A Woman of the Horseclans

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—jerrycans 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 surfaces 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.

“This cat is called Killer of Two-legs. He is not the brother of you or any other two-leg. Keep away from the mother or you all will die under his claws and fangs!”

Dik slapped his thigh and guffawed. “Just listen to him! What a warrior he’ll be when he’s grown! Facing down four full-grown and armed men, and him but a cub cat.”

Milo spoke aloud, saying. “Don’t underestimate him. Dik. He’s smaller than his mother, yes, but even so, he’s near as big as a grown bobcat and I’ll wager he could engrave some meaningful furrows in your hide, if given half a chance.”

Then he added, “But we won’t give him that chance … I hope. Two of you, take off your jackets and then hand one of them to me, sllooowwwllyy. then get some of the lighter rope ready. I could argue all day with this obstinate little bugger, and his mother will likely die soon without help.”

With moving men well to either side distracting the attention of Killer of Two-legs, Milo was able to flip the coat over the cub, and then it was a furious matter of grab and tussle, but finally it was done; the raging, squalling beastlet was securely wrapped in two garments of thick leather and the resultant bundle was lapped about with several yards of rope. When defeat of the feline champion had seemed imminent, the other two cubs had beat a brisk and silent retreat to a far, dark corner of the den.

First Fil cleaned out the ragged wolf bite and packed it with dried herbs, then smeared it with salve; adroitly, he set and splinted the broken bones, using part of his own embroidered shirt when he ran out of prepared bandage cloths. But when he first made to shave the infected offside paw with the razor-keen skinning knife, the huge cat, which had remained inert through all of his previous ministrations, roused to full and savagely furious consciousness. She strained mightily at the ropes and straps pinioning her rear legs and her fearsome jaws, growling between the forcibly clenched teeth and fangs.

Vainly, Milo tried to reach her mind, then gave up and added his strength to that of the others to try to keep her still enough for Fil to do what needed doing.

As well as he could. Fit went on about his shaving off of the long, dense fur, As gently as was possible, his sensitive fingers roved over the grossly swollen paw and leg. After gingerly pressing several spots, he chose one of them and rubbed the discolored skin with a few drops of liquid from a small and ancient metal flask, then tilted the bottle at an angle and dipped the slender blade of a knife into it.

At the first touch of the needle-pointed knife, the huge cat squalled, heaved her heavy body once violently, then lapsed again into unconsciousness.

Fil was blessed with the experience to keep clear, but the overcurious Djim, peering closely, caught full in the face the jet of foul greenish pus that erupted around the blade on its initial cut. Cursing sulfurously, he sprang up and made for the water pool.

A long gash was opened, Fil cutting through to the very bone, then pressing harder and harder upon the leg until only blood and clear serum flowed, Once again, he packed the wound with dried herbs, smeared its gaping edges with salve and bandaged it with more of his shirt and part of Milo’s.

After feeling the throat pulse to ascertain that his feline patient still lived, he gathered his gear and trudged wearily toward the pool. By the time he had finished laying himself and his instruments, the straining men had heaved and manhandled the limp body of the cat back to where she had originally been lying and had released the bonds from her hind legs.

Fil Esmith took up a watch over his patient, squatting near her with the thrashing length of a decapitated rattler on the floor before him. He gobbled raw fillets of snakemeat just as fast as his busy knife could skin, clean and slice them off. Across the den from him, the redhaired Linszee twins joked and chortled while they lugged bloody wolf carcasses up to the roof of the tower for skinning whenever the blizzard died down.

In one end of what had been the snake den, Djim Linszee was squatting, cub-sitting. Killer of Two-legs, having hotly refused to tender his parole, had not been released; the furious and frustrated little beast was somehow managing to roll his ropebound leather cocoon over and over, from one side of the narrow room to the other, alternately bawling for maternal aid and beaming threats of dire and deadly retribution upon the flesh of every two-leg he had so far seen.

