The BLTS Archive - Two Feathers third in the Aide Memorie series by R. Schultz (cousindream@aol.com) --- Disclaimer: Trek belongs to Paramount/ViaBorgCom, who looted their own company. This story mine under Berne Copyright Laws. 7600 words long. Re-written September, 2002, for the FFF. --- Ahead of me I can see Jake and Jake Junior take the fence together, barking in their joy. They circle round the wet spot beyond the fence to the trees and are back by the time I get to the rusting barbed wire myself. Gauge the distance, judge the spot .... right foot there, left foot there, on the ball of my right foot and I lean out and barely touch the one good fence post in this group, swinging myself over in a smooth running jump. My shoes probably clear the fence top by half a meter. I feel the post do something while my weight is on it and my reflexes twist me clear and end over end almost at the same instant I felt something different. Stupid me. Should have expected it to fail when my weight was on it. But I'm clear, I roll, and both dogs are all over me. thinking I want to play. So I bowl them over, and they bowl me over, and I bowl them over again. When I rise, I stride over to the post and give it a good kick. It drops and hangs by the wire, a sad air to it as it creaks in the morning quietude. I could remember this fence line when Grandma Gretchen ran the big rented posting machine and put all new fencing in on this side of the farm. So fascinated I had been by the efficient arms and noises and castor oil stink as old fence was swallowed and new fencing was created before my young eyes. Now this fence was history. Tomorrow I would Comm for a rental and maybe a driver, someone to take down all the fencing and maybe just put up a few posts at the path crossings. Or run the machine myself. Maybe clearly mark some of the paths cutting across what was now my lands. That'd be a pretty sight. Red posts sticking out of winter's snows, indicating trails the deer and elk and wolves followed. Tonight, tomorrow. For now I had a morning run to finish and my dogs were fretting and anxious to resume their games. I turned and sprinted again for the stand of cedars marking the new limits of my spread and that of Beverly's larger place. I was almost late, and Beverly was jogging in place for me when I got past the acres of wild oats. We met under the spreading leaves, kissed, said low hello's and went on our way. Me to touch the gate of her yard, her to touch the gate of mine. Then we'd meet in the river after a long cool down. Walk back home afterwards. Separately. Again I wondered why we had never become lovers, and smiled to know the answer was; "Not yet." Nearing her place I saw sign. Off in the birch I saw flocks of large birds and knew there had been a kill. With my memory jogged, I recalled an out-of-place crack earlier, 'bout sunrise. Gunfire. In four hundred meters I saw where the carcass had been drug towards the woods to my left. Deer, probably. Wind blowing the wrong way, or I might smell the meat being cooked to preserve it, if stasis bags weren't being used. Jake and Junior smelled things, and they were right perturbed. I patted the needler on my side, just to be on the safe side. The big cats, wolves, wild pigs and bears were tagged with AvoidHumans each spring, so I wasn't really thinking of them. Suddenly a magnificent nine or eleven point buck burst out of the woods on my left, heading south towards more open ground. He was intent on speed, and both Jake's had to work to avoid the hooves as he sped past me. I'm sure he didn't even see me. Right behind me two fat does came out on the same tack, and another angled across my path. There was the sharp crack of close gunfire, and the doe suddenly stood still, panting. It was still too far to see if she'd been hit, but I was sure she was. With a spring she began running again, my dogs at her heels. Dumb goddamned critters, liable to get their heads opened up by one of her hooves! If they got injured I'd have to call my flic to me and go catch up with Beverly. Me with an Irish Setter bleeding all over the insides of my vehicle, and her, as we sped back to her offices. Beverly thought nothing of fixing up the occasional pet or farm animal. After umpteen years out exploring and meeting new peoples, she welcomed a simple fix-up job on a critter with plenty of database already to hand in her Comp files. Suddenly Jake bit Jake Junior and I knew he was telling the almost-still-a-puppy to cool it a little. Fortunate none of my Jake's ever needed to be learnt something twice. Good doggies! Another crack, and the doe pitched forward, down for the count. I looked around for the shooter, jogging around the doe in a very wide circle. Suddenly a figure out of James Fenimore Cooper rose out of the grass closer to the trees. Dressed in buckskins, feathers in his long gray hair, waving a Pennsylvania Long Rifle in one hand and a tomahawk in the other. He started covering the distance between us at remarkable speed, constantly waving that tomahawk over his