DAVE WOLVERTON

AFTER A LEAN WINTER

 *
New York Times best selling writer Dave Wolverton made quite a splash when he
first appeared on the science fiction scene. His short story, "On My Way to
Paradise, " won the Grand Prize of the Writers of the Future contest. The story
became a novel; and Dave went on to become the preliminary judge lot the
contest. Since the story appeared, Dave has primarily concentrated on novels. In
addition to writing the most romantic Star Wars novel The Courtship o{ Princess
Leia, for Bantam Books, Dave has written a series of other novels. Tot Books
published his most recent books, The Golden Queen and Beyond the Gate, and will
soon publish his next, Lords of the Seventh Swarm.

 *
"After a Lean Winter," our final Martian story, shows that Dave is still a
master of the short form.

Pierre swept into hidden Lodge on Titchen Creek late on a moonless night. His
two sled dogs huffed and bunched their shoulders, then dug their back legs in
with angry growls, hating the trail, as they crossed that last stubborn rise.
The runners of his sled rang over the crusted snow with the sound of a sword
being drawn from its scabbard, and the leather harnesses creaked.

The air that night had a fetal bite to it. The sun had been down for days,
sometimes hovering near the horizon, and the deadly winter chill was on. It
would be a month before we'd see the sun again. For weeks we had felt that cold
air gnawing us, chewing away at our vitality, like a wolf pup worrying a shard
of caribou bone long after the marrow is depleted.

In the distance, billowing thunderclouds raced toward us under the glimmering
stars, promising some insulating warmth. A storm was chasing Pierre's trail. By
agreement, no one came to the lodge until just before a storm, and none stayed
long after the storm began.

Pierre's two poor huskies caught the scent of camp and yipped softly. Pierre
called "Gee," and the sled heeled over on a single runner. Carefully, he twisted
the gee-poles, laid the sled on its side next to a dozen others. I noted a heavy
bundle lashed to the sled, perhaps a moose haunch, and I licked my lips
involuntarily. I'd pay well for some meat.

From out under the trees, the other pack dogs sniffed and approached, too tired
to growl or threaten. One of Pierre's huskies yapped again, and Pierre leapt
forward with a dog-whip, threatening the lean beast until it fell silent. We did
not tolerate noise from dogs anymore. Many a man would have pulled a knife and
gutted that dog where it stood, but Pierre-- a very crafty and once-prosperous
trapper -- was down to only two dogs.

"S'okay," I said from my watch post, putting him at ease. "No Martians about."
Indeed, the frozen tundra before me was barren for miles. In the distance was a
meandering line of wizened spruce, black in the starlight, and a few scraggly
willows poked through the snow along the banks of a winding frozen river just
below the lodge. The distant mountains were dark red with lush new growth of
Martian foliage. But mostly the land was snow-covered tundra. No Martian ships
floated cloudlike over the snowfields. Pierre glanced up toward me, unable to
make out my form.

"Jacques? Jacques Lowndunn? Dat you?" he called, his voice muffled by the
wolverine-fur trim of his parka. "What news, my tren? Eh?"

"No one's had sight of the bloody-minded Martians in two weeks," I said. "They
cleared out of Juneau."

There had been a brutal raid on the town of Dawson some weeks before, and the
Martians had captured the whole town, harvesting the unlucky inhabitants for
their blood. We'd thought then that the Martians were working their way north,
that they'd blaze a path to Titchen Creek. We could hardly go much farther north
this time of year. Even if we could drag along enough food to feed ourselves,
the Martians would just follow our trail in the snow. So we dug in, holed up for
the winter.

"Ah 'ave seen de Marshawns. Certayne!" Pierre said in his nasal voice, hunching
his shoulders. He left the dogs in their harness but fed them each a handful of
smoked salmon. I was eager to hear his news, but he made me wait. He grabbed his
rifle from its scabbard, for no one would walk about unarmed, then forged up
toward the lodge, plodding toward me through the crusted snow, floundering
deeper and deeper into the drifts with every step, until he climbed up on the
porch. There was no friendly light behind me to guide his steps. Such a light
would have shown us up to the Martians.

"Where did you spot them?" I asked.

"Anchorawge," he grunted, stamping his feet and brushing snow out of his parka
before entering the warmer lodge. "De citee ees gone, Jacques --dead. De
Martians keel everybawdy, by gar!" He spat in the snow. "De Martians es dere!"

Only once had I ever had the misfortune of observing a Martian. It was when
Bessie and I were on the steamer up from San Francisco. We'd sailed to Puget
Sound, and in Seattle we almost put to port. But the Martians had landed, and we
saw one of their warriors wearing a metal body that gleamed sullenly like
polished brass. It stood watch, its curved protective armor stretching above its
head like the chitinous shell of a crab, its lank, tripod metal legs letting it
stand gracefully a hundred feet in the air. At first, one would have thought it
an inanimate tower, but it twisted ever so insignificantly as we moved closer,
regarding us as a jumping spider will a gnat, just before it pounces. We
notified the captain, and he kept sailing north, leaving the Martian to hunt on
its lonely stretch of beach, gleaming in the afternoon sun.

Bessie and I had thought then that we would be safe back in the Yukon. I cannot
imagine any other place than the land near the Circle that is quite so
relentlessly inhospitable to life, yet I am intimate with the petty moods of
this land, which I have always viewed as something of a mean-spirited accountant
which requires every beast upon it to pay his exact dues each year, or die. I
had not thought the Martians would be able to survive here, so Bessie and I took
our few possessions and struck out from the haven of San Francisco for the
bitter wastes north of Juneau. We were so naive.