On the other hand, Djirn had gained at least the conditional friendship and partial trust of the two slightly smaller and much less pugnacious female cubs. The fuzzy little creatures were mindspeaking less and less guardedly as they avidly devoured the lavish gifts of fresh snakemeat proffered by Djim.

Milo had found the inner door of the fallout shelter to be only closed, not locked, though every crack in and around it had been meticulously packed with some sort of chemically treated fiber, then double-sealed with wide strips of tape. Sealant removed, the door had opened easily to reveal a virtual efficiency apartment—two double-decker bunks, a chemical toilet, a three-burner petrol range, stainless-steel sink with a chrome pump rather than a faucet and a plethora of cabinets and drawers of varying shapes and sizes built into every available inch of wall space.

After he had gone through the contents of some of the cabinets, a healthy proportion of the dragging weight of worry over their predicament lifted from off Milo’s mind. Even if the blizzard, now howling around the ruins in full force, should last for a month and the huge wolf pack should maintain their siege right up until spring, he and his Horseclansmen would be well fed on the big cans of powdered whole milk and eggs and orange concentrate, the stack upon high stack of freeze-dried foods still scaled in their plastic-lined foil pouches. There were jars of freeze-dried coffee (Milo vainly racked his brain trying to recall the last time he had tasted real coffee; although all of the nomads drank certain bastard brews that they invariably called “kawfee”) and sugar and honey and jams, tins of tea, even a full case of a Jerez brandy (ano 1972), plus a wide assortment of condiments, candies, herbs and spices and pickles.

Under one of the lower bunks was a steel chest, padlocked as well as being as thoroughly sealed with tape as the inner door had been. The lock yielded to the iron bar, however. Within, the first thing to catch Milo’s eye was a finely tooled leather case some four feet long.

With a shiver of presentiment, he lifted the case onto the bunk and unsnapped its catches, then raised the lid. Nestled into a fitted depression in the liner of impregnated sheepskin lay a scope-sighted sporting rifle, its dark-blue barrel, chrome bolt handle and stock of polished curly maple reflecting back the light of the lantern. Arrayed across the lower edge of the case were twelve brightly colored boxes, each of them labeled “REMINGTON .30-06 Sprgfld. 180 gr. pointed soft point, 20 cartridges.”

His hands shaking slightly. Milo took the beautiful weapon from it’s century-old bed and lifted, then pulled back the silvery bolt handle, The archaic Mauser action slid smoothly open and its ejector sent a glittering brass dummy cartridge clattering across the room. Under a light film of lubricants, the interior surfaces of the rifle gleamed every bit as brightly as did the exterior.

Milo slouched back against the door of the cabinet behind him, a grim smile on his lips. Twelve boxes of cartridges, twenty rounds the box, two hundred and forty rounds, then; even if it required one full box to reorient himself to firearms in general and this magnificent one in particular, that and to get it zeroed in properly, he’d still have far more than enough to seriously deplete the wolf population hereabouts; so now he and his companions were trapped here in these ruins only until the weather improved.

“But what,” he mused aloud to himself, “about those cats? Even with that big wolf pack wiped out, she’s going to be in a bad way. She won’t be able to hunt at all for at least a month, and she and those cubs will be white bones before then. True, the men and I, we can kill and butcher game and leave meat behind for her and the cubs. But how long before they ate it all or it got too ripe to eat?

“What other alternatives are there? Take them back to camp with us whenever we go? Well, for the three cubs, that would be easy of accomplishment, I guess: just strap one each on the backs of three men. But how in the devil are seven men supposed to get a two-hundred—and-some-pound injured cat down a bitch of an almost vertical hillside which also is coated with ice and full of loose rocks?

“Of course, what we really should do is just loll around in here until the big cat is mended, then give her the choice of coming with us or staying here, but if I should keep these men away that long, their clans will think they’re all dead and, most likely, move the camp to a luckier place. And that place to which they move would probably be in the opposite direction from that we’d go to look for them, too.