head. Jake and Junior got to him first, circling him closely, snapping and yelping, crouching, speeding around him some more. I ran into him full tilt and bore him to the ground, me sitting on top of him. One hand held the tomahawk, the other got a grip on his Long Rifle. I was sitting on his face, with his head in what had to be a mighty painful leg lock. Thigh lock, actually. "Mmumprgharpgh!" he yelped at me. It tickled when he yelled, him being in the position he was. "Only one sonofabitch hunts my land without asking kindly first, and you're too ugly and too old to be him, so I'll have to ask you to be polite when I let go of you. It felt good having the muscles to keep him pinned like this, forever if I wanted to. "Numergharmmpheean, hammnmneearnh?" he said. I rolled off him in a perfect acrobat's back-flip, and put on my face the glare that had once frightened aliens and crew-members alike throughout Delta space. "You look a bit like an old senile friend of mine named Two Feathers, son of War Eagle, father to Turtle Beak. But you're too ugly to be him and he's too old by forty years to be still on the trail. So who are you, you ugly chuck?!" "Glad to see you're in good health as well, Kathryn. It IS Kathryn, isn't it? That's still you in that child's body? Or have the White Men been using their evil magic on you and turned you into this nasty kinder who insults innocent old men and abuses their bodies?" "Yes," I admitted with a smile. "I've had a rejuv procedure." With that I elevated myself from a crouch to doing a pirouette for him, there, on the prairie. "Like?" "You're not Kathryn Janeway, you must be her great-granddaughter. Is your great-grandmother still cooking up those lovely peach pies back at the farmhouse? She must be getting on past seventy by now. Can you cook pies like she does?" "Grandmother, am I?" I snapped. More softly I asked; "You miss the old fat me?" "Actually, yes, Katie." He shook his head. "As it is you remind me of how old I am and how unlikely it is I'll get that fine old lady to share a blanket with me again." There it was. He'd probably pulled his part of the Wolverine Clan (Jewish Reformed) of the Sauk all the way down here just on the off-chance that I wasn't a young woman now. For the possibility we might share a little deer and apple pie and an hour or eight in bed together. We'd been off-on lovers for, what? Twenty years now. Jake was remembering him now, or at least following my lead in welcoming him. Jake Junior had stopped growling, confused, finally adapting. He was sniffing the dead doe, and Jake wandered over as well. "I'll help you," I told Two Feathers. He put his hand on my butt and I put it on my shoulder. Us lesbians don't take kindly to unwelcome attentions from males, whatever his age. Yeah, right. He slung both his long-barreled rifles and grabbed the deer and pulled it onto a big sheet he pulled out of his side bag. He had a frictionless sheet, and it was no problem pulling the deer over to the trees to be hung and dressed. But first he put his hand on my butt again and I let him keep it there. For one minute. "I didn't see you last year," I mentioned as we took his prize to it's fate. "I was here," he said. Suddenly I knew. He had probably come on me while I was with one of my lesbian conquests, more than likely while we were making love in a bower of grass by the river. He had been too polite to let know he'd seen. Two Feathers wasn't much for butting in when he wasn't needed. "You could have left a note," I said. He didn't immediately answer, so I helped him get the deer hung and let him get to work. Suddenly he began speaking, seemingly into the wind. "I knew a wonderful old lady once, she was a heroine of the spaceways, a great explorer, a savior of her crew. She spent a lot of her years doing this and that in the senates of men and peoples. I watched her become Assistant Continental Governor for four years. "She befriended a dumb-ass named Bernie and never called him Bernie, but always by his new Indian tribal name. "This aging beauty loved this gangling kid enough so that she let him go back to northern Wisconsin with his tribe for the winter. Never knowing if he would ever come back to see her again." He started a wood fire and threw a few pieces of deer onto the blaze. I knew it was cuts for Jake and Jake Junior he cooked. "Up in the ruins of Superior I heard tales of the new woman who took the place of my heroine. She was a mighty runner, and she was covered with tattoos like a Shawnee princess. She took other women to her bed and yet she still had the Irish dog by her side. "So I stood back from the river and watched you and your neighbor and your lovers play in the river, and I knew a new innocence had come on you, and a new beginning, as well as a new body. "My Admiral Katie had passed on and so did I." "Why did you come back this year?" He smiled suddenly, and I knew I'd enjoy his next few words. "Two of my grandsons are trying to get your red-haired neighbor to take either or both to bed with her. Or rather share