A Woman of the Horseclans

by Robert Adams

  When the claw clicks and shufflings and snufflings told her that the lupine invader was past the first turn of the passage, she entered it herself, pulling as little weight as possible upon her strangely huge and very tender left foreleg. They two met at a point between the first turn and the second, in a section too low-ceilinged for either to stand fully erect.

  The Hunter was supremely confident, for she knew well that she possessed the deadly advantage, here; for with only toothy jaws for weapons, the wolf could but lunge for her throat, whereas, completely discounting her own more than adequate dentition, a single blow from her claw-studded forepaw could smash the life out of that wolf as it had of so many before him. But she reckoned without her disability.

  Sensing more than seeing the exact location of the intruder’s head, the Hunter lashed out with her sound paw. But this suddenly threw the full and not inconsiderable weight of her head and her forequarters onto the fevered, immensely swollen left foreleg. Squalling with the hideous pain, she stumbled, and so her buffet failed to strike home, the bared claws only raking the wolf’s head and mask. Before she could recover, the crushing lupine jaws had closed upon her one good foreleg, the canines stabbing, while the carnassials scissored skin and flesh and muscle, going on to crack bone.

  But the wolf did not have time to raise his bloody, tattered head, for the Hunter closed, sank her own long fangs into the sinewy neck and crushed the spine of the would-be invader.

  Even as the wolfs jaws relaxed in death, the Hunter slowly backed down the tunnel, dragging her two useless forepaws, growling deep in her throat as the waves of agony washed over her. Weak and growing weaker each moment, she tumbled the two-foot drop from tunnel mouth to den floor.

  Two of the cubs, trailed closely by the third, bounced merrily over to her, but a snarled command sent them all scurrying back into a far, dark corner. The Hunter knew that all four of them now were doomed. She might have enough strength remaining to kill with her fangs the very next wolf that emerged from the yawning mouth of that tunnel, perhaps even the second and the third. But there would be another and another and yet another, and at last she would be too weak to deal with the next in the succession of invaders, and that wolf would kill her. And then the pack would be through the undefended tunnel and at the helpless cubs, ripping the soft little bodies to bloody shreds, eating her orphaned young alive.

  Deciding to guard the cubs as long as possible, the great maimed cat painfully dragged herself across the den and took her death stand before them.

  Milo again opened his own personal memories to the folk and the cat who sat with him in Chief Dik Krooguh’s yurt.

  The door Milo had finally forced led into a room that was really just an extra-wide stair landing. These stairs were of concrete; one led down and the other had once led upward. but it now was solidly choked with assorted masonry debris and lengths of rusted iron pipe from about halfway up its course. The high-held lantern showed Milo that although there were bits and pieces of the debris on many of the descending stairs, they were mostly clear enough for easy passage.

  Along the wall facing the stairs was a bank of metal cabinets, each about five feet high and some foot wide. They looked to him like army wall lockers. His exploration of the cabinets proved them bare of very much that was still in any way usable — a few small brass buckles, a handful of metal buttons, otherwise just rotted cloth and leather, flaking rubber and plastic, one pair of metal-framed sunglasses.

  When he opened the last cabinet, he jumped back and cursed at unexpected movement, his hand going to the worn hilt of his big dirk. The hefty brown rat struck the floor running and scuttled down the steps, only to return up them running at least twice as fast and shrieking rodent tenor. The little beast streaked over Milo’s booted feet, jumped back into the cabinet and crouched petrified until the man reclosed the door.

  Thus warned, Milo descended the stain slowly and carefully. holding the lantern high for maximum visibility. It was well that he did so, for the bare concrete floor of the roorn at the foot of those stairs was littered with nearly two dozen sluggishly writhing rattlesnakes!

  “Well,” thought Milo, relieved, “that answers the food problem for a couple of days, anyway, and when these are gone, there’s always that nice fat rat and maybe some of his family, like as not.”

