by Robert Adams
He mindcalled the king stallion, his warhorse, “Brother, take the herd onto the hilltop, where it’s easier to see for a distance. Crooktail will stay with you, but I have need of the other cats.”
Then he mindcalled Snowbelly, saying, “Cat brother, bring the Spotted One and come to the sounds here in the grass. There is a very singular beast here and I need to know if there is more than just this one about.”
To Djoolya, he beamed, “Leave off whatever you’re doing, you and all the others. String your bows and be ready for the herd to shortly come up there. Keep your eyes peeled for a light-tan-colored animal. It looks like a bear-sized weasel with black feet and tail and ears. Tell those boys that I said to stay up there, too. That herd is of more importance than anything else, and this thing is easily big enough to kill a horse or just about anything else that takes its fancy.”
As the three riders finally cleared the patch of tall grasses, they could see the knot of men and beasts less than a hundred yards distant in a trampled-down area of two-foot grasses. The beast now bore a resemblance to a porcupine, so many were the arrow and dart shafts standing up from its snaky body, but apparently no one of those missiles had struck a really vital organ, for the beast still moved fast as greased lightning, as it tried its best to get a few teeth into the dancing, bleeding dogs and the cautiously stalking men. That it had already succeeded in its purpose more than once was evident from the gashed hounds and one of the young warriors who sat hunched over in the grass. Since the remaining five men were advancing with spears and bolas, Milo assumed that they had expended their supplies of arrows and darts.
To Gy, he beamed, “You’re our best archer. If I can get the beast on my spear and hold him more or less still for an instant, do you think you could sink a shaft into one of his eyes?”
“All I can do is my best, Uncle Milo,” was the reply.
Cursing himself for not having chosen to ride a trained and experienced hunting horse this day, Milo rode as close as he was able without losing all control of the nervous, clearly frightened dun gelding, then he slung his bowcase-quiver across his back, took his spear into his left hand long enough to wipe the sweaty palm of his right on his thigh, dismounted and trotted toward the fray.
Close up, the stink of musk almost took his breath away for a moment. Yes, this creature was definitely of the mustelid clan; whatever else it might be, that much was patent truth. He also now recalled where he had seen a creature—also a mustelid—that had at least a superficial resemblance to this one. The American plains ferret was colored almost exactly like this beast, but there the resemblance ended abruptly, for the few black-footed ferrets he had ever seen were none of them more than eighteen inches long, including the tail, where this one was, overall, a good eight feet or more.
“Call off the dogs,” he beamed to Little Djahn Staiklee. “And try not to get into Gy Linsee’s way. I’m going in and try to hold it on the spear long enough for Gy to put an arrow into its brain through an eye.”
“Not alone you’re not, Uncle Milo,” Staiklee beamed back. “You don’t know just how fast and supple that thing can be, and I do. No, I’ll take Djim-Bahb’s wolf spear and go in with you; that critter might dodge one point, but not two, and with any kind of luck, we’ll get both of them into it.”
Milo shrugged, then beamed to Gy, “This stubborn young Kinsman insists on going spearing with me, and I long ago learned the utter hopelessness of trying to get logic into the head of any of the Teksikuhn Kindred. Do you think you can do it with two of us there instead of just me?”
“As I said before, Uncle Milo,” came the reply, “I can do but my best.”
Milo tested the point and the whetted edges of the spearhead with a thumb, made certain that the steel crossbar below the head was riveted tightly in its place, then took a grip at the midpoint of the hardwood shaft where rawhide thongs had been wet-wound and shrunk on to offer a sure hold; with his right hand, he grasped the shaft about halfway between the midpoint and the horn-shot butt of the spearshaft. Then he began his cautious advance on the outre beast, erect, but with his knees slightly flexed, moving on the balls of his feet, ready to jump or shift suddenly in any direction necessary.