If the Martians were in Anchorage, then Pierre's tidings were mixed. It was good
that they were hundreds of miles away, bad that they were still alive at all. In
warmer climes, it was said, they died quickly from bacterial infections. But
that was not true here by the Circle. The Martians were thriving in our frozen
wastes. Their crops grew at a tremendous rate on any patch of frozen windswept
ground -- in spite of the fact that there was damned little light. Apparently,
Mars is a world that is colder and darker than ours, and what is for us an
intolerable frozen hell is to them a balmy paradise.

Pierre finished stamping off his shoes and lifted the latch to the door. Nearly
everyone had already made it to our conclave. Simmons, Coldwell and Porter
hadn't shown, and it was growing so late that I didn't anticipate that they
would make it this time. They were busy with other affairs, or the Martians had
harvested them.

I was eager to hear Pierre's full account, so I followed him into the lodge.

In more congenial days, we would have had the iron stove crackling merrily to
warm the place. But we couldn't risk such a comforting blaze now. Only a meager
lamp consigned to the floor furnished any light for the room. Around the lodge,
bundled in bulky furs in their unceasing struggle to get warm, were two dozen
stolid men and women of the north. Though the unending torments of the past
months had left them bent and bleak, there was a cordial atmosphere now that we
had all gathered. A special batch of hootch warmed on a tripod above the lamp.
Everyone rousted a bit when Pierre came through the door, edging away enough to
make room for him near the lamp.

"What news?" One-Eyed Kate called before Pierre could even kneel by the lamp and
pull off his mittens with his teeth. He put his hands down to toast by the glass
of the lamp.

Pierre didn't speak. It must have been eighty below outside, and his jaw was
leather-stiff from the cold. His lips were tinged with blue, and ice crystals
lodged in his brows, eyelashes, and beard.

Still, we all hung on expectantly for a word of news. Then I saw his mood. He
didn't like most of the people in this room, though he had a warm spot in his
heart for me. Pierre had Indian blood on his mother's side, and he saw this as a
chance to count coup on the others. He'd make them pay for every word he
uttered. He grunted, nodded toward the kettle of hootch on the tripod.

One-Eyed Kate herself dipped in a battered tin mug, handed it to him. Still he
didn't utter a word. He'd been nursing a grudge for the past two months. Pierre
Jelenc was a trapper of almost legendary repute here in the north, a tough and
cunning man. Some folks down at the Hudson Bay Company said he'd devoted a huge
portion of his grub stake to new traps last spring. The north ha.d had two soft
winters in a row, so the trapping promised to be exceptional -- the best in
forty years.

Then the Martians had come, making it impossible for a man to run his trap
lines. So while the miners toiled in their shafts through the dark winter,
getting wealthier by the minute, Pierre had a lost a year's grub stake, and now
all of his traps were scattered in their line, hundreds of miles across the
territory. Even Pierre, with his keen mind, wouldn't be able to find most of
those traps next spring.

Two months ago, Pierre had made one desperate attempt to recoup his losses here
at Hidden Lodge. In a drunken frenzy, he started fighting his sled dogs in the
big pit out behind the lodge. But his dogs hadn't been eating well, so he
couldn't milk any fight out of them. Five of his huskies got slaughtered in the
pit that night. Afterward, Pierre had left in a black rage, and hadn't attended
a conclave since.

Pierre downed the mug of hootch. It was a devil's concoction of brandy, whiskey,
and hot peppers. He handed the cup back to One-Eyed Kate for a refill.

Evidently, Doctor Weatherby had been reading from an article in a newspaper -- a
paper nearly three months old out of southern Alberta.

"I say, right then," Doctor Weatherby said in a chipper tone. Apparently he
thought that Pierre had no news, and I was of a mind to let Pierre speak when he
desired. I listened intently, for it was the Doctor I had come to see, hoping he
would be able to help my Bessie. "As I reported, Doctor Silvena in Edmonton
thinks that there may be more than the cold at work here to help keep the
Martians alive. He notes that the 'thin and rarefied air here in the north is
more beneficial to the lungs than air in the south, which is clogged with myriad
pollens and unhealthy germs. Moreover,' he states, 'there seems to be some
quality to the light here in the far north that causes it to destroy detrimental
germs. We in the north are marvelously free of many plagues found in warmer
lands -- leprosy, elephantiasis, and such. Even typhoid and diphtheria are
seldom seen here, and the terrible fevers which rampage warmer climes are almost
unknown among our native Inuit.' He goes on to say that, 'Contrary to
speculation that the Martians here will expire in the summer when germs are
given to reproduce more fervently, it may be that the Martian will hold forth on
our northern frontier indefinitely. Indeed, they may gradually acclimatize
themselves to our air, and, like the Indians who have grown resistant to our
European measles and chicken pox, in time they may once again venture into more
temperate zones.'"

"Not a'fore bears grow wings," Klondike Pete Kandinsky hooted. "It's cold enough
to freeze the balls off a pool table out that this winter. Most like, we'll find
them Martians all laid out next spring, thawing in some snowbank."

Klondike Pete was behind the times. Rumor said that he'd struck a rich vein in
his gold mine, so he'd holed up in the shaft, working eighteen-hour days from
August through Christmas, barely taking time to come out for supplies. He hadn't
attended our previous conclaves.

"Gads,"Doctor Weatherby said, "I say, where have you been? We believe that the
Martians came here because their own world has been cooling for millennia.
They're seeking our warmer dimes. But just because they are looking for warmer
weather, it doesn't mean they want to bye on our equator! What seems monstrously
cold to us-- that biting winter that we've suffered through this past three
months -- is positively balmy on Mars! I'm sure they're much invigorated by it.
Indeed, the reason we haven't seen more of the Martians here in the past weeks
seems blatantly obvious: they're preparing to migrate north, to our polar cap!"