  But as none of the vipers lay between the foot of the stairs and still another closed door across the room, he left them alone for the moment. This door proved the hardest to open of any he had as yet encountered, but at last he did so, to find himself facing a short stretch of corridor and three more doors — one each to his right and his left, one more straight ahead of him.

  The room to both left and right were secured by massive padlocks. Stenciled in big block letters on the face of the right-hand door was FALLOUT SHELTER — KEEP OUT — THIS MEANS YOU!: the left-hand door bore the message PRIVATE SANCTUM OF STATION DIRECTOR — TRESPASSERS WILL BE BRUTALLY VIOLATED!

  The door straight ahead was unmarked, and though it bore no padlock in the hasp and staple provided for such hardware, it was held firmly shut by an iron bar at least two inches thick which bisected it horizontally and was supported by two U-shaped brackets firmly bolted to the masonry.

  Since it opened inward, Milo thought that it might well be a portal to the outside. He put an ear to the steel-sheathed door, but could hear nothing. Removing the bar. he swung it open a nick, keeping shoulder and foot braced hard against it, just in case a wolf or three should try to come calling.

  But stygian darkness lay beyond this door, too, a damp darkness and an overpowering odor of cat. He closed the door again for long enough to draw his saber, then opened it wide, held the lantern aloft and quickly descended the two steps to the next level, his eyes rapidly scanning the large, high-ceilinged room as far as the lanternlight would extend.

  The Hunter tried to raise herself when the two-leg holding in one forepaw a small, very bright sun opened somehow a part of one wall of the den and came in, but she was now become too weak to do any more than growl.

  Milo let his saber sag down from the guard position, for the big female cat was clearly as helpless as the cubs bunched behind her supine body. One of her forelegs was grotesquely swollen, obviously infected or deeply abscessed, while the other was torn and bleeding and looked to be broken as well.

  There was a flicker of movement to his right, and he spun about just in time to see the slavering jaws and smoldering eyes of a wolf’s head emerge from a hole just a little above the floor. In two leaping strides, he crossed the width of the room and his well-honed saber blade swept up, then down, severing the wolf’s neck cleanly.

  But the headless, blood-spouting body still issued forth from the hole, and as it tumbled to kick and twitch beside its still-grinning head, another, similar head came into view, this one living and snarling fiercely at the man who faced him.

  Milo thrust his point between the gaping jaws and through the soft palate. White teeth snapped and splintered on the fine steel and the point grated briefly on bone before he freed it in a death-dealing drawcut, but as the steel came out, the dying wolf came with it, and behind crouched another of the beasts.

  The saber spilt the skull of the third wolf, but even as its blood and brains gushed out, another was pushing the quivering body out of the tunnel and into the den.

  “This,” thought Milo, “could conceivably go on for hours, as many wolves as there are out there.”

  But as the fifth wolf was being slowly pushed toward him, Milo suddenly became cognizant of the rectangular regularity of the opening. Man-made. And the men who fashioned it would surely have also fashioned a means of closing it . . . ?

  And there that means was! Half-hidden by a camouflage of dust and dirt and the ever-present cobwebs, a sliding door, set between metal runners on the wall above the opening. But did it still function properly? Or at all?

  In the precious moments between butchering wolves, he pulled and tugged and pushed at the door, S
etting the lantern down, he drew his dirk with his left hand and used its point to dig bits of debris from around and beneath the door, to dislodge other bits from the grooves of the runners, Clenching the blade of the dirk between his teeth. he hung his full weight from the doorhandle . . . and it moved!

  Then there was another wolf, this one a huge, coal-black beast. He killed it, chuckling to himself and thinking, “The Chinese used to say that you should never be cruel to a black dog that appeared at your door. Well, hell, I wasn’t cruel to that bastard; I gave him a cleaner, quicker death than he and his pack would have given me.”

  The black wolf had been both bigger and in far better flesh than most of his packmates, so it took the wolf behind a few seconds longer than usual to push the jerking body out of the tunnel, and that few seconds’ respite made all the difference.