a blanket with them. We know she enjoys outdoor recreation." I looked a big question at him and he almost smiled. "Five years ago they each saw your neighbor running naked across this prairie and fell madly in love with her. Well, lust, actually. I told them to wait five years and see if they still wanted her. "So it's been five years and they're probably paralleling her in her run right now. Introducing themselves, being polite, being close, and probably hoping she'll take them with her when she goes skinny-dipping in the river. "They're willing to share, but she can choose just one of the lads, iff'n she wants. Or neither. As she wishes. "I told them not to be too persistent. Some white women don't care for that. "Personally I think she's way too skinny for good loving, too bony in the hips." He eyed me in my black sweats and I repressed my grin. "However, I'm willing to forgive a little lack of heft here and there, on some people. Just for old time's sake. "Did you really have to lose ALL your hips, Kat? You were a woman built special, you were." In a delicate way, I decided to remind him of what I appreciated in the way of lovers these days. "Do you know what this is?" I asked Bernie, fingering my big Labrys tattoo on my upper right arm. "It's a double-bited axe, a Labrys, and it means you are an out lesbian. So?" "And?" "Now Kat, you know I never was all that interested in that political stuff you white people were always messing with." It took me a few seconds to realize he was pulling my leg, and hard. So I decided to change the subject while he worked. By this time he'd flipped the hot burnt-cooked meat to my dogs, and they, at least, were content. "New Rifle?" I asked. "Lefargo Schmidt, Wyoming Valley, eastern Pennsylvania, approximately 1768 Anno Domini," Bernie said. "Actually it came right from the forge at Linsterwalde, out by Styris Major. Nice balance to these Martian replicas. A colonist of the period would probably be fooled, they'd think it was genuine." "What's the effective range?" "With this new double-broken chlorate polymer mix, I've been able to hit what I aim at, at nine hundred meters, a thousand. If I use lead ball, I can still do five hundred meters, and that's what I'm using this trip. Care to try it out?" I had to stand on a log to comfortably pour the powder down the barrel, and rammed wad and ball down with some difficulty. Tight fit. The cap looked fresh, and it went off easy. It took me until my third shot before I took the fence post I was aiming at. Had a slight pull to the right, I told myself. That was why I didn't get it with my first shot. "Not bad," he noted. "I make it four-fifty." Bernie ran a cleaning rod down both barrels and threw the dirty sop in a small bag hanging off one rifle butt. "I've a deer in stasis bag near here, and two wild pigs in my base camp. If you help me pull the sheet, I'll give you a cut of whatever you want." "Ham?" "The pig? Sure. I expect you to feed me a few slices of it tonight, though. Throw in a pie?" "Bernie...." I began, but he interrupted. "Call me Two Feathers, will you? The Council is getting antsy again about us not being real Indians. Like living as what we think of as our moral ancestors isn't enough. Anyone hears you calling me Bernie, especially Bernie Lefkowitz, and they'll have a stroke back at Superior. Favor?" "Okay, Two Feathers," I agreed. "How big is the tribe these days?" "A few more this year, same as always. We get a few recruits each year and most of them go back to being Federation citizens before three months are out. A few of our kids always leave to live in the cities, or something. Still, we have our own kids a tad faster than us olders die off. "One of my nephews is going to the Academy, by the way. He's doing a few years at Mendeleyev School first, to get up to speed, but he'll probably make it. Smart kid. Most importantly, he has what you used to call the look of stars in his eyes. "Speaking of White Man's sinful attractions, you got any good firewater at your place? Maybe we can negotiate a few bottles of something nice for a few steaks and chops, hmmm?" Jake and Junior helped us load the sheet by barking a lot. Beverly called me on my Comm, and said she had company that night, and we'll have supper some other time. I asked her if they looked much alike and she giggled, so I knew all was well. Yeah, us lesbians don't fool with men no more. I wondered how successful they'd be with my neighbor? And how cute were they? Ber .... Two Feathers avoided the river, I noticed, on our way back to my place. If Bev was skinny dipping with a male or two I didn't want to interrupt anything. I admit it, I'd have liked to watch, but males are skittish about an audience, most of the time. --- "You could get your own wine, Ber.... Two Feathers. All you have to do is get a few replicators. With beamed power, they're quite portable." "Then you're getting away from nature again," he said. "Besides, by keeping luxuries rare, we make them more valuable to us. Believe me, when the hunting parties come