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As the story opened back in the first
episodes, Buck Turner, a rancher, was riding to Contention City with
his son on a bitterly cold January morning in the 1890s. Renner, a
homesteader, has repeatedly clipped the barbed wire fence separating
the K-10 and the Lazy-R, letting his cattle across. Renner’s
Lazy-R side is overgrazed because he didn’t know anything about
ranching when he got the place. He ran too many cattle on his 160
acres.
Furthermore, there’s a drought. All
of the ranches - not just Renner’s - are struggling. The K-10 is
no exception. Renner can’t afford to keep his emaciated cattle nor
does he feel that he can afford to sell them. Buck Turner is riding
to town to try to get Sheriff Brucker to come and do something about
the trouble between them. If he doesn’t, there will be trouble.
An interplanetary craft that Buck calls
a skyship crashes near the trail into Contention City. Buck and his
son, Caleb, come close to being killed. Buck rescues one of the
big-eyed, light-green-skinned creatures. The other creatures are
killed by the impact. Buck and Caleb decide to bring the creature
back home to Edith, Buck’s wife and a self-taught doctor. The
father and son drape the creature over Buck’s horse, ‘49er. Over
Bear, Caleb’s horse, they tie on several of the creature’s
possessions that they find in the skyship.
The creature slowly recovers under
Edith’s care. Buck and Jed, an old friend from Buck’s teenage
days when he worked on cattle drives, discuss the virtues of
carrying on a range war with Renner. They realize Sheriff Brucker
isn’t going to come out to the K-10 - he has plenty to do keeping
peace with the silver rush going on in Contention City. Graax, the
creature, learns to speak English.
Edith says the creature is healing
faster than any human she’s ever seen. Still, it’s not fast
enough for Buck. He’s inconvenienced by the creature’s
convalescence and worries that he’s never going to get any better.
There’s a ranch to run and the creature causes everybody too much
extra work.
In the last episode, the cultural and
language education of Graax the space alien by Buck’s daughter
Becky get underway. He learns many common words. His language skills
grow exponentially.
Episode #8
I started to see some of the get-up-and-go
that seemed absent from the creature's character at first. He was an
eager student of anything and everything humanlike - except my
daughter's games.
Graax wanted to do more than play. When my
daughter grew tired of playing school, she'd try to direct their
play (which is what she saw schooling the alien as) toward her dolls
or the toy tea set. Graax would humor her briefly before motioning
her back to the chalkboard, pencil and tablet. "I do not like
this game, Becky. Let us play schoolhouse, Becky," he'd say.
"I'm tired of teaching Mr. Graax,"
she'd reply.
"Just a little longer please today,
Becky?" he'd insist in a quivering whine that he could have
learned only from imitating her. It was only justice that she should
have that tortuous whine used against her.
Seeing his work ethic, I was doubly glad I
hadn't taken him to the convent in Tucson. I thought how maybe his
outsides healed before his insides. He'd be a good man to have
around the ranch.
During their schoolhouse games, the
learning flowed two ways. Becky learned words of his alien language.
Once he drew a rough picture of the
skyship on the tablet. "Brrouf'," he said, making a click
at the end of the word.
"Brrouf?" she repeated.
He nodded with gusto, satisfied. "Brrouf,"
he repeated in turn.
Maybe it wouldn't be such a chore to learn
another language, I considered. I'd sit with Graax each day after my
work was done. We'd talk by the light of the kerosene lamp where we
could read what we'd written. I wanted to find out all I could about
him and he was willing, even after having talked with a girl for so
long. With him learning a little English and me learning a little
Alien, we'd get along fine.
I wanted to learn it, but not use it. That
would be futile. I wasn't going to call his skyship a "brrouf."
Nothing against his language, but a sound like "brrouf"
couldn't be a proper word for anything. I'm sure it worked fine for
creatures like him. Not us. It never would. Even without the clicks
and whistles, it wasn't easy, natural or clear to say.
As the creature told us about his planet, I
made words to fit my mouth though I never changed his name. Granted,
it was as dumb-sounding of a name for a man as I had have ever heard,
with the possible exception of some Indian and Chinese names. Still,
it was his name. That particular foreign word wasn't so hard to say,
unlike some foreign names. When I addressed him, I often added
"Mr." not knowing whether Graax was his first, last or only
name. Didn't really see that it mattered, as he was alien after all.
We just had to make things up about what was and wasn't proper as we
went along. If I offended him, he'd let me know.
Learning from him, I had to make up words.
Putting two of our words together, I called the thing he crashed in a
"starship" or "spaceship." It wasn't just a "skyship".
The craft could do much more than fly through the sky. He explained he
rode it all the way from another planet in the belly of a much larger
spaceship.
That was the darnedest thing I ever heard -
up to that point. That was before I knew he’d have many more things
to say that would make a man get a headache from hearing it all.
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