The Clan of the Cats

by Robert Adams

  “But Gus and Harry never could seem to understand, after that one terrible incident, and I think that in large measure, their unceasing animosity and uncompromising distrust of him and anything that he suggested or did was a primary reason that he left us when and as he did. I, at least, know and recognize and acknowledge the patent debt we all owe Dr. Clarence Bookerman. for without his experiments and the notes he left for me to find, the survival of the group whose descendants are become the Horseclans would’ve been a very chancy, iffy thing, indeed.

  “Nomadic life is hard — always has been, always will be — the mortality rate is high, the suffering severe, so that even with a bit of an edge on survival, only the very toughest ever live long enough to breed more of their rugged kind. Aspects of Bookerman’s unquestioned genius, it was, that gave the Horseclans progenitors that precious edge.

  “They might’ve still survived, some of them anyway, with only my guidance, true. But despite my years of warring and hunting all over the world, I still was basically a creature of the then-recent past — of the late twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries — and, as such, far too dependent upon manufactured chemicals, drugs and equipment to have done those people all that much good in their initial, desperate struggles to adapt, to learn to survive their new, incredibly rugged life as herders on the prairie, lacking almost everything they needed in the beginning, especially the knowledges of how to adapt naturally occurring items to their needs.

  “Bookerman, on the other hand, could draw upon the personal and empiric knowledge of centuries rather than just some few mere scores of years.

  “From the few hints I heard from him and read in his letter and notes. I think he must have lived through at least a part of the seventeenth century and, certainly, through all of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth, so he had memories of how things had been done, made, fashioned and from what raw materials before the industrial age, even, much less the technological age. It was these memories, plus his spate of experiments, that made his notebooks so precious to the people he left in my care.

  “I wonder if he has survived? Probably. I wonder just where he is now. What he’s doing? I wonder if ever I’ll run across him again, too, I wonder that often. I sure hope so.

  “Back to the cats, now. They, too, could be a very definite survival edge for the Horseclans. People used to state that as opposed to dogs, horses and other domestic animals, cats were untrainable, sneaky and unreliable if not inherently vicious, and they were right as far as they took their argument and the thoughts behind it.

  “Cats are indeed different from dogs or any others of the so-called domestic animals; I recall reading once that the cat tribe constitute the epitome of predator development, are one of the most highly evolved forms of mammal, very adaptable and so able to live and breed in a vast range of habitats — subarctic to tropic, swamp to desert, mountain to prairie. From a cave in a ruin to a yurt on the plains? Maybe.

  “Unlike a dog, which will learn to do just about anything to please its master, will quickly adapt its life-style to fit that same master’s, cats own their own, peculiar set of priorities and will seldom forgo any of those feline imperatives for any other creature or purpose.

  “Your cat has a principal imperative of keeping its belly full of high-protein food, and it knows it must feed and care for its young, protect them until they are big enough to see to their own needs. Cats sleep or rest a great deal and possess relatively little stamina over a long haul, so they must have a safe, secure or guarded place to sleep and must obtain their necessary high-protein food with as little stress and danger as possible. They feel pain and suffering as keenly as any animal and they naturally try to avoid anything that would hurt or injure them.

  “These two, this mated pair of this singular kind of long-fanged cat, have adapted to hunting in conceit with me and the other men simply because I was able to convince them, to show them, that it was to their advantage to do so as much as it was to ours. This way, they get their bellies filled on a fairly regular basis with the kinds of food best suited to them and they do so with far less exertion and danger of injury than they would’ve had they been doing the usual kind of feline hunting — the kind of tooth-and-claw killing that cost the life of the Mother’s mate and her own crippling injury. The stalk always takes a long while, and it therefore bums up energy, but the most dangerous moments of a hunt — dangerous to the cat or cats — is always the kill, when it is of necessity close enough to be itself killed or crippled by the horns, hooves, teeth or sheer strength of its prey. Hunting in cooperation with us has not only shortened the stalking time, it has eliminated physical risk to the cats, and for these reasons they are more than willing to continue with us as hunting companions.

  “They also seem to have quickly learned that it is safe to sleep nearby us, that we not only will not ourselves harm them, but that we will protect them from any other living creature, so they have come to feel safe and secure with us here.

  “My next task, of course, is going to be to try to sell them and their certain value to the rest of the clansfolk . . . and the rest of the clansfolk to them. It will help that so many Horseclansfolk own at least some degree of telepathy and so, conceivably, will be able to actually communicate, mind to mind, with these cats, as they can none of them — or me, either, for that matter — with our dogs and hounds. If these strange cats are as intelligent as I think they are, that will help, too.”

  He chuckled to himself, thinking, “The next clan to join us may be a clan composed of sizable, four-legged, furry clansfolk with fur and claws and fangs — the Clan of the Cats.”

  About The Author

  ROBERT ADAMS lives in Seminole County, Florida. Like the characters in his books, he is partial to fencing and fancy swordplay, hunting and riding, good food and drink. At one time Robert could be found slaving over a hot forge, making a new sword or busily reconstructing a historically accurate military costume, but, unfortunately, he no longer has time for this as he’s far too busy writing.