Horses of the North

VII

“Oh, Milo,” Arabella Lindsay silently beamed, “I’m so very excited about Father’s decision. I can hardly wait to ride out of this place of bitterness and hunger and death and start living the free and beautiful-sounding life that your people always have known. Capull can run out there, run as long and as far as he wishes, and never again be forced to endure a box stall.”

“Our life is undoubtedly free … as you comprehend freedom, ’Bella,” Milo beamed, “but it is a freedom that you may in time come to truly curse—freedom to die of heat or of thirst or of cold and exposure, freedom to drown in a river crossing where there is no shallow ford, freedom to be consumed in prairie fires such as often occur in late summer and autumn when lightning strikes tinder-dry grasses or a dead cottonwood tree, freedom to be eaten alive by wolves or bears or predatory big cats, freedom to …”

“Goodness, Milo, it cannot be so bad, so gloomy a life as you picture. Your people seem happy enough with it, after all.”

“They’ve none of them ever known any other kind of life, ’Bella, but you have known comforts and safeties of which they have never so much as dreamed. The time may well come when you will heap abuse upon me for persuading your father to give over all this and come with me and the clans-folk, You may well come to yearn for the settled life and bitterly regret leaving such, you know. And our customs are drastically different from those to which you have been brought up. For instance, how will you feel when your husband brings a second wife into your yurt? Or a slave concubine captured in some raid or other?”

Arabella’s shock showed in her face as she beamed, “But... but why, Milo, why would any man do such a thing?”

“Because we are not monogamous, as are you and your people and most Christians, for that matter, for all that your own holy book is chock-full of polygamy and chattel slavery.”

“Why aren’t you happy with just one wife at a time, you and your people, Milo? And how did you ever get your womenfolk to tolerate such an arrangement?” She wrinkled her freckled brow in clear puzzlement.

“For one paramount reason, to begin, ’Bella: better than one out of every three children born in my tribe dies either in infancy or, at best, before it is ten years of age. There is strength and safety only in numbers when you lack stone walls to hide behind, and a woman can bear but once in two or three years, if she is to properly nurture the last child she bore, so it was long ago decided that were we to practice monogamy, it would not be too long before we were become so small and weak that we would cease to exist as a tribal entity.

“Our women were mostly born into polygamous society, so there is no question about it in their minds. Besides, there are never enough hands to do all the daily chores necessary to maintain a nomadic household; multiple wives, a slave girl or two and a plentitude of small children make individual workloads far the lighter in day-to-day existence on the prairie.

“Another important reason for the practice of polygamy and concubinage in nomad tribes is the all-too-frequent death of women in childbirth, or shortly thereafter. It is a sad enough occurrence to suddenly lose a loved and valued member of a household, without losing the newborn babe—if it survived her—and any still-dependent children because no other women are resident to quickly take them to suck or otherwise care for them.”

Arabella nodded slowly, then demanded. “But Milo, do not the men die, as well? What then becomes of their many women and the children?”

“Yes,” he said, “perhaps as many men as women die each and every year, and others are crippled. Mostly, men and older boys die in war or raidings or the hunt. Some suffer death and disablement while guarding our herds from predators. Others are killed or injured by domestic animals or by mischance, as when a galloping horse happens to fall. Illnesses of assorted kinds take away some, and ill-tended wounds a few more. And there are many other fatal perils facing male clansfolk every day and night of their lives. But I believe your question had to do with the fate of a woman whose husband had died.

“Well, if he chanced to leave one or more sons of warrior age, the household simply goes on as before, with the likely addition of the new wife of this new man of the household. If all of the children are too young to follow that course and if the deceased is survived by an unmarried male sibling, it is quite common for that brother or half brother to marry the widows, adopt the immature children and assume ownership of the slaves and horses and other effects, and the household continues almost as before.”

“But what of the cattle and sheep and goats the dead man owned?” Arabella probed. “Who gets those, Milo?”

“Aside from his horses and his hunting hounds, ’Bella, neither he nor any other individual member of the tribe owns livestock personally. The herds, with the sole exceptions of draft oxen, are owned by the tribe as a whole, and their produce—milk, meat, hides, tallow, wool and hair, horn, sinew and suchlike—is all divided as equally as can be amongst the clans and households.

“But, ’Bella, we only butcher our stock for meat in times of direst need. More have been slaughtered here to feed and restore your people to health than the tribe would normally kill in a year or more; it was a major sacrifice for the tribe, but I thought it necessary, under the circumstances, and was able to influence the clan chiefs to support me in it. Even then, the herds were carefully culled so that the best stock remained alive to breed more of their superior kind.