in each year, it's festival time. A great big orgy of trading with each other and enjoying in advance what we wind up with. "And sometimes we accumulate stuff like real furs and we can parlay them into necessities, like our hunting rifles and unsinkable canoes, and air-effect carts to carry the big loads. "I, myself, I've got five Beaver, two Minks and a Sable back at Tippecanoe. "Anyways, we're not barbarians, Kat, we're just careful about what we depend on for our lives and our joys. We're primitives with sense." Two Feathers had a stink to him, but he quickly asked if he could use my tub and bubble bath. I told him the lavender was under the sink. Living in the wild, eventually you have to use some soap, swimming in streams don't clean you enough. While he was soaking and singing something in what I presumed was Yiddish, I ran his stuff through the replicator to clean it. He came into my bedroom wearing a terry robe too tight on him, and caught me caressing his buckskin jacket and leggings. So soft, so WEARABLE in its old age. Sorta like Ber.... Two Feathers himself. "We've got a bigger camp out towards Tippecanoe, that we share with the Fox and Delaware. Come out with me to it, we'll take your flic, and we'll measure you for a nice buckskin outfit your size. Deal? We can bring it down come spring." "And what'll you want in return?" "We can always work something out. Perfume, chocolates, HoloDrama's to play around the winter fires, a new 25KKK Computer or two, maybe an engagement ring or two. We still like to put something nice looking on our female's fingers, and it isn't as if gold or diamonds are very expensive anymore." "Deal," I murmured, running my hands over the soft leather again. I'd be a wow wearing something like that the next time I hit the MIRROR, or some other women's cruise bar. Miss Deerslayer, no less. I wondered if I'd dare to get a coonskin cap to go with it? Naw. His clean hand was on my shoulder, and I smelled his sharp bubble bath aroma just before he kissed that shoulder. It felt good to have this male hand on me. His lips. His murmurs in my ear. "Have you ever noticed how you walk or stand, Kat?" he asked. "Every time I see you I know just the way you stood on the bridge of VOYAGER, how you walked it's corridors, how you faced murderers and bandits and Borg. "You have the damnedest straightest ramrod back to you I've ever seen in a woman. "You're very Indian, Kat, the way you face the world. You're brave and you have more guts than is good for you. Every time I see you standing with your chin jutting out like that, I want to hold you and kiss you in order to steal some of your strength from you. "Old men like me, we need strength wherever we find it. Can I hold you, dearest Kat, and take strength from you?" I told myself it was bullshit, a line, a variant on the many roll-on's a gal encounters in her life. I didn't believe that. With a small twist I moved from under his hand, moving towards the door. There was the fact a supper still needed to be prepared, granted most of it'd be replicated. There was the fact that I'm a lesbian now. There was the fact that I knew I tingled at his touch, and I mentally apologized to Naomi for those feelings. --- He looked glorious at my table. His gray hair was braided now, and his feathers and buckskins were so damned exotic looking. There were so many small scars on his hands and face! A lifetime's accumulation. Breaking his face into something impossibly craggy and foreign. Federation citizens never let scars accumulate, especially on the face. There was the long three cuts on his left chin, and the jagged one that must have almost cost him an eye. The great scars on his belly where he met a bear cub that hadn't been given an Avoid Humans tag yet. I suddenly remembered how Seven of Nine looked on the BioBed once. Naked, almost dying, her abdomen implants glistening in the SickBay lights, her nude body utterly captivating me even in that crises. I was not adverse to scars. But still, I am a lesbian. I don't do men anymore. I looked at the deep line down the length of his right forearm and remembered how it had felt to kiss that deep past wound. How it felt to have his mutilated left hand behind my head. Two fingers and a thumb, and how strong it was. I had always said he should have taken a new name, Two Fingers, instead of Two Feathers. He was going to die before me, I realized, I remembered, I admitted for the first time. His people did not get rejuv's or extension drugs. They lived their lives in a quiet frenzy, knowing they would never equal our life spans. Their choice. Was it a richer life? I felt weak, for just a second. Then my head straightened and I was once more in command of the hurtling ship that was me. His hand was on mine, he knew I had seen something that frightened and saddened me. I knew his touch and welcomed it. Okay, so maybe I'm not a hundred percent lesbian. He met my eyes and he smiled. The old bastard knew, guessed, hoped that I'd made a decision about him. "I've come near a thousand