Ryan was on his feet in an instant, dashing after Kam and the warbling bleat of the wounded antelope. Thickening underbrush under the trees and the twisting game trail blocked sight of the prey, and even Kam had pulled ahead and out of sight after a hundred feet. However, the boy could scent the warm blood, and see the faint heat of the arterial drops sprayed on the leaves and ground. He spotted the first spear he’d thrown, where it had pulled loose when the dangling shaft was snagged in shrubbery.
He snatched it up on the run, and glanced at the bloodied tip. There was hair and a bit of flesh caught in the barbs he’d cut along the sides of the long point. The end of the tip had broken, and the barbs were not large enough to prevent the shaft from pulling out so easily. He analyzed this in an instant as he ran, thinking of how he’d modify his spear tips when he hunted the next time.
Suddenly, his nose told him his eyes had missed something when he looked at the spear tip. The scent had almost vanished. He turned back and saw where the antelope, without the drag of the long spear shaft in its left shoulder had leaped over a low bush where the trail had bent slightly. It was trying to slow Kam’s pursuit by forcing its own bigger body through the brush, away from the relatively clear game trail.
Ryan leaped over the three-foot shrub, holding both spears high in his right hand above the foliage, and followed the trail recently broken through the low bushes by the antelope and Kam. He heard a high pitch pouncing scream again from Kam, slightly off to his right front, accompanied by the prey’s own increased squalling. Kam had caught the antelope.
Ryan angled towards the sounds, and found that the trees were thinning out, and the shrubbery was thinner and lower, probably due to frequent browsing. They had reached one of the meandering edges of the tree grove, and the savanna lay ahead. The antelope was down in tall grass, but struggling in Kam’s grip.
The hundred-pound cat could only hold the thousand pound animal down because it was exhausted, bleeding, and had a foot of broken spear shaft protruding from its left chest. Claws grasping the shoulder and neck, his jaw locked on the windpipe under the head, Kam was discovering that subduing the larger animal wasn’t as easy as he’d expected. His jaws and fangs, although powerful for his size, were not large enough to close off the windpipe completely. Kam, if he was alone, would find it a waiting game as the prey slowly bled to death, or kicked its way free.
Ryan rushed through the grass, and just before he reached the pair struggling on the ground, he dropped his dulled spear, raised the unused one high over his head with both hands, and leaped three feet into the air above the kicking hooves. His study of the anatomy of Koban animals, a subject permitted by the house AI, guided his spear’s downward plunge. The slender point, with his full weight and both arm thrusts behind it, pierced the lower chest between the front legs, and passed between a pair of ribs to enter the heart. It was over in seconds. They had their first joint hunting kill.
They both relaxed to catch their breath, while Kam continued to frill the antelope as its mind faded. The young ripper had been relishing the fear of the terrified animal, “tasting” for the first time what older rippers had conveyed to him. The sensation of a dying animal, and its fear of the predator that had conquered it, was nearly as thrilling to the cats as eating the prey. Nearly.
Kam didn’t regret the spear thrust that mercifully ended the struggle sooner, but he still liked the pleasure of the power and dominance he’d felt earlier as the wounded animal collapsed beneath his pounce.
Ryan had sensed some of that terror and pain when his perspiring hands slipped down the shaft to touch the antelope, but he quickly pulled back to avoid sensing the animal’s final dying thoughts and images. Humans had not evolved to crave this particular predator’s reward, which only the rippers and other members of Koban’s cat families wanted to sense.
Humans were indeed predators, and he certainly intended to eat some of this kill he was proud of making, but he didn’t care to experience the prey’s final pain and fear.
Rippers believed it was their sensing of the prey’s thoughts, which made them sensitive to never wasting the meat of a kill. They never killed for pleasure, even though they took pleasure in the process.
Some non-Kobani humans were prone to kill for pleasure, and were often willing to waste meat from a kill, such as the organs that many humans didn’t like very much. Those humans with Mind Tap didn’t kill wantonly, but most avoided sensing the moment of death of what they killed.
The Kobani philosophy was strange to the rippers, yet it still produced swift merciful kills on hunts, little meat wastage since they collected the organs as gifts, for wild ripper prides, or to share with wolfbat scouts. Seldom did a full Kobani engage in non-food related killing, with the exception of self-defense, or when fighting the merciless Krall. In that special case, the rippers accepted and shared human intolerance of the genocidal and vastly wasteful aliens.
After a brief respite, Kam tore into the carcass to sample the warm heart, tearing with his jaws and claws around the final spear wound, growing bloody in the task. He distained Ryan’s offer to cut the animal open with his knife. Instead, the boy started the unsavory task of field dressing the large antelope. He’d see this done on a smaller scale, from his secret hiding place in the barn loft at their homestead, when his mother or father dressed out a gazelle for family consumption. However, those were much smaller animals, perhaps less than a quarter the size of this one.