“We usually take only milk, wool and hair from our stock, the rest of our sustenance being derived of hunting and trapping game and foraging for wild plants, augmented by fishing and seining if we chance to be near lakes, ponds or larger running water. Hunting and trapping also give us hides for leather, furs for winter garments, sinew and bone for various uses, antler and horn, down and feathers for filling quilted padding and for the fletchings of arrows. Glue is rendered from fish and from the feet of hooved beasts, both wild and domesticated. The paunches of deer and others of the larger grass-eaters are treated and cured and then used to line waterskins. Intestines of the bigger beasts are cleansed and stretched and cured and then used as watertight storage containers. You see, ’Bella, we are a thrifty people, wasting nothing of any conceivable utility. As chancy as our life can be, it’s a case of ‘waste not, want not.’ ”

“Milo, if this nomadic herding and hunting life is so very hard and dangerous, why did you first set the tribe to such a life? Why did you not settle them somewhere and farm, instead?”

He grimaced, beaming, “Oh, I tried hard to do just that, in the very beginning, some century or so back, ’Bella. Indeed I did, I tried hard, believe me; I tried not just the once in the one place but several times in widely scattered locations. But the hideous explosive weapons with which the War that immediately preceded the Great Dyings was carried on must have vastly altered the high wind currents that control the climate here on earth, causing many once-productive areas to become near-deserts over a space of only a few years and also drowning many and many a square mile of arable land beneath new lakes or vastly broadened rivers and other waterways. The first three generations of the tribe wandered from place to place, farming a few years here and a few more there, only to finally have to move on due to unfavorable conditions of many differing varieties. As they and I slowly were forced by circumstances to adapt to a nomadic existence, I decided that that was the only feasible way of the future, and we gradually achieved to our current life and customs.

“Here—come into my memories and learn just how it was long ago and far, far away to the south and west.”

The spring came in earlier than usual, and Milo, Paul Krueger and their people and herds moved out eastward from the southern fringes of the shrinking Lake Tahoe, but they had not proceeded far at all, not quite to Silver Springs, when the rearguard came roaring in to announce that they were being pursued by a large pack of bikers, loaded for bear and burning up the steadily decreasing distance.

In the empty streets and buildings of the dead town, ambush points were set up and manned. Their backs were to the wall, and both men and women—who all had of course heard of the atrocities wreaked upon the former slaves of the Tahoe City bunch-were prepared to fight to the last spark of life, asking no quarter and expecting to receive none.

The filthy, long-haired and -bearded pack came pouring into the town along its main street, with no scouts or flankers, all of them cocksure in their numbers, arms and rabid ferocity. And they were butchered like so many rats in a barrel. Bullets and buckshot and arrows came at them from all four sides—right, left, front and rear, both on their level and from above their heads. As the impetus of the followers packed them in between the dead or dying or wounded and confused vanguards and those still speeding into the town, hand grenades were hurled among them, the resultant explosions not only spreading a dense and deadly wave of shrapnel, but setting fire to several motorcycles as well.

The bikers tried hard to return fire with their automatics, pistols, riot guns and heavier weapons, but were hampered by their exposed positions and the nearly complete lack of any targets at which to aim. The few casualties taken by the embattled farmer-folk were mostly accidental or pure chance hits.

By the time the survivors of the outlaw band—less than half of the original force—finally decided to pack it in and began to stream, run, walk, hobble or crawl out of town, back toward the west and safety, the street between the bullet-pocked facades of the buildings was heaped with still or writhing bodies and the long-dry gutters were running with sticky red blood.

Mounting captured motorcycles and horses, armed now with a plentitude of weapons of all types, Milo, Krueger and most of the men pursued and harried the retreating bikers, cutting down stragglers with ruthless abandon. As they drew up to within range of the main bunch, they dismounted to fire long bursts at the tires of the speeding bikes, blowing quite a few, then killing the thus stranded human animals at leisure. Some of the former slaves did not kill the unlucky few who fell into their hands quickly, but rather stripped them of clothing, staked them out under the pitiless sun, maimed them in ways that sickened even Milo, then left them to die slowly of exposure, pain and blood loss, if thirst or coyotes did not do the job first. Yet when Paul Krueger and others of the men would have put a halt to the barbarities and granted the captives a quick death, Milo took the part of the freed slaves.

“Paul, gentlemen, God alone knows all that those poor bastards and their fellows—dead and alive-suffered at the brutal hands of bikers, maybe even some of those they’ve now got at their mercy. You surely don’t think that they’ve recounted ail that was done to them, or even the worst things, do you? No, let them alone, for now, what they’re performing here is a sort of emotional catharsis for them, as well as a long-overdue revenge for the loved ones and friends who are no longer alive to savor it.”