“Now if it only weren’t for that damned precipitous hillslope, we could easily fashion a sled or two and …”

Fil Linszee’s mindcall interrupted his musings.

“Uncle Milo, the big cat is waking up.”

When Milo strode into the den, Fil, Bili and Bahb were watching the great groggy beast, made clumsy by her bandaged forepaws, trying to get a hind claw under the strap still securing her jaws.

He moved to her side and sank onto his haunches, laying a hand on her head, because he had long ago learned that some form of physical contact always improved telepathic communication.

Then he mindspoke her, saying, “Sister, wait. I’ll take the snaps off. But you must promise not to tear off the bits of cloth covering your forepaws with your teeth. Will you promise?”

The blizzard blew for three days, but the howling winds began to slacken during the third night and died with the dawn. That fourth morning brought a full blaze of sun and all unclouded blue sky for its setting.

The fourth morning also brought back the wolves, who had wisely departed the dangerously exposed plateau during the blow. Bili and Bahb Linszee were atop the tower working on the frozen carcasses of the wolves Milo had sabered in the den with their skinning knives. As the vanguards of the pack returned to the plateau, they honored an earlier promise and mindcalled Milo.

Carrying the cased rifle and a folded tarp, Milo climbed back up onto the roof of the ruined tower. He had been classed an expert rifleman in every army in which he could recall serving, and during the long blizzard days and nights he had read and reread the booklet that the Browning Arms company had packed with the rifle, then stripped the piece. thoroughly cleaned and relubricated it with other contents of the steel chest, and dry-fired it until he thought that he knew all that he could learn of the weapon without actually putting live rounds through the minor-bright, chromed bore. He also had completely familiarized himself with the scope and its adjusting knobs, for the optic device would be useful to him long after the last round for the rifle had been expended.

Lacking the sandbags he recalled using to steady the piece or long-range shooting, he utilized the tarp-covered frozen carcass of an unskinned wolf, settled himself in the prone position behind it, opened a box of cartridges and filled the rifle’s magazine, then removed the lens covers from the scope. Everything now in readiness to give the wolves a rude and very deadly surprise, he relaxed in place, waiting until a maximum number of the predators had come within range of the rifle.

The pack must have not found much if any game during the days of the blizzard, for soon the most of them were gathered about the foot of the tower, engaged in a snapping, snarling battle royal over the skinned carcasses the Linszee twins tossed off the roof as soon as the pelts were off them. But a few wolves were still sitting or ambling at some distance from the ruins, so Milo set about sighting in the weapon.

Far down, near the distant edge of the plateau, sat two of the wolves, intently observing something in the forest below, Milo centered the cross hairs of the scope on the head of the nearer one and slowly squeezed off the first round. The rifle butt slammed his shoulder with a force and violence he had half forgotten. Below the tower, the wolf-pack members were streaming off in every direction—yelping, howling, barking, tails tucked between their legs, looking back as they ran from that awesome sound with wide and fear-filled eyes. But Milo did not notice the lupine exodus, so intent was he in checking the performance of the rifle, which he calculated had thrown a good ten feet short of his chosen target and well to the left.

The two distant wolves had looked around at the noise, but as they never had been hunted with firearms, they failed to connect that noise with danger or with the small something that had drilled its sizzling way through the frozen crust; they may not even have been aware of that something, since it had arrived somewhat ahead of the noise.

Milo chambered a fresh round, adjusted the scope and then settled himself behind the weapon, remembering this time to push the butt firmly against his shoulder. The second round whizzed out of the barrel. Through the scope, Milo saw the target animal suddenly duck down, then shake his head and raise his long muzzle skyward, looking around above him.

Three morn rounds were fired and three more adjustments of the telescopic sight made, but the sixth fired round sent the distant wolf leaping high into the air, to fall and lie jerking and twitching in the snow for a few moments before becoming very still. The other wolf was still sniffing at its mysteriously stricken packmate when a 180-grain softpoint bullet ended its curiosity forever.