Later, with Kam’s help to tug at the hide and remove most of it from the carcass, the meat was exposed for sectioning. Ryan had tried to use a vine passed over a tree limb, to lift the carcass by the hind legs, to make the work easier, but the ropey material wasn’t strong enough. They also didn’t have the combined mass to pull the weight off the ground anyway. Ryan trimmed the hide into large pieces, and wrapped it around some of the deboned meat. Some had bones still in the large pieces that he’d clumsily sectioned. When finished cutting away all they could hope to take with them, they scattered pieces into the pack of eight wild Jenkins “dogs,” which had followed their ears and noses to the sounds and smell of the kill.
The skinny dog-sized, normally cowardly animals, named after the first unfortunate man a large pack had turned into prey, kept well clear of the ripper cub. After a few swats from a spear shaft, and a painful jab of the point into a butt, they also stayed well back from the boy. There were dozens of feathered reptile scavenger “birds” circling overhead, awaiting their turn at any remains. Nothing would be left to rot, although for the two hunters, any meat not taken home to their “den” was felt as their loss.
Ryan cut some straight saplings as poles, and wove branches and used more of the vines to make a travois. They loaded it with the meat, and he and Kam planned to drag it back to the compound fence. There they would pass the hide wrapped meat packets, one at a time, under and though the fences.
It proved to be much harder than they expected, because they found they couldn’t use the narrow twisting game trails as Ryan had hoped. The weight of so much meat was too great for the materials they had available to make the travois if they took that rugged route. They had selected too large an animal to hunt, not really thinking about how much it would still weigh after dressed out. The smaller gazelles were all Ryan had to go by for experience. Both hunters filed the lessons away today for future hunts.
Forced to leave more meat behind than expected, they felt a sense of shame at the loss, but knew some rather scrawny Jenkins dogs could use the bounty that was seldom left behind by larger predators. They had to take a circuitous route around the grove at the tree line edges, where it was more open, and easer to drag the heavy load. Nevertheless, the travois needed frequent repairs as vines and support limbs worked loose. Kam found that his jaw was a poor substitute for human hands, for holding and pulling a pole.
At one resting point, scraping dried blood and dirt from his thumbnail watch, Ryan saw they had already taken an hour and a half longer than the maximum time
he had expected to be gone. They still had to get their booty back and passed under the fence, lifted into the attic, clean up, and then store the meat in the large underground family freezer. There it would stay frozen, stacked under other meat they often received in trade, being saved for winter consumption when whiteraptors made hunting risky. Doing this, without Doc Trent hearing what they were up to, as they ferried the meat down to the basement would be tricky, but the basement door was in the garage.
Kam had little personal concept of the detailed measure of time, other than morning, mid-day, evening, and night. However, the ripper cub knew it was getting late in the afternoon, and they had at least another hour of dragging the travois around the edge of the grove of trees. Lack of an advance scout trip through the woods was revealing serious holes in the little boy’s previously “perfect” plan. Kam shared this tidbit with the boy, with the expected sour reply.
As they rounded the grove and caught first sight of the compound fencing, they gradually moved deeper into the trees before the house was in view, to stay hidden from the cameras. When they had worked their way to the trail they had followed when they entered the grove, they walked along that towards where the house would be.
Soon the garage wall came into view through the thinning trees, and Ryan made certain they stayed in line with the side of the house, thus out of sight of surveillance cameras. It wouldn’t do to get careless now, after so much effort. He looked at the barn behind the house wistfully. He wished it were reachable without being seen by the AI. He even considered going into the house and shutting off the rear cameras so they could get there. Like that wouldn’t be reported by Sam.
They could have left the meat in the barn overnight, safe from small scavengers, without all the lifting work they had ahead. The rope still hung from the vent opening, and the piled dark dirt from the trench was visible at the electric fence.
Tired or not, starved for more food or not, the two tired but intrepid hunters trudged out of the woods towards the outer fence, their first obstacle to pass. Ryan and Kam left the travois on the ground there and tediously relayed the bound meat packages past the three fences up to the garage wall, where they were stacked. There was probably four hundred pounds of meat and bones.
Retracing the route they had taken to the outer fence, Ryan started to dismantle and hide the travois pieces in the trees. Next, he would replace the semicircle wire section he’d cut from the outer fence, fill in and smooth the dirt over the trench, and heft the meat (and Kam) up into the attic by rope. He should have borrowed the hand-cranked winch in the garage for winding up the rope, and not have to use his arms. He sighed.
Ryan checked his watch again as he paused to rest under the shade of a tree, drank the last of the water, which he shared with Kam. He made an estimate, and touched Kam’s frill. “It will be an hour before the sun sets when we get back into the attic. I’m starved, but we have to clean up before we go downstairs.”
Kam was also tired, but he had more energy than did Ryan. He’d consumed his fill of ten pounds of raw meat hours earlier, when Ryan had cut up the carcass and made the meat packages.
He frilled his satisfaction, and made an observation. “I thought rhinolo cubes were good when I first ate them, but antelope we killed ourselves tastes so much better. You only ate cooked gazelle meat you brought from home today. You should try fresh warm antelope, with the blood. You wouldn’t be so hungry now.”
Ryan shot back, with a hint of revulsion emoted, “I’ll eat two juicy cooked antelope burgers tonight. I’ll even make one for Doc Trent. He’ll think it came from our home stock of fresh ground gazelle meat. That will be a perfect end to a perfect day of hunting.”
