A Woman of the Horseclans

by Robert Adams

  There was one other find. Set in the concrete floor at the fool of the spiral staircase was another trapdoor, this one a bit larger than the one above — about three feet by two feet.

  Milo filled and lit the larger lantern, then set it on the shelf and opened the second trapdoor with no difficulty to disclose more steel stairs, but these looking to be in better condition for all that they still beckoned down into darkness.

  He turned to the others saying, “Dik, Djim, you men all stay up here. I’ll mindcall if I need you or when I find food or water. Help yourselves to any of those rusty tools as take your fancy, but leave that thing in the corner behind the can alone — it was once a very deadly weapon, and it still might hurt or kill one of you if anyone tinkers with it.”

  The floor at the bottom of the second flight of stairs was concrete also, but it once had been covered with asphalt tiles. which crunched and powdered under Milo’s bootsoles. To his left a few yards was a jumble of tumbled and broken brick and granite blocks all covered with plant roots. Milo guessed that he was now within the main building of the ruin, whereon the tower sat perched.

  Behind and to his right, the remnants of rotted wood paneling partially covered what looked like still-sound brick walls. More of the rotted, ruined wood sheets framed the door ahead of him, its brass knob green with verdigris. Although the knob wined stiffly, it did turn. Nonetheless, the door remained firmly closed. Setting the lantern on the stairs, Milo put both hands and his full strength to the tasks of turning and shoving; at last, something popped tinnily and the door gave under his weight.

  The air that wafted out of this new darkness bore a hint of dankness and another ghost of a smell that set the hairs on Milo’s nape a-prickle. Loosening the dirk in its sheath, he raised the lantern and cautiously stepped through the doorway.

  Chapter IX

  There was a scratching at the door of the yurt. Mairee arose and padded over to open the carved wooden door, then push aside the layers of felt and allow an elderly prairiecat and retired cat chief, Bullbane, to enter.

  “May Sacred Sun shine good fortune upon all within this yurt.” The newcomer mindspoke the ritual greeting.

  “And may Wind blow to you all which you desire, Brothel Chief,” Dik Krooguh beamed in reply, adding. “Will you not join our circle? Uncle Milo had admitted us all into his memories and was enriching us with the tale of how, long ago, the brave race of the prairiecats first allied themselves with us Kindred.”

  “Wolfkiller? The mother of our race?” said the old cat.

  “Yes, it was Uncle Milo found her and her kittens in much danger and . . . But I am certain that Uncle Milo, who actually was there, so long ago, can recall it far better than I could simply repeat things I have had mindspoken to me over my comparatively short lifetime.”

  Again Milo opened his mindful of memories, and again those gathered with him in the yurt entered that mind to share of those memories. But these memories now were those things he had learned from a nonhuman source, from that great cat who thought of herself then as the Hunter or the Mother and who only later was known to her many descendants as the Wolfkiller.

  The Hunter’s memories of that first, fateful day were of icy-toothed wind soughing through the snow-laden branches of the overhanging trees, increasing the chill of an already frigid day. Somewhere within the forest, a branch exploded with the sharp crack of a pistol shot.

  But the Hunter had then yet to hear a shot of any kind, and so she ignored that sound as she ignored the other natural sounds which neither threatened her nor heralded possible prey. She was just then concentrating her every sense and ability to get as close as she could creep to her browsing quarry before beginning that swift and silent and deadly rush and pounce that would, if done properly, result in her acquisition of nearly her own weight of hot, bloody, nourishing meat.

  And she needed meat desperately. Meal to fill the gnawing emptiness of her shrunken belly, meal enough. maybe, to be borne back to her den for the three waiting little cubs to worry, lick at and chew upon.

  But the Hunter also knew that she must be very, very close, far closer than usual for a cat of her size and experience, for she now had but three sound legs. Her left foreleg, deep-gored by the same shaggy-bull cow whose widespreading horns and stamping hooves had snuffed out the life of her mate and hunting partner, was healing but slowly in these short days and long, cold nights of deep snows and scant food.