Milo had had the tower top to himself for some time. The two Linszee boys had descended the rickety stairs shaking their ringing heads and wondering how even Uncle Milo could stand those incredibly loud noises.

In a way, Milo felt sorry for the pack of merciless killers he was engaged in extirpating, for they none of them had the faintest notion who or what was killing them. The crashingly loud reports tended to keep them well away from the tower, and that distance simply made it easier to shoot them accurately with the long-range weapon.

He tried hard to make each kill a clean one, and the tremendous shocking power of the mushrooming bullets helped him toward his goal. He never knew how many, or how few, of that pack survived, but those that did were those that, for whatever reasons, were not on the plateau that morning, for he stopped firing only when there were no more targets.

When he finally stood up, his joints crackling and protesting, to survey the slaughter he had here wrought, he felt more than a little sick. Of all of the animals, he had always admired the great cats and the wolves. Sight of the tumbled, furry bodies—scores of them, scattered from side to side and end to end of the plateau—and thought of all the fierce vitality that his skill with the ancient weapon had snuffed out so safely and effortlessly pricked his conscience.

But the Horseclansmen, who had climbed up onto the roof of the ruined tower as soon as they could be reasonably sure that those earsplitting noises had ceased, did not any of them share his anachronistic squeamishness, not when they had gotten a good look at the windfall out there on the plateau.

Whooping, they lowered themselves down the sides of the cower and ran to the nearest dead wolves, skinning knives out, Winter wolf pelts were heavy, warm and valuable. They would become wealthy men at the next tribe council, through trading wolf pelts for cattle, sheep, horses, concubines and inanimate treasures.

By the morning of the fourth day after the blizzard had ended, the deer carcass was become but well-gnawed bones, and the den of rattlesnakes an assortment of curing snakeskins. The cat and her cubs had avidly lapped up every last drop of the three gallons of milk Milo had prepared them from some of the milk powder, so he decided to take Dik and Djim down into the forest below the plateau to seek game more edible than frozen wolves.

However, in the wake of the thorough scouring to which the winter wolf pack had subjected the country roundabout, four hares were all that the hunters had to show for three hours of the endeavor. Then Djim’s keen eyes picked out some large beast moving through the thick, snow-weighted brush among the tree boles.

Alerted by the soundless mindspeak. Milo raised the rifle and almost loosed off a deadly bullet before the scope told him precisely what the animal was, Lowering the piece and thumbing the safety back on. he pursed his lips and whistled the horse-call of the clans, whereupon the chestnut broke off her browsing to come trotting out of the scrub.

Milo put out a hand to the mare, but she shied away, going instead to Dik and nuzzling against his chest.

Smiling broadly and patting the shaggy neck of the mare, he said wonderingly, “Why, this is my hunter, Swiftwatcr, Uncle Milo. But I left her with the other horses, back at that deer yard, days ago.”

“Then it’s a pure wonder that she’s not now wolf shit,” commented Djim laconically. “I figure most of those horses we left there are such long since.”

Dik hugged the mare’s fine head to him, saying, “Well, she won’t have to fear that now. I’ll take care of my good girl.”

“Then we’ll have to set you up in a tent down here in the woods,” said Djim bluntly, because there’s no way we’re going to get a live horse up onto that plateau. Dik.”

Dik set his jaw stubbornly. “I’m not going to leave down here alone again.”

Milo nodded. “No. Dik, you’re not. You’re going to her right now and ride back to the camp. Her fortuitous appearance changes the complexion of things. You’ve got your bow and your dirk. Djim will give you his arrows his spear, as well.

“Fil says that the big cat may never recover her strength in those forepaws. I mean to persuade her to come back to camp with us, her and the kittens.”

Neither Horseclansman showed or felt any surprise at Milo’s stated intent, for both had “chatted” often with the invalid cat and Djim was now become not only a frequent companion but a virtual parent to all three of the cubs. To their minds, the four cats were human, anatomical differences notwithstanding.