A loud sounding snort behind them suddenly dissuaded him of that childish fantasy.
****
The sound originated from a faded and scarred blue-green wall of flesh, standing next to the outer fence of the compound. A huge rhinolo bull was sniffing the ground where the two young hunters had crawled under the outer fence.
Wandering forlornly at the edge of the trees, avoiding being seen by his former herd, it had unexpectedly detected the scent of a ripper and a human. Two creatures it was less than tolerant of on any day, but particularly now, after the defeated old bull was forced to yield to a younger and stronger competitor. He’d lost control of the females he’d protected and bred with for many years, reigning all those seasons as the dominant male of his herd.
He’d lost a battle and his herd leadership position yesterday, and was now a battered and rogue castoff without a harem. In short, he was pissed off and looking for some measure of revenge on the universe. His huge head swiveled right to look at the odd, unnatural looking formation of the building. The experienced bull recognized the territory he’d been passing belonged to the small two legged creatures it hated and sometimes killed members of his herd. As usual, it was protected by death vines. Scenting the ground again, he swung his head left to look into the woods.
Unlike the partial namesake of the extinct rhinoceros of Earth, which humans had bestowed on these savanna animals, this grazer had excellent distance vision. He suddenly saw an opportunity for a small measure of redemption. He loudly snorted his pleasure, and prepared to charge.
It was good to feel like a dominate bull again.
The two inexperienced young hunters had been resting with their backs turned to the house, facing away from a hot white sun low on the horizon and in their eyes; they were looking into the slowly darkening woods, where they had experience the greatest adventure of their short lives. Thus far.
They were upwind of the bull and hadn’t scented his approach, and the huge padded feet of a rhinolo were quiet on the loamy soil, unless thundering when moving their massive bodies at high speed. Achieving that speed was something the bull initiated now, and with a bellow it turned and charged at the two despised interlopers in its world, the horn with a broken tip lowered for the attack. He would pound their remains into the soil, after first goring and repeatedly tossing their lifeless and broken bodies into the air.
The instant Ryan and Kam heard the snort and looked around, the boy’s hand made contact with the cat’s frill. They exchanged a rapid series of thoughts, ideas, and images, to arrive at a course of action in seconds. This was a mental exchange only possible between members of the Koban cat families, and now the Kobani.
“Good luck!” Was the simultaneous and spontaneous shared thought before they separated contact, as they stood up to face the five and a half Earth-tons of blue death charging their way, a bit over eight and a third tons of Koban fury.
The small boy and young cub nervously waited for the beast to pick up speed, to get close enough for them try something suicidal. Not that they had an alternative.
When the lumbering juggernaut was thirty feet way, perhaps up to thirty-five miles per hour by then and building speed, the boy moved. He used hands and feet to scramble up the eighteen-inch diameter tree trunk, against which he’d previously been resting. He climbed only half way to the top, to an elevation just slightly above the nearly three-meter height of the front shoulder hump of the rhinolo. Kam had simultaneously reversed his body to face directly away from the beast, but stood his ground, looking over his right shoulder.
The sharp eyes of the rhinolo saw what both of them were doing, and when they didn’t split up, and run in opposite directions, he knew he had them both! The tree was a soft wood fern tree and its trunk would snap like a wet twig when he plowed into it, knocking the little biped to the ground where it could be reached. The young ripper, all alone without a pride to support him couldn’t harm the bull, and he wouldn’t have the speed or stamina to outrun the bull’s charges very long. All the little cat had was agility, and that wouldn’t save him indefinitely.
When the bull was within a couple of feet of the tree, the cat made a sudden leap to his right. The rhinolo’s deep-set eyes were recessed within a boney ridge and socket, nature’s protection from the horns of other bull
s when in a dominance duel. He didn’t have any visual coverage of what was above him when his head and horn was lowered, as it was now. He could see the cat, but not the human. However, where could the pathetic, pink little tree-climbing biped go? They couldn’t fly.
The horn, an inch broken from the slender tip in his last duel with that younger bull, was still sharp enough to shatter its way through the soft wood of the tree trunk near its base. As the horn penetrated, he jerked his head up in a powerful pull of thick neck muscles, which snapped the trunk and lifted it into the air. Raising his head, as he simultaneously turned towards the right after the cat, he would see which way the biped fell when it was dislodged from its precarious perch. Raising his head that high necessarily caused him to lose sight briefly of the ground, and young ripper he was pursuing.
The sight of the upper tree, lifted and pushed aside by the massive head and left shoulder of the rhinolo, didn’t reveal a falling biped shaken from its perch. Instead, the bull experienced a blurring of vision in his left eye, and sensed numbness on that side of his head and neck.
He also felt the tree branches fall onto his upper back and slide down, when his shoulder shoved the broken trunk aside. He leaned back and lowered his rear haunches to slow and turn to the right, kicking up masses of leafy litter and soil as he leaned back on his rear haunches to slow his charge, and made a nimble turn to his right, going after the ripper. He put his head down again to look for the cat, and had good vision on his right side. However, the young ripper wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Where was that stupid agile cat?
Koban Universe 1 Page 11
