by Robert Adams
At last, he desisted. He could evoke a dim ghost of a memory, but no more. It had just been too long; too many more recent scenes overlay that long-dead past now. Funny, he could easily remember women he had had, back then, in some detail, could recall the performance of fine cars and boats he had owned, but still the broader picture of that lost world eluded him.
“Just as well, likely,” he muttered under his breath. “Let the dead stay buried. They’d be as lost in this time and environment as we would be in theirs.”
The bowman ahead of him in the single file half turned. “Yes, Uncle Milo . . . ?” he mindspoke.
Milo smiled, and answered as silently, “Never mind, Pat. I was talking to myself.”
The ground was harder underfoot, under the layers of snow; the men’s bootsoles now frequently slipped on the surfaces of rocks and boulders thrusting up from out of the frozen earth, forcing them to throw out their arms for balance or grasp at trees and shrubs for support.
At an overly thick copse of brush and trees, the spoor veered to the right, and the hunters relentlessly followed it.
* * *
The Hunter was aware of her pursuit very soon after it commenced, since her pursuers made almost as much noise as a stampeding herd of shaggy bulls. But she was easily maintaining her lead, despite the weakness and lancing agony that her left foreleg was become with the strain of dragging the stiffening, heavy carcass through the breast-deep snow and over the rough ground beneath it. Only when she neared the hillock atop which lay her den did she decide to take action against the persistent two-legs. Perhaps if she killed one of the pack, the others would feed on him as wolves did, and give her time to cover her trail to the den.
The Hunter had never had much contact with two-legs, but she had seen her mother killed by them, pierced through and through with the hateful little black sticks, then pinned to the ground, still snarling and snapping and clawing, by a longer stick in the hands of a two-leg sitting high on the back of a hornless four-leg. She did hate two-legs, did the Hunter, but she also respected them, so she laid her ambush with care.
She continued well past the spot she had chosen, then adroitly broke her trail by leaping atop a fallen free bole from which the night winds had scoured the snow. Climbing atop the mass of dead roots and frozen earth, the Hunter reared to her full length and carefully hung her precious deer over the broad branch of a still-standing tree. Below that branch, the trunk stood bare and the bark was slippery, so the carcass should be safe from the depredations of any other predator save perhaps a bear or another cat. And the only bear that stalked hereabouts was denned up a full day’s run to the north. The few small cats ran in mortal fear of the Hunter and would never venture so close to her den.
The soil was thin and rocky on the hillslope, and over the years many a tree had fallen to storms and winds. The Hunter now made use of these raised ways to make her way back to the ambush point she had chosen without leaving telltale tracks in the snow. Arriving at last in the thick brush, she bellied down and made a swift and silent passage to the opposite side of the copse. There she crouched, motionless as the tree trunks themselves, waiting.
The first two-leg, slightly crouched above her tracks. came abreast of the Hunter, then passed her, a long shiny-tipped stick dangling from one forepaw. Then came two two-legs, each grasping one of the horn-covered sticks that threw the deadly little black slicks; them, too, she allowed to pass around the point of the copse.
The third was bigger than the others, which most likely meant that he was leader of the pack, thought the Hunter. He bore neither long stick nor short, but three of an intermediate length. Soundless as death itself, the Hunter hurled her weight upon this pack leader. Even as she bore him to earth, she thrust her good, right forepaw around his head, hooked her big claws into the flesh over the jaw, then jerked sharply back and to the right.
The Hunter growled deep satisfaction at the snapping of the neck. Then she spun upon her haunches and bounded back into the brush-grown copse, leaving the other two-legs shouting behind her. Many of the little black sticks were hurled after her, but only one of the hastily aimed missiles fleshed, and that one only split the tip of her ear before hissing on to rattle among the tree trunks.
Well satisfied with her strategem, the Hunter negotiated the width of the copse and made her way back to where she had cached her deer, directly this time, for there now was no need to hide her spoor. Soon she and her three kittens would be feasting upon tasty deer flesh, while the two-legs would probably be tearing at the carcass of their dead leader.