Milo continued, “Dik, tell the chiefs of all we have found and all we have done here. Tell them to come with a large party and plenty of spare horses. We’ll strip that ruin up there of anything and everything we can use; then, too,” he grinned “none of you will want to leave any of your wolfskins or snakehides behind.

“Tell the chiefs that I say to hurry, Dik. If they heed me in this instance, they stand to be chiefs of fairly wealthy clan by the time they leave this winter’s camp.”

With Dik departed, Milo and Djim continued to hunt vainly, for a while, but then Djim mindcalled, “Uncle Milo elk dung, still hot!”

Following the clear trail, the two men shortly came out of the thick woods into more open terrain. Well ahead, among the stumps verging a beaver pond, a solitary bull elk had cleared enough snow from off the frozen ground to give him access to the bunches of sere grass that underlay the white blanket; now, he was grazing.

Raising his head with its wide-spreading, still-unshed rack of deadly tines, the huge beast gazed at the two men without apparent alarm. A brief scan of the elk’s surface thoughts told Milo the reason for this unconcern—this particular bull had been hunted by men more than once and he now realized that the long distance separating them was just too far for the hurting-sticks to travel through the air. If the two-legs kept to this distance, he was safe. Should they try to close, he would flee. Meanwhile, he would eat grass. Simple.

A single well-placed shot from the ancient hunting rifle dropped the half-ton animal, but Milo put a second into the head at close range as a precaution, for bull elk could be highly dangerous adversaries. Then he and Djim. taking time only for a few refreshing drafts of hot elk blood, set about the skinning and cleaning and butchering of the kill.

“The Hunter and her brood,” thought Milo, “should be very happy with some hundreds of pounds of elkmeat, and that’s to the good. I want her in a very damned jolly mood when I breach the subject of her and them leaving here for good with us and living out their lives with the clans.

“I would imagine that the idea of a steady, reliable and effortless—on her part, at least—food supply will appeal to her, so that’s one point in favor of my plan. For all of her stubbornness, she’s highly intelligent—more intelligent than any dog or pig that I ever came across, and they’re supposed to be the most intelligent of four-footed creatures—and if you can convince her that something new or different is for her own or her cubs’ welfare, she’ll usually do as you say—as witness the fact that she has not pulled off her bandages even once, for all that those healing injuries must itch like pure, furious hell.

“If she’s a sport, she’s breeding true, for all three of her cubs can mindspeak, can beam every bit as strongly as can she, though not yet as far. When she has recovered her physical strength, she and I will have to travel around and see if we can locate a mate for her, since she avers that there are more of her kind in this neck of the woods.”

Secure in the belief of the efficacy of his own powers of persuasion, Milo chuckled to himself on that long-ago, snowy, bitterly-cold day, “Who knows? In time, there may yet be still another Horseclan—a four-footed and furry Horseclan!”

“And so there is,” beamed old Bullbane. “The Clan of Cats must be the most numerous of all the Clans of the Kindred, for every two-leg Horseclan has an allied sept of Cats. And there must be many claws-count of Kindred clans.”

“Yes, honored cat brother,” agreed Milo, “I, too, am certain that the full Clan of Cats is the largest of all the clans. Fourscore are the Kindred Clans, and each sept of the Clan of Cats averages some twelve, plus cubs, so there are well over one thousand prairiecats following the herds with their two-leg brothers and sisters. Nor does that figure include some that still are living wild, apart from the clans.

“The wild life is a good life for a healthy sound cat in its prime.” stated Bullbane silently, “but illness or serious injury or advanced age in the wild presage naught but a slow, painful death. Far better that a cat live our his life with his two-leg cat kin, secure in the knowledge that his abilities are valued, that his belly will be full as long as the bellies of his kin are full, that he will be protected and fed in illness or if injured, and that he will be vouchsafed a quick, painless death when he feels that the time has come for him to go to Wind.”