The well-trained dogs had drawn back from the attack, but they still half-crouched, one on either side of the wounded predator, just out of easy reach of its slavering jaws. The other four young men had each accepted the loan of an arrow from Bard Herbuht’s quiver and now they and he had taken up positions around the killing ground, lest the beast essay to bolt.
Milo could see why the bolas and riatas had not been used by these young warriors who, of all the far-flung Kindred clans, truly excelled in the use of them —this beast was relatively short-legged and went just too close to the ground to be easily snared up in the rawhide ropes.
With a bear, one could often slash a forepaw sufficiently deep with the knife-edge spearblade to cause the ursine to stand erect on the hind legs and give a spearman a clear shot at the heart or throat, but this beast did not look to be of a shape to be able to attack in such a position. Nor did it look to be of the sort that would leap, like a cat, giving a well-coordinated and iron-nerved spearman the opportunity to let the predator impale itself on the spear. No, he thought, this one will come in low to the ground and without a doubt very fast, too; so …
He had just set himself to stab at the head of the beast when that toothy head and the rest of the creature lunged at him with what seemed the speed of light. His too-high spearblade just slid across the top of the beast’s flat head, slashing only the edge of a black ear, but then he was able to raise the butt and lower the point enough to sink it deeply into the sinewy neck at its confluence with the shoulders.
Putting his weight on the lucky thrust, he held the beast pinned even while he felt the burning agony of sharp teeth tearing through the thick leather of his boots and into the flesh of the leg beneath. That was when Little Djahn Staiklee stepped up and, crouching, buried the five-inch steel head of his spearblade behind the near foreleg of the beast, just below the withers. At the same time, Gy Linsee took a few quick steps and, at a range of two feet, drove an arrow into the right eye of the outsize mustelid.
As soon as the beast’s remaining eye began to glaze over in death, Milo drew out his spearhead from its body, thrust it into the earth a couple of times in order to at least partially cleanse it, then paced over to where the Teksikuhn still sat crouched in the grass, grimacing with pain, part of his left trouser leg soaked in blood, his face as colorless as fresh curds where not weather-tanned.
When mindspoken, the boy looked up with pain-filled blue eyes, not releasing, however, his hold on the bowstring-and-stick tourniquet in place high up on his thigh. Shaking his head even as he mindspoke, he beamed back bitterly, “No, Uncle Milo, that critter didn’t do me no harm. No, it was that damn fool Bili-Fil come close to killing me! Cast his dart at that whatever-it-is and put the fucker into my leg instead. Sometimes I think my brother is purely set to see ever drop of blood I owns.”
With Milo’s help, the young man stood and then managed to mount one of the horses. “Gy,” said Milo, “get him back up to the camp and tell Djoolya that he took a dart in his thigh. She’ll know what to do. Then ride back down here with some more horses, one with a pack saddle; I don’t want to stay down here in this grass any longer than absolutely necessary. Another of those things”—he gestured at the arrow-and dart-studded body of the strange beast —“or a whole pack of them could be in one of those patches of the higher grasses and we’d never know it until they chose to show themselves.”
Of course, it was not that easy; Milo reflected that it seldom was. The packhorse did not like the smell of the dead beast and refused to go and stay in close proximity of it. The other horses, even the hunters, were no better, and no amount of coaxing or mindspeak soothing by Milo and Gy could achieve equine cooperation. Finally, Gy made yet another trip to the hilltop campsite and came back with one of the big, powe
rful, gentle mules of the pair that pulled Milo’s cart on the march. She snorted her plain disapproval of the stink and stamped a couple of times, but made no other objections to having the furry, blood-soaked thing tied onto her back.
Once back up on the top of the hill, Milo found the yurts all back up and layered. This time they were arranged in a circle with the empty carts parked between them, the whole forming a barrier to the horses the milled around the rest of the hilltop.
The lashings were loosed and the heavy body was dumped from off the mule-mare, then Milo called in all three cats—the two prairiecats and the jaguar—to thoroughly examine and scent-record the beast, beaming, “Remember this smell, all of you. Spotted One, is this beast at all familiar to you?”