  As the manyhorn browser ambled to another young tree and began to strip the bark from its trunk the Hunter carefully wriggled a few feet closer, her big amber eyes fixed unwaveringly upon her prey, her twitching nostrils seeking for the first, faint scent of alarm or fear. Then suddenly, she stopped, froze into place, even as the heads of all four of the browsers came up and swiveled to face a spot just a few yards to the Hunter’s right.

  The Hunter saw the muscles of the largest manyhorn browser contract under the skin of his haunches, but before he could essay even his first wild leap away from proximity of the danger he sensed, four thin little black sticks came hissing from the thick concealment of a stand of mountain laurel and all four of the manyhorn browsers collapsed, kicking their razor-edged hooves at empty air, one of them coughing up quantities of frothy pink blood which sank, steaming, into the deep white snow.

  A vagrant puff of wind wafted to the Hunter the rare but still-hated scent of two-legs, and her lip curled into a soundless snarl. They were trying to rob her of her manyhorn browser, trying to steal life itself from her and her helpless cubs; for if she did not have food now, she knew that soon enough she would lack the strength to get food in this frozen world, and her cubs were still too young and immature to hunt for themselves. Outside the den and lacking the protection of her claws and fearsome fangs, those three furry little felines would be the hunted rather than the hunters.

  One of the lung-shot manyhorn browsers, this one a horn-less doe, struggled to her feet and crossed the deer yard at a stumbling, staggering run. Another of the hissing black sticks sped from out the laurels to thunnk solidly into her other side, just behind the shoulder. The stricken doe managed two more steps, then fell again this time almost under the Hunter’s forepaws. The heady scent of the dying deer’s hot blood filled the cats nostrils and set her empty stomach to growling while her tongue unconsciously sought her thin lips.

  The Hunter flattened her long-furred body onto the snow-covered ground and moved not a whisker, for she wanted none of those little black sticks flying in her direction; but neither was she willing to make a quick and silent withdrawal, leaving behind so much of the meat she had stalked so long and so laboriously.

  She watched four of the two-legs, coveted in animal hides and furs, rise up from out the mountain laurel clump that had hidden them. Pulling long, shiny things from someplace at a point just above their hind legs, they went from one to another of the manyhorn browsers, opening the big throat veins and holding hollow, pointless horns to catch the hot red blood, which they then drank off with broad smiles and obvious relish.

  The Hunters keen ears could hear other two-legs and a number of the rather stupid, hornless four-leg grazers that often carried two-legs on their backs proceeding from a short distance downwind. She knew then that if she was to have any half-decent chance of getting clear with one of these dead manyhorn browsers that meant so much to her and her most recent litter, it must assuredly be done immediately.

  Those four visible two-legs had stopped drinking browser blood, and now three of them were half carrying, half dragging the largest carcass — an adult buck of twelve points — toward a thick-boled tree at the other side of the yard. The fourth two-leg was shinnying up the bole with one end of a rawhide rope clenched between his flashing white teeth.

  She had wormed herself to the uttermost limits of available concealment. Now only a snow-crusted log and a bare body length of open ground lay between her and the dead doe. With careful and deliberate speed, she drew her powerful hind legs beneath her, tensed, th
en uncoiled like a huge steel spring. In barely a human eyeblink, the great cat was over the log, had reached the side of the doe, sunk her long fangs into its neck, then disappeared with her prize back into the snow-choked brush between the forest trees, her pearl-gray coat with its dark-gray markings blending perfectly with the wintry landscape.

  Entirely absorbed in fitting the rawhide rope between the hocks and the tendons of the bucks hind legs, the quartet of men neither saw nor heard the movement of the great furry cat.

  A hundred yards uphill, deeper into the thickening forest, the ravenous cat could no longer resist the temptation. Dropping her burden at the base of a tall pine tree, she employed her daggerlike upper canines to tip open the doe’s belly, then avidly tore out mouthfuls of hot, tender liver and other choice parts.