kilometers, beautiful Katie, and you was always on my mind. "You've always been a beautiful woman, always. Maybe some didn't see your beauty anymore, but some of us, the ones that see more clearly, we saw your beauty, Katie. "Your neighbor has always seen it, and your Naomi, and so have I. You're an elemental state of being, Kathryn. Earth, wind, water, fire, and power. "All your life you've been power, command, resolution, drive. There is part of you that is as much part and parcel of this landscape as a tornado or a blizzard or a forest fire." It was bullshit, I told myself, he wanted to get me in bed, but dear God I loved it all. If he wanted me .... he could have me. "I am a broken stick, Katie, and am waiting to be thrown in your fire. Will you have me and burn me this night, dear sweet?" For that sentence alone.... --- I figured it out once. Two Feathers was eighteen years and more my junior. I'd always liked the concept of a younger man in my arms. The lights were on dim, and I stood in the doorway, letting the hallway light show through my gauzy blue nightgown. "Craving" on my pulse points, small ribbons in my long flowing gray hair. Lace edges to the gown, a thin belt keeping the flimsy thing closed. Not that it hid much. Bernie, Two Feathers, was damned well getting the full monty, the full treatment. "Shoskatovich and Rachmanioff, romantic mixing, soft," I instructed computer. Take no prisoners. He stood there, in the dimness, waiting for me to come to him. "Bolero," Bernie, Two Feathers asked. I nodded my head, and knew the strains of that music would come to us during the night. I came to the edge of my bed and was stunned to see him lift a bowl and start picking petals from it. He was strewing rose petals across the bed. WHERE the hell had he gotten rose petals? My downstairs replicator. He must have told it his account number and called up .... rose petals. Indians didn't buy or replicate things except in an emergency. They would ask him a few questions about the use of the tribal account when he got back to Superior. I didn't swoon, never did, but if ever was a moment for such a dramatic gesture, then was it. I wanted him in my mouth, I always wanted my men in my mouth. But not this time. For rose petals you get the best at the start. At his age, I knew, it might be some time before he rose to the occasion again. I just made a pun. There seemed four or five colors of petals there, I let my hand caress them. Then I turned to face Two Feathers as he came around the bed. I lifted my arms and let him pull me against him. The murmurs began, the whispers, the lips across my brows and my nose and eyes. He nibbled on each ear in turn, letting his hands fill with my breasts as the nipples stiffened. For a second his hand slid down my belly to my soft naked groin. I hoped he liked the hairless innocence of it. I presumed by this time he was beyond caring, because I could feel his curved prick hot and hard against my belly. Oh my, I was going to enjoy a man. Again. Forgive me, Naomi. I was going to enjoy him a LOT! He bent to kiss my arm, and I knew he was licking my Labrys tattoo. Then he was at the base of my throat and his hands had opened my nightgown and were feeding my nipples into his palms again. We kissed, and he was male, pushing too hard, forcing his tongue tip between my lips, touching my teeth before I was quite ready for it. What the hell, he was a man. Men don't have the patience women do. It felt good, finally, as I opened to him and nibbled on his lips and then tongue and the other lip and moaned into his hands finding my bald Mons again. Suddenly his hands and arms were behind me. lifting me, and I held on to him as he pivoted to lay me upon the rose petals and my bed. "No," I said to him, "Lay me naked on my bed. Please?" As I stood, I was stripped, and I smiled to know his impatience. But he stayed slow and gentle. lifting my slight weight with no problem. Then he lay me on the rose petals. I stretched like a cat, purring at him, wriggling my sensitive skin over the fragments of soft scented silk that were the rose petals. He bent over me and took one breast, then the other, into his mouth. His hand found me and divided me and made my vagina pulse by pushing a finger tip into it. Then he swam up the wetness of me to my clit and rubbed his palm against my stiff tiny crooked rod. I had to cry out, for I came on his insistent teeth and strong palm. I arched my back and held my tattooed breast to him, making sure he paid special attention to it. His fingers ran up and down the wetness of my cleft and thus lubricated his finger, allowing him to easily enter me again. And I Came Again and I cried, louder this time. He kept working me and working me and my other breast was in his mouth and a finger was in my ass and I gladly spread myself as he rolled on top of me. Frantic for my next come I held his penis tight and put it against the opening of my vagina as my legs spread and my ankles waved in the air. I cried tears and screamed and Came As he slid inside me, easily, without