The Only Thing He Hadn't Hunted was a Martian

The March 1951 cover of Planet Stories is one of the best known, featuring a dynamic image from Leigh Bracket's novella Black Amazon of Mars, which is also one of her best-known stories.

But that isn't the only version of Mars featured in that issue. Poul Anderson sends us to the Red Planet as well--this one a version of the planet that has a thin atmosphere requiring us poor Earthmen to wear helmets, but also includes an intelligent native species.

"Duel on Syrtis" is set long after man has colonized Mars and gone through a phase in which we were enslaving the natives--called by the derogatory term "owlies" because of their owl-like faces.

Times have changed, though. Slavery is outlawed and there's even talk of giving the Martians the right to vote. This annoys a wealthy big-game hunter named Riordan. He's hunted game all over the solar system--"From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he'd bagged them all. Except, of course, a Martian. That particular game was forbidden now."

But Riordan knows that if you throw enough money at a problem, you can usually make it go away. Soon, he has information about a Martian named Kreega, who lives alone in an isolated location. Soon, Riordan is stalking Kreega with a rifle and a couple of Martian animals analogous to a hunting bird and a bloodhound.

Kreega, at least at first, is caught outside without any weapons. Despite this, he knows the land and he has a symbiotic relationship with the flora and fauna of the surrounding desert.

But what advantage can the ability to give commands to a small, harmless sand-mouse give the Martian? Perhaps a tad more than Riordan--or the reader--suspects.

This science fiction variation of "The Most Dangerous Game" is a lot of fun, with Anderson carefully setting up the conditions of the hunt that make the brutally ironic ending appropriate and believable. As I've written before, evil big game hunters are pretty much everywhere, but they rarely meet a happy end.

This story has fallen into the public domain, so you can read it HERE.