  From behind a currant bush, a vixen thrust out her wriggling black button of a nose and an inch or so of her slender, rufous-furred jaws. The Hunter rippled a low snarl of warning whereupon the nose was abruptly whisked back out of sight and the vixen scurried away . . . but not far, for she knew that her turn would come soon or late, and she had the patience to await it.

  Her sharpest pangs of hunger temporarily assuaged, the Hunter arose, gripped anew her now somewhat lighter burden and limped on over ice-glazed rocks and between the boles of trees toward her well-hidden den and her hungry kittens.

  Once the Hunter was well out of sight among the snow-weighted brush and dark evergreens up the slope, the vixen crept warily from beneath the currant bush and first cleaned up every scrap that she could see or smell of gut or organ. then began to lap at the bloody snow.

  The Hunter had been aware that the two-legs were coming after her almost from the moment they had set out on her trail, since the pursuers made nearly as much racket as an equal number of shaggy-bulls would have created in passage through the woods. But she was easily maintaining her lead, despite the lancing agony that her left foreleg was become with the strain of dragging the heavy, stiffening carcass through the wet, breast-deep snow and over the rough ground beneath it.

  Only when she neared the high place atop which lay her den did she decide to take action against the pursuing two-legs. Perhaps if she stopped long enough to kill one of them, the rest of the pack would feed upon him, as wolves did, and give her time to cover her trail to the immediate environs of her den.

  The Hunter had had but little contact with two-legs — they seldom penetrated the perimeters of her range — but when a two-year-old, she had seen her mother killed by two-legs, pierced through and through with the hateful little black sticks, then pinned to the ground, still snarling and snapping and clawing, by a longer and thicker stick in the forepaws of a two-leg who sat high astride the back of a hornless grazer four-leg. She did not hate two-legs, really, any more than she hated other competitive predators, but she did respect those of the little black sticks, recognized their deadly potential, and so she took great care in the laying of her ambush.

  She continued well past the spot she had decided upon. then adroitly broke her trail by the expedient of leaping atop the bole of a fallen tree, now scoured of snow by the wind. Climbing onto the mass of dead roots and frozen earth, she reared to her full length on her hind logs and carefully hung her precious doe over the broad branch of a still-standing tree. Below that branch all the way down, the trunk stood bare of all save slippery bark encased in even slipperier ice, so the carcass should be safe from the depredations of any other predator or scavenger save perhaps a bear or another cat.

  But the only bear that shared her range was denned up for the winter a full day’s run to the north, while the smaller cats of varying sizes and races hereabouts ran in mortal fear of the Hunter and would never dare to venture so close to her den while she was about.

  The soil was thin and studded with many rocks on the slope, and over the years many a tree had fallen to storm’s or winds or simply the erosion that bared roots. The canny cat now made good use of the raised way provided by these fallen treetrunks to wend her way back toward the ambush point she had earlier chosen without leaving telltale signs of her return passage in the snow.

  Arriving at last in the patch of saplings and thick brush, she bellied down and made a swift and silent trip to the opposite side of the copse. There, in what she felt to be the ideal spot, she crouched, motionless as the very rocks frozen beneath the shrouding snow, waiting.

  The lead two-leg, slightly crouching, with his gaze locked on her tracks and the broad trail made by dragging the deer, came abreast of the Hunter, then passed her, a long, shiny-tipped stick dangling from one forepaw. Next, one behind the other, came trotting two two-legs, each of them grasping one of the cursive, horn-covered sticks that threw the deadly little black sticks.

  All of these she allowed to pass out of sight around the point of the copse. for the very next two-leg was, she could see, bigger than the others, which meant that he was the pack leader, thought the Hunter. He bore neither long stick nor cursive horn-stick and little ones, but rather three of an intermediate size.

  Soundless as very death itself, the Hunter hurled herself upon this leader of the two-leg pack, and even as her weight and momentum bore him toward the snowy ground, she thrust her good right forepaw around his head, hooked her wicked claws bone-deep into the flesh over the jaw, then jerked sharply back and to her right.