more than a hiccup of resistance by my clutching vaginal walls, as my pussy smiled to hold him close. The rhythm developed, quickly, a measured metronome of movement inside me. My universe was concentrated on my cunt contracting and letting go and contracting again on his dick as it moved back and forth inside me. I could feel the fire starting again, growing higher again, I think I was puffy and tight, never wanting him to finish but always for him to stroke back and forth inside me while I Came Again. "Kathryn," he moaned, Kathryn, I'm going to, is it all right, do you...?" "Come inside me, you son of a bitch or I'll have your balls and your ears on my toast tomorrow." So he did. Two Feathers always was an agreeable male. So warm, so warm, so satisfying. This is what I missed in my women, the sensation of male seed being planted in me, filling my sterile womb, making me grin to know he was spurting inside me. My ankles were crossed behind his ass, I rocked him, holding him tight while the both of us warmed down from our fires to an embryonic glow. I bore his weight, my caressing hands discovering I'd cut his back with my nails again. It felt sad when he rolled off me and out of me. I could feel the wetness of his come or mine or both trickling down the crack of my ass. On impulse I used my fingers on me, then sucked them clean. "Have pity on me, Kat," he asked. "I'm just one solitary brave, and an old one at that." "Relax, mighty hunter, I don't expect any miracles. But will you hold me? If you do that I won't complain if you have a nap." "And later?" "I'll expect the miracles from you then, Bernie. Two Feathers." With that I snuggled into his arms. But first I cleaned his prick with my mouth for a few minutes. He stayed soft, but over the decades I'd become quite the enthusiast for tasty gifts from my lovers. Male spunk was an acquired taste, but I'd acquired the taste for it sixty years ago, and more. I loved his cut head, too. His tribe might be Reformed Jewish tending towards paganism, but some of the old habits still held. A few, two, of my old boyfriends were circumcised, but I think it's becoming rarer out in the stars. Federation men have themselves augmented, and that's it. Bev said she had a seventy-year-old male rejuvie who had his penis length more than doubled. She wondered who found that length comfortable. Maybe he raised horses. When I woke up, I finally took Two Feathers into my mouth for a serious no-holds-barred blow-job. Two Feathers stirred and started petting my head, running his fingers through my gray hair. "Is it miracle time already, Katie-me-darling?" He yelped when I accidentally on purpose bit him a little too hard. I apologized by pulling my head off him and licking his length and balls. Admiral Janeway, slut. "Katie," he said, "there's something I'd like to do...." "I'll go douche..." "Not necessary. Just wriggle that skinny ass of yours up here, and smile, please, even if I don't do it as good as some of your lady friends." "I have a GREAT ass, I'll have you know." "You HAD a great ass. Now it's too bony. But I'm an easy-going brave and I forgive you for getting skinny." Fortunately he was almost as ticklish now as he once was. Once we got our breaths back, he began caressing me. Then paused. "Kathryn, dear pearl of the prairie, would you mind if I had some good light in here? I can see your tattoos and can damned well feel that soft babies bottom on that exquisite pussy of yours, but I'd like to SEE you clearly." For asking nice he could look all he wanted. Just so long as he remembered his promise to give me more loving. Maybe he wouldn't be as good with his mouth as some of my women had been, but technique was only marginal to good sex. The mind rules. It decides whether you feel anything special with a person, and gender be damned. I rolled over so he could inspect my Tinker Bell on my shoulder. I flexed and Tinker Bell's wings moved. Two Feathers liked that, so I did it a few more times. Yes, yes, I know, people who tattoo do it to show off and get attention. Is that supposed to be a revelation to me? I had a nude girl with short honey hair in the small of my back. Her feet were crossed and about to slide down between the cheeks of my butt. It looked like she was leering. His fingers traced the figure, and he asked; "Naomi?" I nodded a yes, enjoying the touchings there. He also discovered the sprig of mistletoe on my right butt cheek. Bastard bit it after kissing it a few times. What he REALLY enjoyed, though, was the giant Red Rose that the center of my right breast had become. "That's beautiful, Kat," he said. "Exquisite. Lovely. Edible." He took it in his mouth and made persistent and forceful love to it. He didn't just suck and lick and nibble and bite. He made love to it. He didn't stop, he didn't actually pause, he made love to it and made love to it and .... "The other one, dammit," I said, "do the other one too." I gave a great sigh when he rolled all the way over me to comfortably take the other breast in his mouth. His hand