do if one of them comes back?”
    He paused thoughtfully, then asked, “How good are you at climbing trees?”
    “Not very,” I said.
    “Oh,” he said. “Well, do you know any real fast prayers?”
    “Knock off the comedy and come down here,” I said.
    “That wasn't a rhetorical question, Lucifer,” he said. “There's an elephant about fifty feet behind you, and he looks very unhappy.”
    Which was how I found out that I could climb trees after all.
    We stayed on our branches for an hour or two after the elephant