"Ah, Gods, I swear!" Klondike Pete shook his head mournfully, realizing our
predicament for the first time. "Why don't the Army do somethin? Teddy Roosevelt
or the Mounties ought to do somethin."

"They're playing at waiting" One-Eyed Kate grumbled. "You know what kinds of
horrors they've been through down south. There's not much the armies of the
world can do against the Martians. Even if they could send heavy artillery
against the Martians in the winter, there's no sense in it-- not when the
varmints might die out this coming spring anyhow."

"There's sense 'n it!" one old timer said. "Folks is dyin' up here! The Martians
squeeze us for blood, then toss our carcasses 'way like grape skins!"

"Yeah," One-Eyed Kate said, "and so long as it's the likes of you and me that
are doing the dying Tom King no one will do more than yawn about it!"

The refugees in the room looked around gloomily at one another. Trappers,
miners, Indians, crackpots who'd fled from the world. We were an unsavory lot,
dressed in our hides, with sour bear grease rubbed in our skin to keep out the
weather. One-Eyed Kate was right. No one would rescue us.

"I just whist we 'ad word on them Martians," old Tom King said, wiping his nose
on the sleeve of his parka. He looked off into a corner with rheumy eyes. "No
news is good news," he intoned, the hollow-sounding supplication of an atheist.

None of us believed the adage. The Martian vehicles that fell in the southern
climes were filled only with a few armies and scouts. Thirty or forty troops per
vehicle, if we judged right. But now we saw that these were only the advance
forces, hardly more than scouts who were meant, perhaps, to decimate our armies
and harass the greater population of the world in preparation for the most
massive vehicle, the one that fell two months later than the rest, just south of
Juneau. The mother ship had carried two thousand Martians, some guessed, along
with their weird herds of humanoid bipeds that the Martians harvested for blood.
The mother vehicle had hardly settled when thousands of their slaves swarmed out
of the ships and began planting crops, scattering otherworldly seeds that
sprouted nearly overnight into grotesque forests of twisted growths that looked
like coral or cactuses, but which Doctor Weatherby assured us were more likely
some type of fungus. Certain of the plants grew two hundred yards high in the
ensuing month, so that it was said that now, one could hardly travel south of
Juneau in most places. The "Great Northern Martian Jungle" formed a virtually
impenetrable barrier to the southlands, a barrier reputed to harbor Martian
bipeds who hunted humans so that their masters might feast on our blood.

"If no news is good news, then let us toast good news," Klondike Pete said,
hoisting his mug.

"Ah've seen dem Marshawns," Pierre said at last. "En Anchorawge. Dey burned de
ceety, by Gat, and dey are building, building -- making new ceety dat is strange
and wondrous!"

There were cries of horror and astonishment, people crying out queries. "When,
when did you see them?" Doctor Weatherby asked, shouting to be heard above the
others.

"Twelve days now," Pierre said. "Dere a jungle growing around Anchorawge now--
very thick -- and de Marshawns live dere, smelting de ore day and night to build
dere machine ceety. Dere ceety --how shall I say? --is magnificent, by Gat! Eet
stands five hundred feet tall, and can walk about on eets three legs like a
walking stool. But is not a small stool -- is huge, by Gat, a mile across!

"On de top of de table, is huge glass bowl, alive with shimmering work-lights,
more varied and magnificent dan de lights of Paris! And under dis dome, de
Marshawns building dere home."

Doctor Weatherby's eyes opened wide in astonishment. "A dome, you say?
Fantastic! Are they sealing themselves in? Could it keep out bacteria?"

Pierre shrugged. "Ah 'uz too far away to see dis taim. Some taim, maybe, Ah go
back -- look more closer. Eh?"

"Horse feathers!" Klondike Pete said. "Them Martians couldn't raise such a huge
city in two months. Frenchie, I don't like it when some pimple like you pulls my
legs!"

There was an expectant hush around the room, and none dared intervene between
the two men. I think that most of us at least half believed Pierre. No one knew
what the Martians were capable of. They flew between worlds and built killing
death rays. They switched mechanical bodies as easily as we changed clothes. We
could not guess their limitations.

Only Klondike Pete here was ignorant enough to doubt the Frenchman. Pierre
scowled up at Pete. The little Frenchman was not used to having someone call him
a liar, and many honest men so accused would have pulled a knife to defend their
honor. A fight was almost expected, but in any physical contest, Pierre would
not equal Klondike Pete.

But Pierre obviously had another plan in mind. A secretive smile stole across
his face, and I imagined how he might be plotting to ambush the bigger man on
some dark night, steal his gold. So many men had been taken by the Martians,
that in such a scenario, we would likely never learn the truth of it.

But that was not Pierre's plan. He downed another mug of hootch, banged his
empty mug on the lid of the cold iron stove at his side. Almost as if magically
summoned, a blast of wind struck the lodge, whistling through the eaves of the
log cabin. I'd been vaguely aware of the rising wind for the past few minutes,
but only then did I recognize that the full storm had just hit.

By custom, when a storm hit we would set a mating blaze and lavish upon
ourselves one or two hours of warmth before trudging back to our own cabins or
mine shafts. If we timed it properly, the last of the storm would blanket our
trail, concealing our passage from any Martians that might fly over, hunting us.

Still, some of us were clumsy. Over the past three months, our numbers had been
steadily diminishing our people disappearing as the Martians harvested us.

My thoughts turned homeward, to my own wife Bessie who was huddled in our cabin,
sick and weakened by the interminable cold.