Krueger and the others, after stripping the dead bikers of weapons, ammunition and any other needed items, draining the damaged bikes of gasoline and removing sound tires and wheels, left in disgust, leaving Milo and the freed slaves plus a few of his own people to continue trailing the much-reduced force of raiders.

There was one short, sharp skirmish with a contingent of bikers who had stopped at a crossroads service station and were in process of trying to siphon gasoline out of an underground storage tank, but the exchange of fire was very brief; the bikers just left their dead and seriously wounded and took off up the road to the west with as much speed as they could coax from their engines.

Milo and his party halted there at the site of the skirmish for long enough to dispatch the wounded bikers, strip them and themselves complete the task of raising enough fuel from the subterranean tank to refill all of their own bikes and the five-gallon cans that several men carried strapped behind them as a reserve supply.

After that, they never again caught up to the fleeing mob of survivors, though here and there along the roadway they found evidences that the pack still rode ahead of them—men dead or dying of wounds, damaged bikes or undamaged ones with empty fuel tanks, weapons, ammunition, supplies and equipment abandoned in order to lighten loads.

On the southern outskirts of Reno, Milo called a halt to the pursuit and turned about, heading back to Silver Springs. His guesstimate was that some eight hundred to a thousand bikers had descended on the ambush points. Of those, a good four hundred to five hundred had died in that little slice of hell that he and Paul and the rest had made of that main street of the town; those killed along the road and in the skirmish at the service station, plus the dead and dying they had found along the way, added up to half the number that had gotten out of the town alive, anyway. And the skirmish had proved one thing if nothing else: the outlaw bikers had had a bellyful of fighting, for once, and desired nothing more than escape. He felt certain that they had seen the last of the predatory cyclists. The pack had not too many fangs left to break on so tough and dangerous a quarry; his experience with their unsavory breed was that they were bullies who if hurt badly enough by a chosen victim would run away to find another less capable of self-defense.

On the trip back, they topped off their tanks at the same service station, put a couple of cases of motor oil and some assorted lubricants and tools into the two trailer carts that they had found left behind by the enemy, then headed east once more, pausing only occasionally as the sun sank lower and lower behind them to run down and slay the few stray dismounted bikers they spotted wandering about or skulking in the roadside brush. The victory had been complete, the enemy’s rout, utter.

After a long, slow march, with frequent stops of varying lengths, since there no longer existed the horrendous pressure of pursuit by the vengeful bikers, the migrants reached what had been the State of Idaho, crossed the Snake River to the famous Snake River Plain and settled down to farming and ranching for a while. They stayed for over ten years, during which time old Paul Krueger died, to be succeeded in authority by his fortyish son, Harry, a rancher.

Through all those years, just as through the many years that had preceded them, Milo’s appearance had never changed; no sign of aging had ever occurred and, indeed, he looked far younger than many of those who had been teenagers when he had taken them under his wing thirty years before. But, oddly enough, they and the Krueger group and all the current crop of youngsters had come to accept Milo’s immutability of aspect without giving thought to the matter. He was just Uncle Milo, who had always been there to guide and help them and who, conceivably, would always be there when needed.

For the first five or six years of their ten-year sojourn in the Snake River country, now as devoid of other living humans as had been most of Nevada and southern California, there had been few problems. The land had been productive, the graze abundant; the deserted homes and outbuildings they had acquired through merely moving in had been commodious and comfortable in both warm weather and cold. Early on, Milo and Paul Krueger and some others of the older men had rigged new and existing windmills to provide electricity to most of the farms and ranches, with bicycle arrangements as a backup source of power generation.

What with wells, springs, smaller streams, ponds and the nearby river, lack of water was never a problem to them. Both the hunting and the fishing were quite productive of protein, and other than coyotes, wild dogs and the rare bear, there were few predators about to menace livestock larger than chickens. If things had been fated to stay to idyllic, they might well have remained longer in the beautiful, fruitful area, but they did not.

Each succeeding winter snowfall seemed heavier than the last, and the resultant spring floods began to render the fields soggy and difficult to work at just the wrong time in the cycle of farming. The stupendous quantities of snowmelt also turned burbling brooklets into wide, turbulent torrents, ponds into shallow lakes covering many an acre of fields or pasturelands and the Snake itself into a horrifying flood that bore all on or before it and against which there was no defense.

So terrifying and deadly were the floods of the eighth spring in the Snake River country that Milo, after consulting with Harry Krueger and the half-dozen or so other natural leaders who had emerged from among the maturing first generation, decided that they must move on to a place less prone to annual disaster, in Wyoming, possibly, or Colorado.

