Battlefield Earth by Hubbard, L. Ron Read Free Book Online Page B

the open. There were big ones and small ones, but they were all fat.
        
    Jonnie pulled Windsplitter to a halt and slid off. The wind was not quite right, a bit too downwind to the pigs. They’d smell him if he approached directly.
        
    With a bent-knee run, he brought himself silently around them until the wind was at right angles.
        
    He stopped and hefted his club. The tall grass was nearly to his waist.
        
    The pigs were rooting around a shallow depression in the plain, where water stood in the wet months, making a temporary marsh. There must be roots to be had there, Jonnie supposed. There were dozens of pigs, every one with his snout down.
        
    With a crouching gait, staying below the grass tops, Jonnie went forward closing the distance yard by yard.
        
    Only a few feet separated him now from the outermost fringe of pigs. Silently he rose until his eyes were just above the level of the grass. A small porker was only three arm-spans from him, an easy throw.
        
    “Here’s for supper,” breathed Jonnie and heaved his kill-club straight and true at the head of the pig.
        
    Dead on, a direct hit. The pig let out an earsplitter and dropped.
        
    But that wasn’t all that happened. Instant confusion roared.
      
      
    Hidden from Jonnie by the tall grass and slightly behind him and to his right, a five-hundred-pound boar who had become tired of eating had lain down for a nap.
        
    The squeal of the hit pig acted like a whip on the whole herd, and away they went in an instant charge, straight upwind at Jonnie’s horses.
        
    For the big boar, to see was to charge.
        
    Jonnie felt like he had been struck by a mountain avalanche. He was knocked flat and squashed in instants so close together they felt like one.
        
    He rolled. But the whole sky over him was filled with boar belly. He didn’t see but he sensed the teeth and tusks trying to find him.
        
    He rolled again, the savage squeals mixing with the roaring pound of the blood in his ears.
        
    Once more he rolled and this time he saw daylight and a back.
        
    In the blink of an eye he was on the boar’s back.
        
    He reached an arm across the throat.
        
    The boar spun around and around like a bucking horse.
        
    Jonnie’s arm tightened until he could feel his sinews crack.
        
    And then the boar, strangled, dropped into a limp, jerking pile.
        
    Jonnie unloaded quickly and backed up. The boar was gasping its breath back. It lurched to unsteady feet, and, seeing no opponent, staggered off.
        
    Jonnie went over and picked up the small pig, keeping an eye on the departing boar. But the boar, although it cast about and made small convulsive charges, still couldn’t see anybody, and after a bit it trotted in the direction the herd had taken, following the trampled grass.
        
    There was no herd in sight.
        
    And there were no horses!
        
    No horses! Jonnie stood there with the dead pig. He had no sharp rock to cut it. He had no flints to start a fire and roast it. And he had no horses.
        
    It might be worse. He looked at his legs, expecting to see tusk gashes. But he found none. His back and face ached a bit from the collision of the charge and his own collision with the ground, but that was all.
        
    Mentally kicking himself, more ashamed than scared, he made off in the direction of the trail of crushed grass. After a while his depression wore off a bit, to be replaced by optimism. He began to whistle a call. The horses would not have just gone on running in front of the pigs. They would have veered off somewhere.
        
    Just as darkness was falling he spotted Windsplitter calmly cropping grass. The horse looked up with a
        
    “Where have you been?” and then, with a plainly mischievous grin, as though he had intended to all the time, came over and bumped Jonnie with his