"Storm's here, stoke up the fire!" someone shouted, and One-Eyed Kate opened the
iron door to the old stove and struck a match. The tinder had already been set,
perhaps for days, in anticipation of this moment.

Soon a roaring blaze crackled in the old iron stove. We huddled in a circle,
each of us silent and grateful, grunting with satisfaction. During the storms,
the Martian flying machines were forced to seek shelter in secluded valleys, it
was said, and so we did not fear that the Martians would attack. The bipeds that
the Martians used for food and as slaves might attack, I suspected, if they saw
our smoke, but this was unlikely. We were far from the Martian Jungles, and it
was rumored that the bipeds held forth only in their own familiar domain.

After the past two weeks of damnable cold, we needed some warmth, and as I
basked in the roaring heat of the stove, the others began to sigh in
contentment. I hoped that Bessie had lit our own little stove back in the old
mining shack we called home.

Pierre put his gloves back on, and the little man was beginning to feel the
effects of his drinks. He weaved a little as he stood, and growled, "By Gat,
your dogs weel fait mah beast tonait!"

"You're down to only two dogs," I reminded Pierre. He wasn't a careless sort,
unless he got chunk. I knew he wasn't thinking clearly. He couldn't afford to
lose another dog in a senseless fight.

"Damn you, Jacques! Your dogs weel fait mah beast tonait!" He pounded the
red-hot stove with a gloved fist, staggered toward me with a crazed gleam in his
eyes.

I wanted to protect him from himself. "No one wants to fight your dogs tonight,"
I said.

Pierre staggered to me, grabbed my shoulder with both hands, and looked up. His
face was seamed and scarred by the cold, and though he was drunk, there was a
cunning glint in his eyes. "Your dogs, weel fait, my beast, tonait!"

The room went silent. "What beast are you talking about?" One-Eyed Kate said.

"You looking for Marshawns, no?" he turned to her and waved expansively. "You
want see a Marshawn? Your dogs keeled mah dogs. Now your dogs weel fait mah
Marshawn!"

My heart began pounding, and my thoughts raced. We had not seen Pierre in weeks,
and it was said that he was one of the finest trappers in the Yukon. As my mind
registered what he'd brought back from Anchorage, as I realized what he'd
trapped there, I recalled the heavy bundle tied to his sled. Could he really
have secured a live Martian?

Suddenly there was shouting in the room from a dozen voices. Several men grabbed
a lantern and dashed out the front door, the dancing light throwing grotesque
images on the wall. Klondike Pete was shouting, "How much? How much do you want
to fight your beast?"

"I say, heaven forbid! Let's not have a fight!" Doctor Weatherby began saying.
"I want to study the creature!"

But the sudden fury with which the others met the doctor's plea was
overwhelming.

We were outraged by the Martians for our burnt cities, for the poisoned crops,
for the soldiers who died under Martian heat beams or choked to death in the
vile Black Fog that emanated from their guns. More than all of this, we raged
against the Martians for our fair daughters and children who had gone to feed
these vile beasts, these Martians who drank our blood as we drain water.

So great was this primal rage, that someone struck the doctor-- more in some
mindless animal instinct, some basic need to see the Martian dead, than out of
anger at the good man who had worked so hard to keep us alive through this
hellish winter.

The doctor crumpled under the weight of the blow and knelt on the floor for a
moment, staring down at the dirty wood planks, trying to regain his senses.

Meanwhile, others took up the shout, "There's a game for you!" "How much to
fight it? What do you want?"

Pierre stood in a swirling, writhing, shouting maelstrom. I know logically that
there could not have been two dozen people in the room, yet it seemed like
vastly more. Indeed, it seemed to my mind that all of troubled humanity crowded
the room at that moment, hurling fists in the air, cursing, threatening,
mindlessly crying for blood.

I found myself screaming to be heard, "How much? How much?" And though I have
never been one to engage in the savage sport of dog fighting I though t of my
own sled dogs out in front of the lodge, and I considered how much I'd be
willing to pay to watch them tear apart a Martian. The answer was simple:

I'd pay everything I owned.

Pierre raised his hands in the air for silence, and named his price, and if you
think it unfairly high, then remember this: we all secretly believed that we
would die before spring. Money meant almost nothing to us. Most of us had been
unable to get adequately outfitted for winter, and had hoped that a moose or a
caribou would get us through the lean months. But Martians harvested the caribou
and moose just as they harvested us. Many a man in that room knew that he'd be
down to eating his sled dogs by spring. Money means nothing to those who wish
only to survive.

Yet we knew that many would profit from the Martian invasion. In the south,
insurance hucksters were selling policies against future invasions, the loggers
and financiers were making fortunes, and every man who'd ever handled a hammer
suddenly called himself a master carpenter and sought to hire himself out at
inflated prices.

We in this room did not resent Pierre's desire to recoup his losses after this
most horrible of winters.

"De beast has sixteen tentacles," he said, "so Ah weel let you fight heem with
eight dogs -- at five thousand doughlars a dog: Two thousand doughlars for me,
and de rest, goes for de winner, or de winners, of de fait!"

The accounts we'd read about Martians suggested that without their metallic
bodies, they moved ponderously slow here on Earth. The increased gravity of our
world, where everything is three times heavier than on Mars, weighed them down
greatly. I'd never seen a bear pitted against more than eight dogs, so it seemed
unlikely that the Martian could win. But with each contestant putting in two
thousand dollars just for the right to fight, Pierre would go home with at least
$16,000--five times what he'd make in a good year. All he had to do was let
people pay for the right to kill a Martian.