  With all of Milo’s one hundred and eighty pounds of weight suspended from it, the ancient steel door inched downward, then, screeching like a banshee, picked up speed. Finally, impelled by a last, powerful thrust of Milo’s arms, it slammed shut and latched itself in the very face of the next wolf, which yelped its startled surprise.

  Stepping back and carefully wiping off the blood-slimed blade of his saber on the pelt of a dead wolf, Milo mindcalled, “Dik, Djim, the rest of you, take up the lantern and carry it as you saw me carry this one. Be very careful that you don’t drop it or strike it against something. Come down the metal steps one by one — they’re too old and rusty to bear too much weight at once. Proceed through the opened door and down a flight of stone stairs, but be careful where you step at the bottom of those, for rattlesnakes are denned there.

  “Those who have a taste for snakemeat can kill them, but any who’d rather have fresh wolf chops need only join me here and skin and gut and butcher their choice of ten or twelve of the bastards, all fresh-killed.

  “Oh. and there’s water here too, somewhere; I can smell it.”

  Then, suddenly, an intensely powerful mindspeak blanked out any reply the Horseclansmen might have beamed. “What are you, two-legs? You bear a small sun in your paws, you slay many, many wolves to protect cubs not your own, you can somehow open den walls and close them, and you can speak the language of cats, which is a something other two-legs cannot do. Who are you? What are you?”

  The Hunter felt that she no longer could trust the witness of her own eyes. At times they seemed to be clouded with a dark, almost opaque mist; at other times she seemed to be seeing the images of three of four or even more identical two-legs and as many of the little, intensely bright suns. But none of these images stayed constant, they shifted about changing not only in numbers but in consistency as well.

  Therefore, when first she sensed the two-leg, sun-bearing wolfkiller’s mind projecting that silent means of communication used only by cats and a few other of the more intelligent four-legs, she thought that others of her perceptions had suddenly gone as skewed as her visual perception. But at length she beamed a question . . . and he answered her!”

  Milo just stood and stared at the injured cat for a long moment, deeply shaken by the experience of having an animal actually communicate with him telepathically. Then, moving deliberately and slowly, he laid down his saber beside the lantern and took a few steps in the cat’s direction, extending an empty hand in the ages-old, instinctual gesture of promised friendship.

  “You are badly hurt sister,” he beamed. “Will you bite me if I try to help you?”

  The sight of him abruptly faded again into the dark mist, but still his message came clearly into her mind and she said, “Help this mother? Why would you want to help this mother? This Hunter killed one of your pack last sun, Two-legs do not ever help cats, they slay cats, just as you slew those wolves there.”

  He replied, “Wolves are the enemies of us both, sister, foes of both cats and men. Besides, the other men and I are hungry.

  “You would eat wolf flesh?” The repugnance in her thoughtbeam was crystal-clear.

  He moved his head up and down twice for some unknown reason and beamed, “Hunger can make any meat taste good, sister.”

  All of the Hunters life had been hard, and she could grasp the universal truth stated by this remarkable two-leg. Perhaps, then, he was truthful about wishing to aid her. “If the mother allows you to come close, what will you do, two-leg?”

  “The bleeding of your torn paw must be stopped, sister, the wounds cleaned out and packed with healing herbs, then wrapped up in cloth . . . uhh. something like very soft skins . . . then the broken bones must be pulled straight and tied in place to heal. All of this will hurt sister, and you must promise not to bite us in your pain.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes, sister, one of my brothers must help me. He is most skilled in caring for wounds and injuries.”

  To himself, Milo thanked his lucky stars that chance had had Fil Linszee with this party. The young man was well on his way to becoming a first-rate horse leech, and was always certain to have a packet of herbs and salves and the like secreted somewhere on his person.

  “Does your brother, too, speak the language of cats?” beamed the Hunter. She was feeling very strange, much weaker, so weak in fact that it was now all that she could do to keep her big head up and frame the thoughts she beamed.

  She half-sensed an answer from the two-leg, but it was very unclear. Suddenly, nothing was clear for her — not sight, not hearing, not touch, not mental perception. The dark mists closed in, thicker and darker. A great waterfall seemed to be roaring about her. Then there was nothing.