“Who could ever forget such a stench, brother of cats?” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head in distaste. “No, if this cat had scented or seen one of these before, even as a cub, she would certainly recall it.”
To Djoolya, he beamed, “How is the boy? Is he still bleeding?”
“Not much, now,” came back her response. “But even so, I don’t think he should fork a horse or even walk around much for a few days, my dear.”
“Hmmm. Well, I suppose I could rig a horse litter out of two of the pry-poles, a couple of riatas and a cured hide or two. But knowing these southern Kindred, we’ll also have to use a third riata to tie him into that litter, unless you can brew him up a tea to knock him out for the day.” Milo shook his head dubiously. “Or do you think we could pad the load of a cart enough to bear him without further injury?”
“You do mean to move on today, then, Milo?” she beamed. “Do you think that best for us?”
He shrugged. “Far better than staying here, I’d say. That high, dense grass surrounding this hill bothers me; it bothered me to begin, but now, combined with that huge, vicious thing we just killed, it has me very worried, and I’d much rather move on to an area where we can at least see more than a bare score of yards out from the camp. True, mustelids are usually solitary beasts, but I have seen pairs of them hunting together here and there and the thought of so much as one more of that ilk”—he waved at the body with the women, children and cats gathered around it and the flies crawling all over it—“sets my nape hairs to twitching.”
“So, yes, let’s start getting the yurts down and loaded up, the teams harnessed and hitched. Two of the warriors ought to be enough to do for the hurt dogs, two more to go about their yurt and cart. Gy and I and the other one will get the hide off that thing.”
Djoolya wrinkled both her brow and her button nose. “Do you think you’ll ever get the reek out of that hide, Milo? And even if you do, finally, will it be worth the effort of scraping and curing and then sewing up all the rents and punctures and tears with sinew? If you’ll observe, that’s a warm-weather pelage, not a thick winter one.”
“We always get the muskiness out of mink and fisher and martin and even wolverine, don’t we, Djoolya?” he replied. “Does that skunk-skin cap of yours now smell at all like the former owners?
“You’re right, of course, about the light fur, but if this beast is as rare a one as it seems to be, it should have value as a novelty, if nothing else, and we might get something of more worth in trade for it, somewhere along the line.
“Oh, by the way, that two-handled gray-steel box from the ruin—where is it now?”
As he squatted at the tail of a canted cart, feeding the fat, stubby, ancient but still shiny .45 caliber cartridges into three of the silvery stainless-steel magazines, Milo felt a brief stab of longing for that world now long centuries in the dead past, that world of which these deadly artifacts were only pitiful reminders.
After he had threaded the webbing magazine pouch onto the pistol belt and hooked the leather holster in place, he cinched it about his waist, inserted a loaded magazine into the butt of the weapon and slipped it into the holster. Even with the holster flap secured, however, he still was worried about the possibility of the irreplaceable pistol falling out, so he snapped the lanyard to the butt ring.
He now half-wished that he had left the way clear to obtain one of those powerful rifles that had been stored with the pistol. That would have put paid to such a big, dangerous animal quickly enough, and from a far safer distance than this pistol, the primary utility of which was and had always been mankilling at very close quarters.
When he at last got around to pulling off the pierced, torn boot, there was, aside from torn, blood-stiff trouser leg and sock, no mark to show of his injuries inflicted by the creature’s sharp teeth and strong jaws and fury, but then he would have been shocked if there had been such. With a deep sigh of annoyance, he sought out his clothing chest and another pair of boots.
Sacred Sun was well up in the sky by the time the party got on the move, so they set a brisk pace, taking only such game as they came across directly in their chosen path, not taking time to actively hunt for prey. Snowbelly ranged out ahead alone, while the other two cats alternately ran the flanks of the column and trailed the horseherd, seeking out any trace of the musky stink that identified the peculiar beasts like the one whose pelt—now scraped and soaked and salted and rolled up—rode along lashed to the tailgate of a cart, dripping water and serum and covered with dust and a metallic-hued carpet of feeding flies.