Klondike Pete didn't even blink. "I'll put in two huskies!" he roared.

"Grip can take him!" One-Eyed Kate said. "You'll let a pit bull fight?"

Pierre nodded, and I began calculating. If you counted most of my supplies, I
had barely enough for a stake in the fight, and I had a dog I thought could win
-half husky, half wolfhound. He'd outweigh any of the other mutts in the pit,
and he pulled the sled with great heart. He was a natural leader.

But I caught that sly gleam in Pierre's dark eyes. I knew that this fight would
be more than any of us were bargaining for. I hesitated.

"By Gol', I'll put in my fighter," old Tom King offered with evident bloodlust,
and in half a moment four other men signed their notes to Pierre. The fight was
set.

The storm raged. Snow pounded in unbounded avarice, skirling across the frozen
crust of the winter's buildup. One-Eyed Kate lugged a pair of lanterns into the
blizzard, held them over the fighting pit. At the north end, a bear cage could
be lowered into the pit by means of a winch. At the south end, a dog run led
down.

Klondike Pete leapt in and flattened the snow, then climbed back up through the
dog run. Everyone unhitched and brought their dogs from the sleds, then herded
them down the run. The dogs smelled the excitement, yapped and growled, stalking
through the pit and sniffing uneasily.

Someone began winching the big cage up, and the dogs settled down. Some of the
dogs had battled bears, and so knew the sound of the winch. One-Eyed Kate's pit
bull emitted a coughing bark and began leaping in excitement, wanting to draw
first blood from whatever we loosed into the pit.

It was a ghoulish mob that stood around that dark pit, pale faces lit dimly by
the oily lanterns that flickered and guttered with every gust of wind.

Four men had already lugged Pierre's bundle around to the back of the lodge. The
bundle was wrapped in heavy canvas and tied solidly with five or six hi de ropes
of Eskimo make. A couple of men worried at the knots, trying to untie the frozen
leather, while two others stood nearby with rifles cocked, aimed at the bundle.

Pierre swore softly, drew his Bowie knife and sliced through the ropes, then
rolled the canvas over several times. The canvas was wound tight around the
Martian six turns, so that one moment I was peering through the driving snow
while trying to make out the form that would emerge from the gray bundle, and
the next moment, the Martian fell on the ground before us.

It burst out from the tarpaulin. It backed away from Pierre and from the light,
a creature frightened and alone, and for several moments it made a metallic
hissing noise as it slithered over the snow, searching for escape. At first, the
hissing sounded like a rattlesnake's warning, and several of us leapt back. But
the creature before us was no snake.

For those who have never seen a Martian, it can be difficult to describe such a
monstrosity. I have read descriptions, but none succeed. My recollections of
this monster are imprinted as solidly as if they were etched on a lithographic
plate, for this creature was both more than, and less than, the sum of all our
nightmares.

Others have described the fungal green-gray hue of the creature's bulbous head,
fully five times larger than a human head, and they have told of the wet
leathery skin that encases the Martian's enormous brain. Others have described
the peculiar slavering, sucking sounds that the creatures made as they gasped
for breath, heaving convulsively as they groped about in our heavy atmosphere.

Others have described the two dumps of tentacles -- eight in each clump, just
below the lipless V-shaped beak, and they have told how the Gorgon tentacles
coiled almost languidly as the creature slithered about.

The Martian invites comparison to the octopus or squid, for like these
creatures, it seems little more than a head with tentacles. Yet it is so much
more than that!

No one has described how the Martian was so exquisitely, so gloriously alive.
The one Pierre had captured swayed back and forth, pulsing across the
ice-crested snow with an ease that suggested that it was acclimated to polar
conditions. While others have said that the creature seemed to them to be
ponderously slow, I wonder if their specimens were not somehow hampered by
warmer conditions -- for this beast wriggled viciously, and its tentacles
slithered over the snow like living whips, writhing not in agony -- but in
desperation, in a curious hunger.

Others have tried to tell what they saw in the Martian's huge eyes: a marvelous
intelligence, an intellect keen beyond measure, a sense of malevolence that some
imagined to be pure evil.

Yet as I looked into that monster's eyes, I saw all of those and more. The
monster slithered over the snow at a deceptively quick pace, circling and
twisting this way and that. Then for a moment it stopped and candidly studied
each of us. In its eyes was an undisguised hunger, a malevolent intent so
monstrous that some hardened trappers cried out and turned away.

A dozen men pulled out weapons and hardly restrained themselves from opening
fire. For a moment the Martian continued to hiss in that metallic grating sound,
and I imagined it was some warning, till I realized that it was only the sound
of the creature drawing crude breaths.

It sized up the situation, then sat gazing with evident maleficence at Pierre.
The only sound was the gusting of wind over the tundra, the hiss of frozen snow
stinging the ground, and my heart pounding.

Pierre laughed gleefully. "You see de situation, mah frien'," he addressed the
Martian. "You wan' to drink from me, but we have de guns trained on you. But
dere ees blood to drink -- blood from dogs!"

The Martian gazed at Pierre with calculating hatred. I do not doubt it
understood every word Pierre uttered, every nuance. I imagined the creature
learning our tongue as Pierre talked to it and his dogs on the lonely trail. It
knew what we required of it. "Keel dem if you can," Pierre admonished the
creature. "Keel de dogs, drink from dem. If you ween, Ah weel set you free to
fin' your own kind. Ees simple, no?"

The Martian expelled some air from its mouth in a gasp, an almost mechanical
sound that cannot adequately be described as speech. Yet the timing of that
gasp, the pitch and volume, identified the beast's intent as certain as any
words uttered from human lips. "Yes," it said.