The group of leaders agreed upon long and very careful preparations for this impending migration, setting a tentative departure date two years ahead.

“Well, at least most of us still have our wagons and carts and U-Haul trailers. My family’s trailer has been a chicken coop for the most of the last eight years, but we can get it cleaned up and scrounge new tires for it somewhere, I guess,” remarked Chuck Llywelyn, grinning. “But living in that nice, big, warm, dry house for so long may have spoiled us for going back to trailers and tents and wet and cold.”

But Milo frowned. “I don’t think we’d be wise to plan on using those trailers any longer, Chuck. These heavy snows and floods are probably not a purely local phenomenon, and everyone here is aware of the havoc that the weather and thirty-odd years of no maintenance have wrought on roads and bridges hereabouts. And Chuck, those trailers were designed for use on hard-surfaced roads, not cross-country. Their axles and wheels contain a lot of needless weight for animals to draw, and their ground clearance is so low that it sometimes seemed on the trek up here that we spent half our time whenever we had to leave the roads unloading and reloading and manhandling the damned things. Also, they are none of them light or waterproof enough for crossing deeper fords or floating across waters that have no ford … and those are possibilities we are going to have to anticipate and prepare for, this time around.

“No, I think we’d better start collecting hardware and metal scrap that can be reforged and lots of seasoned wood and set up a wagon works around Olsen’s forge and commence the building of more carts as well as renovating and refurbishing the ones left from eight years ago. Parties had better set out on regular foraging trips to every settlement within reach, for we’re going to need a veritable host of large and small items, from harness fittings and stirrups to tents and canvas sheeting and a thousand and one other things.

“From what I can recall of the country as it was before the War and from recent study of contour maps and whatnot, I think our best eventual destination would be somewhere in southeastern Wyoming or in eastern Colorado. But, gentlemen, both of those areas are a long, long way from here, and in order to reach either of them we are going to have to nurse our herds and our families and our wheeled transport over and through some of the roughest terrain on this continent. We are going to have to move at a much faster pace than we did coming up here from southernNevada, too, lest we be trapped up there by an early winter.

“In order to see what the general condition of the roads and bridges and cuts and fills may be, I’m going to be choosing men to ride with me over several alternate lines-of-march to a number of alternate settlement sites. Consequently, a largish portion of the preparations carried on here is going to fall squarely on Harry and Chuck and Jim Olsen and the rest of you. And the usual round of farm and ranch work is all going to have to be performed at one and the same time, mind you; this will all take two years to jell, and everyone has to eat between now and then, as well as put up stores for the journey.

“Harry, you have your father’s journals from the first migration, and I’ll loan you mine, as well. Pore over them and you’ll have an idea what to tell the foragers to bring back here. One thing they all should seek out is coal, hard coal, lots of it, for the forge—it produces a steadier and longer-lasting heat for metalworking than either wood or charcoal.”

Jim Olsen, the smith, nodded his agreement wordlessly. He never had seen the sense of wasting words and breath. He was vastly talented at his new postwar profession and continued to perform it every day for all that he now was sixty-two years of age. Despite his advanced years, however, he still was as strong and active and vital as many a man of half his age, and he owned the liking, admiration and respect of every man and woman of the community.

“The seasoned woods are going to be the hardest thing to find—I know they were last time, down south. We need hardwoods, not softwood building lumber, you see—ash, oak, fruit or nutwoods, elm, maple, ironwood, birch and the like. Nor should any of them pass up pieces of solid exotic woods of a usable size—ebony, lignum vitae, mahogany, teak and rosewood, cypress, too.

“Harry, are the camels still on your ranch?”

The man addressed nodded. “Yes, they were Pa’s pets, kind of, nasty and ornery and vicious as they are, so they’re still around, biting cows and horses whenever they feel like it and scaring the hell out of honest coyotes and bears. Why?”

“I’llbe wanting them to pack supplies for me and the advance scouting parties, Harry. See if you can turn up the packsaddles we used on them eight years ago, too. The loads that they can easily carry would break a horse’s back—that’s the reason that Paul doted so on them. With the five of them to pack our water, supplies and equipment, we won’t need any other pack animals, only spare mounts.”

“There are now six of them,” said Harry Krueger. “A calf or foal or whatever you call it was dropped four years ago. But the critter’s not been saddle-broke or even gentled. I wouldn’t know how to go about breaking one, and I have too much regard for keeping my hide in one piece to go near those loud, smelly, dangerous abortions.”