* * *
Milo could not repress a groan as Dik Esmith dabbed a bit of homespun cloth at the hot blood gushing from the claw-torn cheek.
“Let be, Dik, let be,” he gasped. “That cat is not only canny she’s strong as a horse. She broke my neck like a dry twig, but it will knit quickly enough. Just leave me here.
“She’s most likely broken trail, so some of you had better scout around and see where the spoor takes up again. Djim, you and a couple of bowmen backtrack her through that copse, but be damned careful — you’ve all seen what she can do.”
Milo lay still feeling the pains of regeneration of bone and tissue already commencing. He was aware that Dik and one other squatted nearby, unwilling to leave him hurt and alone in this cold and dangerous place.
“They’re good men,” he thought, “all of them. I’m glad it was me that that wily flea factory chose as victim, and not one of them. In thirty minutes, those tears in my cheek will be fading scars and even the vertebrae will be sound again in an hour or less. But if she’d jumped one of them, we’d be bearing a well-dead Linsee or Esmith back to camp.”
For the many-thousandth time he wondered what had made him the kind of being he was, wondered if he was unique on the earth, or if, somewhere, there might be others of his kind. Over the course of the hundred fifty-odd years of life he could remember, he had suffered wounds enough to have slain a hundred ordinary men — he had been gunshot, stabbed, slashed, cut and clubbed. Once an axe had taken off his left hand above the wrist, but it had regrown; twice he had lost the same ear, yet he now had two.
With an agonizing tingle, life was coming back into his arms and legs and body. When he could easily flex his limbs and abdominal muscles, Milo rose to sit propped on his hands.
Shortly Djim Linsee approached and proffered a horn cup of clear, icy water. Milo gulped the fluid gratefully.
The tracker sank down before him. “There are many fallen trees just beyond this place, Uncle Milo. The cat must have doubled back across them, for we could only find the tracks she made when she ran away. She had hung the deer up in a tree, and after she took it down, she went uphill at an angle to the right until she came to flowing water. The stream bed is all rock, so where she went from there, upstream or down, is anybody’s guess. But I have a feeling . . .”
“That she went upstream?” asked Milo.
Djim nodded quickly. “Cats always seek high places. I climbed a tree on the stream bank and looked uphill. The slope is very much steeper farther on, but the top of the hill is flat and level and virtually treeless. Near the center of the hilltop is a high and spreading pile of rocks. True, I could not see any openings that looked big enough for such a cat to go into, but then I could only see the one side.
“Don’t ask me how, Uncle Milo, but I know her den is in there, in those rocks!”
Chapter II
But when Milo stood up, he nearly fell again. Seeing him so unsteady, Dik and Djim half-led, half-carried him up to the bank of the little stream. With his charge seated against the thick bole of an elderly oak, Dik mindspoke his clansmen to gather squaw-wood, brought steel and stone and tinder from out his beltpouch and soon had the dry stuff smoking quickly.
For some time, they had been hearing, now and again, the howling of wolves, but such was not an unusual sound either upon high plains or mountains. In the dead of a hard winter such as this, the packs often joined into superpac
ks and hunted almost constantly, day and night, small game or big, resting only on those rare occasions that their bellies had a modest quantity of food to work upon.
However, the howls of this pack were becoming louder, and that meant nearer! Now and again, gusts of wind bore the excited yelping of wolves on a flesh trail . . . and no man in the party had the slightest doubt about just whose trail those gaunt grey demons were on.
Once, long ago, Milo had faced a big wolfpack, while afoot, in open country. He had come out of it alive and whole, but more than half the score or so of warriors he had started with had not been so lucky, and even those who lived had carried scars of that fearsome battle to their graves.
Milo forced himself erect and set himself to control the shakiness of his legs. “Dik, Djim, the rest of you, this is no fit place to try to fight off Wind knows how many wolves. And we number too few, even were the conditions ideal.
“Now, true, we could each climb a tree and rope ourselves into it, but we could very easily freeze to death, so exposed this coming night, or die of hunger or thirst before those stubborn devils left.