Haltingly, with many a backward glance at us, the Martian slithered over the
ground on its tentacles, entered the bear cage. Klondike Pete went to the winch
and lifted the cage from the ground, while Tom King swiveled the boom out over
the floor of the pit, then they lowered the cage.

The dogs sniffed and yapped. Snarls and growls mingled into a continuous sound.
One-Eyed Kate's pit bull, Grip, was a grayish creature the color of ash, and it
leapt up at the cage as it lowered, growling and snapping once or twice, then
caught the alien's scent and backed away.

Others were not so circumspect. Klondike Pete's dogs were veterans of the ring,
used to fighting as a team, and their teeth snapped together with metallic
clicks as we lowered the Martian into the pit. They jumped up, biting at the
tentacles that recoiled from them.

When the cage hit the floor of the pit, Klondike Pete's huskies snarled and
danced forward, thrusting their teeth between the pine-wood bars at each side of
the bear cage, trying to tear some flesh from the Martian before we pulled the
rope that would open the door, freeing the Martian into the ring.

The dogs attacked from two sides at once, and if it had been a bear in that
cage, it would have backed away from one dog, only to have the other tear into
it from behind. The Martian was not so easily abused.

It held calmly in the center of the cage for half a second, observing the dogs
with those huge eyes, so full of malevolent wisdom.

Klondike Pete pulled the rope that would spring the door to the cage, releasing
the Martian to the pack of dogs, and what happened next is almost too grisly to
tell.

It has been said that Martians were ponderously slow, that they struggled under
the effects of our heavier gravity. Perhaps that was true of them when they
first landed, but this creature seemed to have acclimated to our gravity very
well over the past few months.

It became, in an instant, a seething dynamo, a twisting, grisly mass of flesh
bent on destruction. It hurled against one side of the cage, then another, and
at first I believed it was trying to demolish the cage, break it asunder.
Indeed, the Martian was roughly the size and weight of a small black bear, and I
have seen bears tear cages apart in a fight. I heard timbers crack under the
monster's onslaught, but it was not trying to break the bars of its cage.

It was not until after the Martian had hurled itself against the bars of its
cage that I realized what had happened. Each of a Martian's tentacles is seven
feet long, and about three inches wide near the end. With several tentacles
whipping snake-like in the air, striking in precision, the Martian had snatched
through the bars and grabbed one husky, then another, and pulled, pinning the
dogs helplessly against the sides of the bear cage where it held them firmly
about their necks.

The huskies yelped and whined to find themselves in the Martian's grasp, and
straggled to pull away, desperately scratching at the beast's tentacles with
their forepaws, tugging backward with their considerable might. These were not
your weak house dogs of New York or San Francisco. These were trained pack dogs
that could drag a four hundred pound sled over the bitter tundra for sixteen
hours a day, and I believed that they would easily break free of the Martian's
grasp.

The door to the cage began to drop open, and with one tentacle, the Martian
grasped it, twined the tentacle about the door, and held it closed as securely
as if it were held by a steel lock, and in this manner it kept the other dogs
somewhat at bay.

The other dogs barked and snarled. The pit bull lunged and experimentally nipped
the tentacle that held the door closed, then danced back. One or two dogs
howled, trotted around the pit, unsure how to proceed in their attacks. The pit
bull struck again -- once, twice --and was joined quickly by the others, and in
a moment three dogs were snarling trying to rip that one tentacle free of the
door. I saw flesh ripped away, and tender white skin, almost bloodless, was
exposed.

The Martian seemed unconcerned. It was willing to sacrifice a limb in order to
sate its appetite. Holding the two huskies firmly against the cage, the Martian
began to feed.

It must be remembered that Pierre had held this Martian for nine days without
food, and any human so ill-treated perhaps would also have sought refreshment
before continuing the fight. It has also been reported that Martians drink
blood, and that they used pipettes about a yard long to do so. From other
accounts, one might suppose that such pipettes were metallic things that the
Martians kept lying about near their vehicles, but this is not so.

Instead, from the Martian's beak, a three-foot long rod telescoped, a rod that
might have been a long white bone, except that it was twisted, like the horn of
a narwhal, and its tip was hollow.

The Martian expertly inserted this bone into the jugular vein of the nearest
husky, who yelped and snarled ferociously, trying to escape.

A loud, orgasmic slurping issued from the Martian, as if it were drinking
sarsaparilla with an enormous straw. The dog's death was amazingly swift. One
moment it was kicking its hind legs convulsively, bloodying the snow at its feet
in its struggles to escape, and in the next it succumbed totally, horribly, and
it slumped and quivered.

The tiniest fleck of blood dribbled from the husky's throat as it ceased its
frantic attempts at flight.

In thirty seconds, the feeding over, the Martian twisted with a snapping motion,
inserted its horn into the second husky, and drank its blood swiftly. The whole
process was carried out with horrid rapidness and precision, with as little
thought as you or I might give to the process of chewing and swallowing an
apple.

By now, the other dogs had gotten a good portion of the flesh on the Martian's
tentacle chewed away, and as the Martian fed upon the second of Klondike Pete's
prize-fighting huskies, the Martian struck with several tentacles, pummeling the
dogs on their snouts, frightening them back a pace, where they snarled and leapt
back and forth, seeking an opening.

The Martian stopped, regarded Klondike Pete balefully, and tossed the body of a
dead second husky a pace toward him. The look in the creature's eyes was
chilling -- a promise of what would happen to Klondike Pete if the Martian got
free.

