No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) Read Free Page A

on some of the things we had been doing.
    So we struck off down Dark Hollow and we didn’t make much time because all of these friends of Nature Boy were popping out to join him. Before very long, we were a sort of traveling menagerie—rabbits and chipmunks and a gopher or two and a couple of raccoons.
    I like Nature Boy, of course, and I’ve had some good times with him, but he has spoiled a lot of fun as well. Before he showed up in the neighborhood, I did a lot of fishing and hunting, but that is all spoiled now. I can’t shoot a squirrel or catch a fish without wondering if it is a friend of Nature Boy’s.
    After a while, we got down to the creek bed where we were digging out the lizard. We’d been at it all summer long and we hadn’t uncovered very much of him, but we still figured that some day we might get him all dug out.
    You understand that it wasn’t a live lizard we were digging out, but a lizard that had turned to stone a zillion years ago.
    There is a place where the stream runs down a limestone ledge and the limestone lies in layers. The lizard was between two of those layers. We’d got four or five feet of his tail uncovered. But the digging was getting harder, for we were working back into the limestone ledge and there was more of it to move.
    Fancy Pants floated up above the limestone ledge and got himself set as solid as he could. Sitting there, he hit that limestone ledge a tremendous whack, being very careful not to crack the lizard. It was one of his better whacks, busting up a lot of stone, and while Fancy Pants rested up to take another one, the three of us piled in and threw out the busted rock.
    But there was one big piece he had loosened up that we couldn’t move.
    “Hit it just a tap,” I told him. “Break it up a little and we can get it out.”
    “I got it loose,” he said. “It’s up to you to get it out.”
    There was no sense arguing with him. So the three of us wrestled at the rock, but we couldn’t budge it and Fancy Pants sat up there, fat and sassy, taking it easy and enjoying himself.
    “You ought to have a crowbar,” he told us. “If you had a crowbar, you could pry that rock out.”
    I was getting sick and tired of Fancy Pants, and so, just to get away from him for a while, I said I’d go and fetch a crowbar. And this new kid, Butch, said he’d go along with me.
    So we left Nature Boy and Fancy Pants and climbed up to the road and started out for my place. We didn’t hurry any. It would serve Fancy Pants right if he had to wait, and Nature Boy as well, for all his showing off with his animals.
    We walked along the road and talked. Butch told me about the planet he had come from and it sure was a poor-mouth place, and I told him about the neighborhood, and we were getting to be friends.
    We reached the Carter place and were walking past the orchard when Butch stopped dead in the middle of the road and went sort of stiff, like a hunting dog will go when he scents a bird.
    I was walking right behind him and I bumped into him, but he just stood there with those eager eyes agleam and his entire body tense—so tense it seemed to quiver when it really didn’t.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    He kept on looking at something in the orchard. I took a look where he was looking and I couldn’t see a thing.
    Then he turned around like a flash and jumped the fence on the downhill side of the road and went lickety-split down across the field opposite the orchard. I jumped the fence and ran after him and caught him just before he reached the woods. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face me. it wasn’t hard to do, he was such a spindly kid.
    “What’s the matter with you?” I hollered. “Where do you think you’re going?”
    “Home to get my gun!”
    “Your gun? What for?”
    “There’s a whole bunch of them up there! We have to clean them out!”
    He must have seen I didn’t understand.
    “Don’t tell me,” he said, “that you didn’t see