“Djim, you say that the hill ahead is steep. How steep?” The intuitive tracker sensed his embryonic plan and shook his shaggy blond head. “Not that steep, Uncle Milo. We won’t be able to go up as easily as a cat, and the wolves will have even more trouble, but they and we will be able to climb it.”
“Then how about the rocks on the summit, Djim?”
The tracker closed his eyes and wrinkled his brow in concentration, then opened them with an incisive nod of his head. “Yes, Uncle Milo, the rocks are all overgrown with vines, but there are places that are almost sheer for seven or eight feet or more near the very top. And the top looks to have a depression in the center, so it may offer some protection from the winds.”
The way was steep, very steep, and might have been deadly treacherous in better, warmer weather, but now, at least, the jumbled blackish rocks were frozen into place and only a few shifted under the weights of the climbing men. The sounds from behind spurred their straining muscles to further efforts. The wolves had reached the stream now, and were fanning out to find the place where the men had come out of the swift-flowing water.
Milo alone recognized the rocks up which they frantically scrambled for what they were — much-weathered shards of old asphalt. A hundred years ago this had no doubt been part of a road leading to the hilltop, but fivescore freezing winters and as many scorching summers had buckled and cracked it. Then, undercut by erosion, the easy, manmade gradient had given way, the fill had washed down to the base of the hillock and left behind the heavier chunks of paving.
Milo led the way, knowing that any rock that would bear his weight would certainly not give under the lighter men who followed him. As he pulled himself over the rim, he heard the triumphant signaling howl of a wolf, a wolf that had sniffed out their trail. Now bare seconds were precious as rubies.
Djim Linsee was the next to clamber onto the level ground, and he and Milo grasped the arms of each of the others as they came into reach and pulled them up by main strength, bidding them run for the stone ruin — for such Milo could see it to be — some eighty yards across the tiny mesa. But even as they raised the last man, Dik Esmith, the first of the wolves ran snarling to the foot of the incline, there to rear on his hind legs and voice his savage view-halloo.
Djim snatched up a piece of loose stone as big as his two fists and hurled it with all his wiry strength and with deadly accuracy. His narrow skull shattered, the big dog-wolf fell without even a whimper, to lie twitching below them. But his last howl had been heard and understood. An increasing chorus of wolf-sounds told Milo and Djim of the grey death coming on as fast as the hunger-driven beasts could run.
* * *
In her den, full of deer meat and languidly laving her kittens with her wide red tongue, having to hold the squirming bundles of soft fur down with her good forepaw, the Hunter had heard the wolves afar off, long before the less sensitive ears of the two-legs could have been aware of the huge pack.
But the Hunter knew herself to be safe, even should the pack ascend the hill. Even with an injured forepaw, the big cat realized that she was more than a match for any one wolf, and no more then one wolf at a time could crawl into the narrow, winding passage that led to this den. Too, her eyes were better adapted to the near-total darkness that prevailed beyond the first couple of turns of the passage.
Three winters ago, she and her now-dead mate had lazily taken turns at killing wolves starved or crazed enough to enter the confines of that passage. As many had they killed as she had claws on her forepaws, and as fast as the cats’ mighty buffets crushed skulls or snapped necks, as fast as their long fangs tore out throats, so last did others of the pack drag out their dead or dying fellows to tear them apart in an orgy of lupine cannibalism.
At last, though, the edges of their hunger slightly dulled by their grisly repast, the pack had trotted off to seek out less dangerous prey. And the Hunter, gently swishing her long, thick tail and watching the kittens’ wobbling stalks and bumbling leaps at the tailtip with a critical maternal eye, knew that she was still capable of defending herself and her young from any number of wolves.
* * *
The building that was now become but ruin had been fashioned of bricks and rough-hewn blocks of granite. Milo could see no clues as to what had caused the collapse of the structure, but he was not really looking. Djim and another extraordinarily agile man had somehow gotten atop the almost smooth, almost vertical eight-foot-plus wall and Milo was now using his prodigious strength to lift the other four, one by one, holding them at arm’s length over his head, that those above might drag them up.