The Martian exhaled from its long white horn, and droplets of blood sprayed out
over our faces. The sound that this exhalation -- this almost automatic cleaning
of the horn -- made was most unsettling: it sounded as a trumpeting, ululating
cry that rang through the night, slicing through the blizzard. It was a mournful
sound, infinitely lonely in that dark setting.

At that moment, I felt small and mean to be standing here on the edge of the
pit, urging the dogs to finish their business. For their part, the other six
dogs backed away and studied the monster quietly, sniffing the air, wondering at
this awe-inspiring sound that it made.

A biting gust of wind hit my face, and for the first time during that fight, I
realized just how cold I was. The storm was blowing in warmer air. Indeed, I
looked forward to the next few days under the cloud cover. But the wind was
brutal. It felt as if ice water were running in my veins, and the bitter weather
drove the breath from me. I hunched against the cold, saw how the dogs quivered
with anticipation in the pit, the breath steaming hot from their mouths.

I wanted to turn, rush inside to the warm stove, forget this grisly battle. But
I was held by my own bloodlust, by my own quivering excitement.

There were six strong dogs in the ring, dogs bred to a life of toil. They
growled and menaced and kept their distance, and the Martian retracted its horn
back under that peculiar V-shaped beak, and flung open the doors of the bear
cage, surging forward. Its appetite for blood had been sated, and now it was
ready for battle.

In a pounding, quivering mass it rolled forward over the ice, staring into the
eyes of the dogs. There was a look of undaunted majesty in those eyes, an air of
mastery to the creature's movements. "I am king here," it was saying to the
dogs. "I am all you aspire to be. You are fit only to be my food."

With a coughing bark, Grip lunged for the Martian, its gray body leaping silent
as a spectre over the snow. It jumped in the air, aiming a snapping bite at the
Martian's huge eye. I was almost forced to turn away. I did not want to see what
happened when that pit bull's monstrous, vise-like jaws bit into that dark flesh
of the Martian's eye.

In response, the Martian dropped down and under the dog with incredible speed.
It became a whirling dynamo, a vortex, a living force of incredible power.
Reaching up with three tentacles, it caught the pit bull by the neck in midair,
then twisted and pulled down. There was an awful snapping as the pit bull hit
ground, bounced twice. The pit bull slid a few feet over the snow, its neck
broken, and lay panting and whining on the ice, unable to get up.

But the huskies were undaunted. These were the cousins to wolves, and their
bloodlust, the primal memories passed through generations, overcame their fear.
Four more dogs lunged and bit almost simultaneously, undaunted by the spectacle
of strangeness and power before them. As they latched onto a tentacle, twisting,
trying to rip and tear at the Martian as if it were some young caribou on the
tundra, the Martian would convulse, pull its limb back rapidly, drawing each dog
into its clutches.

In seconds, the Martian had four vicious, snarling dogs in its grasp, and its
tentacles wound about their necks like a hangman's ropes.

There was a flurry of activity, of frantic writhing and lunges on the parts of
the dogs. The growls of attack became plaintive yelps of surprise and fear. The
eager savage cries of battle became only a desperate pawing as the four worthy
huskies, these brothers of the wolf, tried to escape.

The Martian gripped with several tentacles to each dog, as a squid might grasp
small fishes, and choked the fight and life from the dogs while we oggled in
horrid fascination.

Soon the startled yelping, the labored breathing of dogs, the frantic tussle as
the huskies sought escape, all became a stillness. Their heaving chests quieted.
The wind blew softly through their gray hair.

The Martian sat atop them, slavering from its exertions, heaving and pulsating,
glaring up at us.

One dog was left. Old Tom King's husky, a valiant fighter that knew it was
outmatched. It paced on the far side of the pit, whimpered up at us in shame. It
was too smart to fight this strange monster.

Tom King hobbled over to the dog run, granted as he lift ed the gate that would
let his dog escape the pit. Under normal circumstances, this act of mercy would
not be allowed in such a fight, but these were anything but normal
circumstances. We would not be amused by the senseless death of this one last
canine.

Klondike Pete raised his 30-30 Winchester, aimed at the Martian's head, right
between its eyes. The Martian stared at us fiercely, without fear. "Kill me," it
seemed to say; "It does not matter. I am but one of our kind. We will be back."

"So, mah fren'," Pierre called to the Martian. "You have won your laif. As Ah
promis, Ah weel let you go now. But mah companions here," he waved expansively
to the rest of us around the pit, "Ah no think weel be so generous, by Gar. Mah
condolences to you!"

He turned his back on the Martian, and I stared at the indomitable creature in
the pit, lit only by the frantic wavering of our oil lamps. The storm was
blowing, and the fierce cold gnawed at me, and for one moment, I wondered what
it was like on Mars. I imagined the planet cooling over millennia, becoming a
frozen hell like this land we had all exiled ourselves to. I imagined a warm
house, a warm room, and I thought at how I, like the Martian, would do anything
for one hour of heated solace. I would plot, steal, kill. Just as the Martian
had done.

Time seemed to stop as Klondike Pete took aim, and I found myself croaking
feebly, "Let it live. It won the right!"

Everyone stopped. One-Eyed Kate peered from across the pit. Jim cocked his head
and looked at me strangely.

The Martian turned its monstrously intelligent eyes on me, and gazed, it seemed,
into my soul. For once there was no hunger in that gaze, no disconcerting look
of malevolence.

