The Tejano Conflict by Steve Perry Page B

“Thirty minutes.”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œEveryone starts off an ovum,” she said. “Formentara has called me.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œZhe has found a place where I can seek prey.”
    â€œThat’s good.”
    â€œIt is. If I have a few days.”
    â€œNothing going on here you need to stick around for, go.”
    â€œThank you, Jo. It will be a good thing to do.”
    â€“ – – – – –
    Overall, Earth was not a good place for a Vastalimi to hunt. Prey animals had been domesticated here for thousands of years, and there was no joy to be found in catching a lumbering bovine and killing it. Most humans no longer ate meat, fowl, even fish; they consumed ersatz versions of these made from plants, designed to look and smell and taste like the real thing. Of course, with their poor senses, humans were easy to fool.
    The cattle and sheep and llamas and assorted mammals that were once on the menu now produced milk or cheese or eggs or whatever, and under strict rules. Eating such creatures or their produce was expensive and even frowned upon.
    Predators who ate mostly plants. It was hard to comprehend.
    Walking up to a creature bred for docility and opening its throat with a claw as it stared stupidly at you, too inbred to be afraid?
    Pah.
Maybe even less satisfying than eating plants made to taste like the real thing. One expected a plant to be still . . .
    There were game preserves, of course, places where tourists could go and see creatures that would be extinct otherwise. Big felines, wild canines, ursas, and the like. They frowned on having those creatures poached.
    There were apparently secret hunting clubs, wherein armed humans could go and shoot “wild” animals, using computer-controlled rifles that needed no guidance to speak of; dial in the target parameters, point it in a general direction, squeeze the trigger, the gun would do the rest.
    Pah.
    Not many places on this world where one of The People could get her claws righteously bloody without running afoul of the local laws.
    There were, however, exceptions. And through the grace of Formentara, Kay had access to one of those exceptions . . .
    The area was called Alaska, and much of it was still forested. The local region, Denali, surrounded a snowcapped mountain of some size, and most of it was a park, sans development, and rugged.
    Animals were allowed to run loose here, kept in the park with electronic fences, and some of them were predators, including brown bears, the largest of which were nearly seven hundred kilos in weight and three meters tall when rearing upright on two legs. Most of the adult animals were tagged and easy to locate, via Planetary Position Satellites
    Visitors to the park carried transducers that repelled the tagged predators, so it was generally safer for humans.
    Generally. However, now and again, there were births that escaped the game wardens. And some of these unregistered births resulted in adult animals that did not sport electronic devices. Which, to a tourist expecting a beast twice his height and nine times his weight to turn and pad off, could be a nasty surprise when it decided he was prey.
    Apparently, at least one such creature was running loose, surprising tourists; thus far, it had killed and eaten parts of three visitors to the park, and apparently once a bear developed a taste for human flesh, nothing else would be as satisfactory.
    Kay didn’t think human was that tasty herself.
    â€“ – – – – –
    Kay looked at the warden. The human fem was trying not to stare but was obviously intrigued by her contact with a Vastalimi.
    â€œSo, that’s the situation,” the warden said. “It’s a bear, grown, and we’re guessing six hundred kilos, from the tracks. We typed his DNA from scat and shed hair, and know his parents. The mother sow had what we thought was a single-cub birth five years ago;