rediscovered my Red Rose breast and began to vigorously work it. He loved my breasts! I loved him loving them, I adored it, I bit my lip as he pinched and bit at the same time, I was so in love with his attentions to my breasts. I came as soon as my finger found my clit. Oooh It was Good And it didn't stop, either. I had to roll away and call a stop to it. My nipples hurt now, and my breasts, and my come had been way too quick and bitingly sharp. He held me and kissed my neck while I came down to normality. I rolled back to face him and snuggled for long minutes. He smelled different from my women, and felt different, and he moved and breathed and touched in different ways. I found myself missing the breasts and fragrant sex and skin of a woman. But this was good in it's own way. Naomi would forgive me. By the time he scooted down the bed I was ready to discover his mouth and tongue and teeth and lips, and most importantly, his love for my femininity. Mark had never understood using his mouth on me was not foreplay. Rather it was and should be love and sex and showing care. Two Feathers understood. His breath on my bald Mons was not a signal for cunnilingus. It was the beginning of love itself, another pattern of pleasure. I stopped being so damned analytical and metaphysical once he began to open me with his fingers. He loved my bald soft smooth groin and wouldn't let up. Not that I fought him. I was covered with sweat when I finally had to curl away from him. I looked down at my pussy and was surprised my clit wasn't blinking on and off like a faulty light bulb. Two Feathers wasn't half bad at oral love, I told him later. Just half bad, he protested? Alas, I was more ticklish than he was. --- There wasn't much of a trail here, but I continued to run nonetheless. We were following the Taggers. It was extraordinarily good luck to come on a team of them at work. To my left I could see Two Feathers for a second as he ran parallel with me. Damn, but he looked so damned much like someone out to beat the French Indians to the palisades before Fort Ticonderoga. Ahead I saw the flash of silvery metal again. A gap opened in the forest, and I was slowed by the thick brushes here. Above I could see the Control Ball, and two or three Taggers flashing quickly in the sun. The ground was still wet from the night's rain, but it was firm ground underneath the leaves. My right arm was raised to protect my face as I ran, and my left hand had a tight grip of the Cavalry Carbine's sling. I could hear the squealing anger and agitation of the pigs, they must not be two hundred, three hundred meters in front of me and to my left. I slowed and brought the five-shot Sharps revolver carbine to port. Looking careful now for sign. We had a great advantage, having stumbled on an animal Tagging Team while it was at work. From the sign, the broken bushes with the damage just so high and no higher, we knew it was pig. I'd already crossed the herd of pig's path three or four times in the last few hundred yards. My moccasins's were silent on the leaves, my breath short, my ears wide open. There had to be a boar with the group, and boar were no trifle. Which is why I chose my Sharps when I took Two Feathers up on his offer of a month's hunt with him. I'd never done so much physical labor in my life. I'd rarely felt so alive. I tended to blend in with the trees and shadows in my buckskins and black Revolutionary period tricorn hat. Every time I thought of it I adored the image I must present. When we had met three Miami north of Vincennes, I felt like telling them I was in a powerful hurry to see Colonel Washington and General Burgoyne, because the French already knew they was heading for Fort Pitt. The Civil War period Sharps Cavalry Carbine was an anachronism, but then so were the Navy Colt .44's on cross holsters over my jacket. Katie Janeway ain't no fool, thank you. I go hunting, I want something with stopping power to hand. Tarzan I am not. Though my two knives were fine items. Acquiring my buckskin's were simplicity itself. Once Two Feathers and I flew in my flic to the big camp at Tippecanoe, we stumbled on a party of Delaware with a female in it. She was my size, a touch bigger in the hips and bosom, but nothing too big. We took the girl and her boyfriend back to my place on my flic, and accessed my replicator. We made two copies of her clothes, during the clean-replicate cycle, and one copy fit me wonderfully, once I put on a good web belt. The boys were downstairs enjoying a little chicken noodle soup and beer, and Ludmilla and me girl-talked upstairs. She adored my tattoos and surprised me by taking my Red Rose breast in her mouth. Nothing developed out of her move, but we understood each other a lot better after that. She said a few of the squaws back at Salt Lick, their winter camp, got together once in a while. The males had more sense than to object. This was the second year she'd been part of the hunter parties, and she would stay home soon to marry and raise her kids. On impulse I added a gold and