  Chapter X

  As it chanced, Fli Linszee was the first Horseclansman to come through the door into the den area. His long spear was in one hand and the writhing, jerking bodies of a brace of headless rattlesnakes were in the other. But at sight of the cat, he dropped the snakes and grasped his spear in both hands, bringing the point to low guard.

  But Milo waved the spear away, saying, “You’ll not need a spear, Fil, not with any luck. Believe it or not, this cat can mindspeak. We two were having quite a conversation before she passed out a few moments back. We . . . that is, you, are going to try to do what is necessary to heal up those forelegs of hers. Do you think that working on a cat will be radically different from working on a horse?

  Fil came further into the den and critically eyed the cat while keeping a safe distance from her, with his spear shaft held cautiously between them. Then, after sucking for a minute on his long lower lip, he said, “Uncle Milo, that cat must weigh over two hundred pounds, for all she’s not really well fed. That near foreleg will be tender as a boil just now, and it needs draining, which means that I’m going to have to cut deeply into it, probably in two places. I value my life and a whole skin, Uncle Milo, so I will not touch the cat unless she is well and firmly tied. She’s bound to be too strong for even six warriors to hold down for long.”

  Reflecting that the man was no doubt right in his assessment of the cat’s strength, Milo thought hard, The two or three short lengths of rawhide rope that his party had brought along would be of no good to them at all for the monumental task at hand, nor would their seven belts help.

  “Maybe.” he thought, “behind one of those locked doors. . . . ?”

  A swift succession of short, powerful blows with one end of the iron shaft that had barred the door to the cat’s den did not even dent the massive padlock, but did tear the hasp and staple loose, which accomplished Milo’s purpose.

  Behind the door marked FALLOUT SHELTER, he found a real treasure trove — jcrrycans of fuels, boxes of canned goods. several locked footlockers . . . three long-handled spades, a pickaxe, a grubbing hoe, a chainsaw, a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer. All of the moral parts of these tools had been well coated with Cosmoline, then with treated paper and looked to have just come from a hardware store.

  The room was bricky dry and there was almost no dust, since the door had been thick, tight-fitting and weatherstripped, to boot, with a sill three inches higher than the floor su
rfaces on either side of it. There was an identical door let into the opposite wall, but Milo postponed exploring whatever lay beyond it, for he had found those things he immediately needed in the very first footlocker he had opened — several coils of strong rope, both manila and nylon, plus an assortment of webbing straps fitted with buckle fasteners.

  Bearing the ropes and straps. Milo, Fil, Dik and Djim filed into the den and headed toward the unconscious cat. But suddenly, there arose a fearsome — if somewhat high-pitched — growl and one of the cat’s cubs, probably weighing all of twenty-five pounds, stalked purposefully from behind his mother. His fur and his whiskers were all a-bristle, his ears were folded back against his diminutive head and his lips were curled up off his little white teeth, After advancing a few yards, the cub took his stand, his tail swishing his rage and his fierce resolve.

  Milo received the silent warning in a beaming almost as powerful as had been that of the mature cat. “Two-legs keep away from the mother or this cat kills!”

  The other Horseclansmen had received the thought transmission, as well, and stop they did, all grinning and nodding their honest admiration of such natural courage and reckless daring in the defense of kin.

  “Uncle Milo,” said Dik soberly, if that cub had two legs instead of four, I’d feel honored to sponsor him to my chief for adoption into our clan, for it’s clear beyond any doubt that he’s a Horseclansman born.”

  Handing his coils of rope to another, Milo slowly approached the diminutive feline warrior. Squatting at a distance he hoped was out of range of a sudden pounce, he mindspoke the hissing little cat, while at the same time, on another level of his mind, he broadbeamed a thoughtless message of soothing reassurance, having noticed that such worked well with angry or frightened horses or mules.

  “How is my young brother called?”

  The cub did not alter his position or his mien of overt menace one whit and he eyed Milo with distrust. When he at last deigned to answer, it was with open hostility.