  The Hunter growled deeply in satisfaction at the sound and the feel of the snapping of the neck of the biggest two-leg. Then she spun upon her furry haunches and bounded easily back to become instantly lost to sight among the snow-covered undergrowth of the copse, leaving the remaining two-legs all making loud noises behind her.

  Many of the little black sticks flew after her, but only one of them fleshed itself at all, and that one did no more than to split the very tip of her ear before hissing on to rattle among the treetrunks until spent.

  Well pleased with both her plan and its execution, the Hunter negotiated the width of the copse and made her way back to where she had cached her doe. Soon she and her three cubs would be feasting upon tasty deer flesh in their warm, safe, comfortable den, while the remaining members of the two-leg pack filled their own bellies with the carcass of their dead leader.

  With only the one reliable forepaw, the Hunter found it a long and difficult and very painful task to maneuver the stiff and weighty deer carcass through the twisting, turning tunnel, but finally she arrived in the spacious den, to the most raucous welcome of her three cubs.

  When her belly was stuffed with venison, when the cubs had consumed as much of the meat as they desired and then nursed, the Hunter padded over to the pool that was never dry but ever full of icy water in any season. Her thirst slaked, she padded back, thoroughly washed the sleepy cubs, then curled up with them to sleep.

  She was aware, thanks to her keen hearing, that a winter pack of wolves was approaching the high place on which this den of hers was situated, but she harbored no fear of even so many, not while she lay safe in the den. No single wolf, no matter how outsize, could be a match for the Hunter, and the inner portions of the convoluted passage which was the only entry to the den of which she was then aware could be negotiated by no more than a single wolf at a time.

  Many winters ago. she and her mother and her littermates — they then being something over a year old — had whiled away a snowy afternoon by taking turns killing wolves as the lupines reached the first turn in the entry tunnel. One by One, they had slain or seriously maimed the marauders, who then were dragged out backward by their packmates, torn apart and eaten. Finally, as darkness approached, the huge pack — their bellies by then partially filled with wolfmeat from their cannibalistic feast — departed the high place to seek easier prey in the forests below.

  Aware that among other natural advantages, her sight was far superior to that of the wolves in the almost total darkness prevailing in the tunnel, the great cat anticipated no difficulty in doing the amount of killing necessary to discourage this pack, if matters came to
that.

  A sudden intensification of the hot, lancing pain in her left foreleg awakened the Hunter, that and a thirst that was raging. Arising, she hobbled unsteadily across the high-ceilinged, airy den to lap avidly at the pool in one corner.

  Her thirst sated for the nonce with the water, which, though always crackling-cold, never froze over in even the most bitter of winters, she did not return to the spot whereon the cubs were sleeping, but rather hobbled over to take a sentry post at the inner mouth of the tunnel, for her senses cold her that a large number of wolves now were on the high place and were, some of them, milling about and sniffing at the track she had made while dragging the dead doe’s carcass.

  Lying down there, for she seemed strangely devoid of energy, the big cat instinctively licked at her swollen, throbbing left foreleg, at the inflamed spot where the horn had pierced her, but even the gentle touch of her tongue sent bolts of burning, near-intolerable agony coursing through her body. And, of course, that moment was when she heard the first wolf enter the tunnel.

  Even while sleeping, an unsleeping portion of the Hunter’s consciousness had been made aware by the feline’s senses that the two-leg pack, hotly pursued by the wolf pack, had taken refuge upon the high, smooth-sided, flat-topped place. whereon in better weather full many a cat had sunned itself.

  But because she did know that eyrie so well, she knew that there was no danger of the two-legs getting from there to her den. She did not think that the wolves could jump high enough to gain to the top of that place, but if they could and they really wanted to eat the two-legs. they were more than welcome to the smelly creatures. As for her, she had nearly gagged at the foul stench of that two-leg she had killed so easily on the preceding day.