The wolfpack was howling and yelping below the hill. A few had already scrabbled up the difficult ascent and were even now racing flat out toward the ruin, howling back the message that the quarry were in sight. The last Horseclansman raised and safe on high. Milo stepped back a couple of paces and leaped upward, his arms stretched upward toward the hands that reached for him. But his legs failed to deliver their usual power and even collapsed under him as he fell back, sending him tumbling down to the very foot of the ruin.
Only fifty feet distant was the nearest wolf — its red tongue lolling over its cruel white fangs, short spurts of mist jetting from its nostrils, and pure murder shining from yellow eyes.
Milo fought back onto his feet and retraced his way to the foot of the sheer wall. Even as he reached it and grasped the joined belts the Horseclansmen had lowered, he could hear the claws of the big wolf clicking on exposed surfaces of the ruin. The animal’s panting sounded unbelievably loud and Milo even imagined that he could feel the hot, dank breath on the back of his neck.
As the Horseclansmen drew him up, he freed his right hand and drew his saber, for he sensed himself rising very slowly, too slowly. His head and shoulders already were above the upper edge of the ruin when the wolf arrived where he had been. Without any discernible pause, the ravenous beast jumped high, jaws agape.
The wolf’s first jump missed, but then so did the swing of Milo’s saber. On the second jump, the slavering jaws brushed Milo’s bootsole, but his keen-edged saber took off most of one furry ear, and with the surprised yelp of a kicked dog, the wolf fell back. The determined animal essayed one more leap, but by then Milo’s legs were disappearing over the top edge of the ruin.
They were safe for the moment, but as more and more grey shapes debouched onto the mesa, it became more and ever more clear that their situation was distinctly unenviable.
The wall up which they had come was the lowest side of the tower, so they were at least safe from wolves, so long as they stayed on high. However, although the tower top was slightly concave, the floor was only bare inches below the jagged rim, offering no trace of protection from wind, which, judging from the rime of ice and lack of snow, must be vicious and biting here, so high.
Nor was there anything burnable. While each man carried a few ounce
s of fatty pemmican in his belt pouch, none had more than enough for one full day. Moreover, none of them had brought water bottles, knowing that they could slake their thirst with snow, but this eyrie was bare of snow.
Husbanding their bare dozen arrows against greater need, the Horseclansmen used their heavy-bladed dirks to work loose jagged chunks of granite and weather-worn bricks, then they and Milo spent the rest of the waning daylight teaching the wolves to keep a respectable distance from the tower.
Horseclansmen were ever prone to gambling, they would wager on anything, and Uncle Milo was asked to bear witness to numerous bets while the supply of missiles lasted — cattle, weapons, old bits of gaudy loot, even women and horses. At least a dozen wolves were either killed outright or so badly crippled that they could not flee or fight off the packmates that savaged them and devoured their sometimes living flesh.
The night was terrible. Rolling pebbles in their mouths to allay their thirst, the nomads laced their hoods tightly and drew the woolen blizzard masks up over lips and vulnerable noses. In the very center of the concavity, they huddled together for warmth, frequently changing position that all might have equal time in the warmer, centermost position.
Not that sleep was easy, for the wolves paced and howled snuffled and barked and yelped throughout the long, dark night. Wolf after wolf set himself at the sheer walls, jumping and falling back to jump again until exhaustion claimed him. The pack seemed driven mad by the smell of so much manflesh and blood, so near, yet so unattainable to them.
Light came at last, but there was no visible sun and no cessation of the biting wind. The signs were unmistakable that a blizzard was building up. Milo knew that were he and his men to survive the coming weather, they must get off this exposed pinnacle and into shelter of some kind. But how?
The wolves paced the length and breadth of the little mesa. They numbered at least threescore, possibly more — grey wolves and those of a dirty brown color, with here and there a black one. Milo could almost feel pity for the canines, for they were obviously starving, with ribracks clearly visible beneath the dull, matted coats.