platinum anklet to her agreed-on booty. She put it on and gave me a kiss while the braves found other things to look at. I wore that deerslayer garb now, and carefully parted the brush and stepped careful. Wondering where the hell the Boar was. My Sharps had caliber .58 Teflon-coated minie balls and modern broken-hexanated chlorate gunpowder. My Navy Colt's had depleted uranium ball. I might look anachronistic, but my weaponry was quite capable of bringing down a wild bull, much less a boar. I felt no uneasiness about hunting living beasts, because I hunted to fill the larders of an entire people, so that they might survive another year. It was a marvelously inefficient way of hunting, but it gave the animals a chance. I could feel the lure of being Indian. It was a desperate on-the-edge life, but you felt very much what you did was live hard and free. I wondered, sometimes, on the trail, what had gone through the minds of millions of my ancestors who had hunted for sport. The same ones who'd left me immense rusting ruins like Gary and radioactive pestholes like Singapore and Chicago and Madrid. I'd understood most of the aliens in the Delta Quadrant more easily than I did those wasteful progenitors. There! A flash of something! I'd found the pig! A Tagger flashed past me, searching for the last of these wild pigs to tag with Avoid Humans implants. Suddenly it doubled back towards my left and I automatically aimed my Sharps there. A sow burst out of the brush, angling at and then away from me to the side. I put all five Minie-balls into her, then slung my carbine. She was still moving, but she was dying already. You could see by the way she staggered, falling, and getting back up. We'll track her down later, finish her off, and dress her. I drew both my Colt's, cocking the hammers back. Step, step, step, brush much more close here than I liked it Then a sound like a Kazon ship ramming my VOYAGER, and I was in the air and on my stomach, the air gone out of me. I could see the Boar pivoting to take another run for me. My legs weren't responding, but I rolled to my side and began putting depleted uranium balls into the beast. Two Feathers said later I put six bullets into the big tusker, before it reached me again. It bit down on my arm and I knew he'd broken it. I put two more Colt rounds straight into it's eye with my free hand. I looked down at myself, getting very scared very fast. I didn't look very good. That's how Two Feathers found me. Tore to shit, arm broken, legs broken, big opening with guts poking out, and one very dead boar. Next time I take a phaser along. Two Feathers used his own emergency Comm, then I used mine, as I was still rational at the time. Cursing and bleeding, yeah, but rational. I was almost expecting what I saw ten minutes later when a transport took place next to me. It was Beverly. The damned....! She'd been shadowing me, all unbidden, worrying about stupid stubborn me. She'd been afraid I'd get hurt and damned if I didn't, justifying all her fretting. She gave me locals, cleaners, a come-along, blocked off the big arteries and veins, ran freeze's in my abdominal cavity and gave me a deep kiss after she'd yelled at me for three minutes for being a perfect jackass. I replied no one was perfect, and then I went under. When they transported me to St. Louis Fleet General, I never knew it. Two Feathers made sure I was okay, then Beverly took him back to finish the job we'd started in that Illinois forest. I was safe, and he visited me again when I was returned to my farm. But he had two pigs to dress and haul first. People like him were the tribe's life's blood. They needed him and they needed the winter food my two pigs meant. Bev brought Jake and Jake Junior back to me once she was convinced I was fully recovered. I loved my doggies, but hunting dogs they weren't. In apology I part-cooked a few pork steaks for them. Once they'd got their pissed-off barking out of their systems, things were back to normal. Just in case I didn't get back to full-scale running for two more days. Two Feathers came by in early November, late for the trek back to the shores of Lake Superior. I got to see the two grandson's who'd romanced Doctor Beverly, and waved to them as they ran ahead to give my neighbor their own farewells. Two Feathers and I had most of the morning before he felt he had to leave. He'd brought me more than half the boar, in stasis. He said it'd be fitting revenge to eat the old bastard. He returned my buckskin outfit, complete with an embroidered skirt. The repairs were good, but visible. I thought the mends gave it a richer quality. I got a lot of attention when I wore it into the MIRROR the first time. At least it was different. A young brave visited me in early April to tell me Two Feathers had contracted pneumonia during the winter, and died of it. Lives of quiet desperation. I thought about it and decided he was probably well content with his life. It eased my pain a little. --- continued in the fourth story in the Aide Memorie series - 'Umber and Amber'