Pushing onward an hour or more after the usual halting time unexpectedly brought them to the fringes of the ruined city, and, after finding a lake a mile or so north, Milo and the party set about making camp near the lakeshore among the scorched, tumbled, much-overgrown shells of the homes that had apparently composed part of a small subdevelopment, long ago, in another time, in a vanished world.
Milo still was unsure of their exact location. However, he felt they were too far north for the ruined city to be Tulsa; they might be somewhere in western Missouri, but he suspected, rather, southeastern Kansas. With any kind of luck, there should be something left still legible in those ruins to tell him precisely.
He breathed a silent sigh of relief when, after a wide-swinging circuit of the lake area, the cats reported no trace of the scent of the ilk of the giant mustelid, though there seemed to be a plentitude of game and a few of the more normal predators about.
“No lions or big bears, I hope?” queried Milo.
“Not that I sniffed out,” replied Snowbelly, adding, “There is a sow bear and her two half-grown cubs denning in a place just east of the camp, but she is not one of the big, flat-faced bears, only one of the smaller, the ones you call black. The only cats about seem to be the short-tailed ones.”
“There is at least one bigger cat,” Crooktail put in.
“Puma?” Milo asked.
“No, bigger,” she replied. “Not so big as me or even as Spotted One, though.”
“Maybe just a very big puma, then, cat sister?” beamed Gy Linsee. “They can get big. When my sire was a boy, guarding sheep of a night, he speared and killed a puma that weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“No, Brother Gy,” Crooktail beamed back. “This cat smells in no way like a puma or like Spotted One, either, although she is just a little smaller than Spotted One and, also like Spotted One, will soon throw cubs.”
Milo nodded. “All right, we’ll camp in this place tonight only. Tomorrow we’ll move farther northeast and put the widest part of the lake between the camp and herd and those ruins.
“Snowbelly, no more than one of you cats is to night-hunt at a time; I want at least two guarding the herd, constantly. With really plentiful game hereabouts, of course, the predators may not exhibit any slightest interest in trying to take a horse at all, but those who take enough chances usually suffer for it in the end.
“Herbuht, you and Djim-Bahb Gahdfree take the hunt in the morning, eh? I’ll be taking; Gy and Little Djahn over into the main ruins to see what we can see.”
It was unnecessary for him to add that they would harvest any edible animals they chanced across—that was simply the Horseclans way.
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Like the isolated ruin they had found back west on the prairie, most of the small city was tumbled and thickly overgrown and, under the vegetation, there seemed to be frequent indications of old conflagrations. The three horsemen rode slowly along what once had been metaled roadways, but now the macadam or concrete only showed through in the rare spot here and there beneath the soil that held the roots of grasses, weeds, shrubs and trees.
Milo led a curcuitous way toward the visible, multistory ruins that he thought to be the center of the dead city. He did this in part because, uneven as was the surface of the streets, occasionally rent or bisected by subsidences of varying widths and depths where subsurface piping had collapsed, still did those streets offer more reliable footing for the horses than might have been obtained by threading a way between the overgrown ruins of homes and smaller buildings that lined them. Another reason for avoiding the tangles of brush and vines was his desire to, if possible, avoid for now the beasts likeliest to be denning within the roofless, sagging walls or the tumbled piles of masonry; he and most of his clans only killed predators when the folk or their stock were threatened by the beasts or when the pelts were needed for clothing, bedding or trade—and this was no season for good pelts to be had.
As they entered upon a street forking off one along which they had been riding, the cawing of carrion crows caused them to look up into a huge-boled, ancient oak. There, some thirty feet up the tree, wedged into a crotch, was the partially eaten carcass of a white-tailed deer. All the hide and flesh were gone from the head and neck, shoulders and forelegs; moreover, the doe had been partially gutted.