What happened next, I cannot explain, for words alone are inadequate to describe
the sensation I received. There are those who assume that the Martians
communicated through clicking sounds of their beaks, or through the waving of
tentacles, but the many witnesses who observed the monsters in life all agree
that no such sounds or motions were evident. Indeed, one reporter in London went
so far as to suggest that they may have shared thoughts across space,
communicating from one mind to another. Such suggestions have met with ridicule
in critical circles, but I can only tell what happened to me: I was gazing into
the pit, at the Martian, and suddenly it seemed as if a vast intelligence was
pouring into my mind. For one brief moment, my thoughts seemed to expand and my
intellect seemed to fill the universe, and I beheld a world with red blowing
desert sands so strikingly cold that the sensation assaulted me like a physical
blow, crumpling me so that I fell down into the snow, curling into a ball. And
as I beheld this world, I looked through eyes that were not my own. All of the
light was tremendously magnified and shifted toward the red spectrum, so that I
beheld the landscape as if on some strange summer evening when the sky shone
more redly than normal. I looked out across a horizon that was peculiarly
concave, as if I were staring at a world much smaller than ours.

A few red plants sprouted in this frigid waste, but they were stunted things.
Martian cities--walking things that traveled through great maze-like canyons as
they followed the sun from season to season -- were marching in the distance,
tantalizing, gleaming. I craved their warmth, the company of my Martian
companions. I hungered for warmth, as a starving man might hunger for food in
the last moments of life.

And above me, floating like a mote of dust in the sea of space, was the shining
planet Earth.

One. We are one, a voice seemed to whisper in my head, and I knew that the
Martian, with its superior intellect, had deigned speak to me. You understand
me. We are one.

Then above me -- for I had fallen to the ground under the weight of this
extraordinary vision -- a rifle cracked, the sound of it reverberating from the
cabin and the low hills. Klondike Pete cocked the gun and fired three more
times, and the stinging scent of gunpowder and burnt oil from the barrel of his
gun filled the air.

I got up and looked into the pit at the Martian. It was wriggling in its death
throes, twisting and heaving on the ground in its inhuman way.

Everyone stood in the freezing, pelting snow, watching it die. I looked behind
me, and even Doctor Weatherby had come out to witness the monster's demise.

"Right then, I say," he muttered. "Well, it's done."

I got up, brushed the snow from me, and looked down into the pit. Tom King was
watching me with rheumy eyes that glittered in the lamplight. He pulled at his
beard and cackled. "'Let 't live,' says he!" He tumed away and chuckled under
his breath. "Young whippersnapper thinks he know everything -- but he don't know
gol'-durned nothin'!"

The others hurried into the warm lodge for the night, and in moments I was
forced to follow.

That was on the night of January 13, 1900. As far as I know, I was among the
last people on Earth to see a living Martian. In warmer climes, they had all
passed away months before, during that hot August. And even as we suffered that
night through the grim storm, the huge walking city in Anchorage began a tedious
trek north, and was never seen again. Its tracks indicate that it came to the
frozen ocean, tried to walk across, and sank into the sea. Many believe that
there the Martians drowned, while others wonder if perhaps this had been the
Martians' intended destination all along, and so we are forced to wonder if the
Martians are even now living in cities under the frozen polar ice, waiting to
return.

But on the night I speak of, none of us at Hidden Lodge knew what would happen
in months to come. Perhaps because of the Martian's malevolent gaze, perhaps
because of the nearness of the creature, or perhaps because of our own feelings
of guilt for what we had done, we feared more than ever an ignoble death in the
tentacles of the Martians.

After we had warmed ourselves for a few moments in the lodge, the men all
scurried away. Doctor Weatherby agreed to accompany me to my cabin under the
cover of the storm, so that he might look in on Bessie. More than anything else,
it was her need that had driven me to the lodge this night.

We left Hidden Lodge during the middle of the storm, let the snows cover our
trails until we reached the cabin. We found Bessie gone from the cabin. The
front door was open, and an armload of wood lay on the floor just inside. I knew
then that the Martians had gotten her, had snatched her as she tried to warm
herself. I tramped through the snow until I found her frozen, bloodless corpse
not far outside the cabin.

I was overcome with grief and insisted on going out, under cover of darkness,
and burying her deep in the snow, where the wolves would not find her. I did not
care if the Martians took me. Almost, I wanted it.

The storm had passed. The Arctic night was brutally cold, the stars piercingly
bright. The aurora borealis flickered green on the northern horizon in a
splendid display, and after I buried Bessie, I stood in the snow for a long
hour, looking up.

Doctor Weatherby must have worried at why I stayed out for so long, for he came
out and put his hands on my shoulders, then stared up into the night sky.

"I say, there it is -- isn't it? Mars?" He was staring farther south than I had
been watching, apparently believing that I was studying events elsewhere in the
heavens. I had never been one to study the skies. I did not know where Mars lay.
It stared down at us, like a baleful red eye.

After that, Doctor Willoughby stayed on for a week to care for me. It was an odd
time. I was brooding silent. On the woodpile, the good Doctor set out petri
dishes full of agar to the open air. Small colored dots of bacteria were growing
in each dish, and by watching these, he hoped to discover precisely what species
of bacteria were destroying the Martians. He insisted that cultures of such
bacteria might provide an overwhelming defense in future wars. I was intrigued
by this, and somehow, of all the things that happened that winter, my numbed
mind remembers those green splotches of mold and bacteria better than just about
anything else.

After the doctor left, it was the most difficult time of my life. I had no food,
no warmth, no comfort during the remainder of that winter. Sometimes I wished
the Martians would take me, even as I struggled to stay alive.

Before the end of the cold weather, I was forced to eat my dogs, and ultimately
boil the gut strings from my snowshoes to eat there at the last. I struggled
from day to day under each successive frozen blast from the north.

I managed to live.

And slowly, haltingly, like the march of an old and enfeebled man, after the
lean winter, came a chill spring.