Free Hazards by Mike Resnick

fact, that was my very thought as I left Cornelius MacNamarra’s chartreuse mansions behind me and moseyed alongside the Amazon, waiting for civilization to raise its head so I could get together with it and finally get around to the serious business of building the Tabernacle of Saint Luke. But the closest I came to civilization in the next week was a couple of little fellers who were wearing paint on their faces and not much else. They didn’t speak no known language, which is something they had in common with the French, and they kept staring at me as if they were wondering how my head would look in their trophy case, so I finally took my leave of them.
    I wish I could have took my leave of everything else, because I kept getting et by mosquitoes and hissed at by snakes and growled at by jaguars and giggled at by monkeys, and after I’d footslogged maybe another hundred miles and still hadn’t seen no shining cities filled to overflowing with sinners who were in desperate need of a man of the cloth like myself, I figgered maybe the cities had all migrated to the south when no one was looking, so I took a left turn and put the Amazon River behind me.
    Now, I knew South America had a bunch of cities even back then, places like Rio and Buenos Aires and Caracas and Saigon, but it was like they’d seen me coming and had all tiptoed away before I could lay eyes on any of ’em. I picked up a female companion named Petunia along the way. She was a real good listener, but she didn’t say nothing and she smelled just terrible, especially after a rainstorm (of which we had an awful lot), and after a few days I finally had to admit that I just didn’t have much in common with lady tapirs, and we parted ways.
    I kept trudging along, keeping my spirits up by reading my well-worn copy of the Good Book, and finally, after another couple of weeks, the forest started retreating, the mosquitoes found other things to do, the animals took umbrage when I kept reciting the Eighth and Fourteenth Commandments at ’em, and even the rain decided it had urgent business elsewhere. The land flattened out, the sun came out of hiding, and suddenly I was in this pasture that must have been a couple of hundred miles long, give or take a few inches.
    And as I looked over my surroundings, I began to realize that this wasn’t like no part of South America I had ever seen, and I’d seen an awful lot of it, starting with San Palmero and working my way through the Island of Annoyed Souls and this big wet area everyone called the Amazon Basin though I didn’t see nary a single wash basin, with or without no love-starved Amazons, the whole time I was walking through it.
    I kept looking around and thinking that maybe I’d fallen asleep and sleptwalked to some new country. I was still mulling on it when I realized I’d been walking forever and a day, and I decided to lay down right on the grass, and if there’d been a desk clerk I’d have told him not to wake me ’til maybe half past Tuesday, and then I was snoring to beat the band.
    I woke up when something kind of cold and sort of wet and more than a little bit pushy rubbed against my face.
    “I’m sleeping,” I said.
    It nudged me kind of gently.
    “Go away,” I said, scrunching up my eyes. “It’s a holiday somewhere in the world. I’ll get a job tomorrow.”
    Then whatever it was pressed right up against my ear and said “Moo!”
    “What in tarnation was that ?” I bellowed, jumping to my feet.
    Suddenly I heard a dozen more moos , and I looked around, and damned if I wasn’t surrounded by some of the fattest cows I’d ever seen. There were hundreds of ’em, maybe thousands, and they’d all snuck on me my while I was sleeping.
    And then I thought, well, maybe they didn’t exactly sneak up. Maybe they live here.
    “Moo!” said a few dozen of ’em, staring at me with big brown cows’ eyes, as if they were begging me to come on over and choose a steak for dinner.
    And then,