Milo and his intrepid band of explorers rode back and forth along the tentative routes until winter and snow-choked passes confined them in the Snake River country. The country over which they rode and walked had never been in any way thickly settled, even before the War and the subsequent Great Dyings. Now there were almost no signs that men had ever trod most of it, save for the crumbling roads and bridges that, where not washed out, were often of questionable safety for the passage of anything heavier than a mounted man or a pack animal.

Not one of the scattered habitations and business structures along the routes appeared to have experienced human occupation in twenty or thirty years, being all weatherworn, of warped wood, sun-damaged plastics, oxidizing metals and cracked, deeply eroded concrete. In many places, the roofs had fallen in, and many more seemed teetering on the brink of similar collapse.

Not that there was no life at all, for indeed there was. Game of ail sorts was more than merely abundant. Deer herds abounded—common black-tails, elk and some spotted cervines that Milo was certain were fallow deer, though how they’d gotten into Wyoming was a question now unanswerable, and even a few bison, though these last were in herds of feral cattle and looked to have interbred with the bovines to some extent.

There were feral sheep and goats, too, now all as chary as the bighorns on the heights. Sometimes pronghorn antelope were to be found in the herds of sheep and goats, as well. Smaller game had proliferatedunbelievably, for all that there were predators in plenty about. There were, of course, the inevitable coyotes and wild dogs, which here as elsewhere seemed to be in the process of breeding up into real, sizable lupine creatures that ran in small, extended-family packs. There were bears, both the grizzlies and the blacks. There were cougars, bobcats and the larger lynxes, smaller, long-tailed cats that bore a startling resemblance to the European wildcat, and the full gamut of well-fed mustelids. Forests and open lands and skies were filled with birds of all sorts, sharp-eyed raptors glided high above on every clear day, and owls hooted from the tail trees as dusk was falling on the party’s camps.

The men ail lived well on easily harvested game, but they were forced to keep fires burning brightly and armed men alert throughout every night to protect the animals from the plethora of hungry-predators. Panicky horses frequently were more of a danger to the men than the cougar or bear that had frightened them. But the camels soon proved themselves beasts of a different water; on the first outward-bound trip, the six of them joined to merrily rip and stamp a pack of coyote-dog-wolves into furry, bloody paste when said pack assayed an attack against one of the humped dromedaries. On the way back, through the mountains, a grizzly came sniffing around the camp and the camels and suffered attack and fatal injuries as a result. At morning, Milo and some of the men followed the blood trail of the gravely crippled ursine and found him, still warm, a scant half-mile off. So thoroughly had he been gashed by the long fangs of the camels that the men did not even try to skin him, taking only his hams for meat and his teeth and claws for adornment; the huge bear was missing one eye and had suffered so many broken bones from camel kicks that Milo wondered how he had managed to drag himself off as far as he had.

Three men lost their lives in the expedition, and some dozen horses were killed or so badly injured as to require being put down—though some of these were able to be quickly replaced by animals run down and roped and broken from wild herds—but the same six camels that had left in the spring came back in the autumn. And a spindly camel colt was dropped the following March, to boot.

When Milo met again with the leaders of the people on a late-winter day of the ninth year, he had an armful of marked maps and a voluminous sheaf of notes compiled from the experiences of the expeditions he had led out and back again.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the country, everywhere we went, is virtually swarming with game of every description, including feral horses and sheep and goats and cattle, although some few of the latter seem to have interbred with wild bison.

“As these maps show, there are several equally attractive destinations to be considered, some nearer, some farther; should we choose one of the farther ones, perhaps we should plan on wintering over in one of those farther west, but we’ll all make that decision later.

“We saw no signs at all of recent human life until we got to what was once the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The few score people scratching out a bare subsistence in the decaying shell of that city seemed overjoyed to discover that someone else had survived, that they were not the only humans left on the continent, and their leader, a man named Clarence Bookerman, wants to join us in our community wherever we decide to establish it.

“At all of the sites we have recommended in these reports, the land is fertile and adequately watered, though not obviously prone to the kinds of flooding we have suffered from here. There are homes and buildings on most of the lands, though all of these are by now in need of repair if not complete rebuilding; the fields and pastures are going to have to be cleared of the tough grasses, weeds, brush and young trees that have taken root in them since last they were worked by men, thirty-odd years ago, but with due care and caution exercised, we can probably burn off the larger portions of it, fell any tree trunks that the fires leave behind, then grub out the roots in jig time, and all the ashes will make the soil even richer for the crops we sow in it.

“Now the bad news, gentlemen. The far-northern route, the first one we tried last year, would be impassable to wagons or carts. Between crumbling road surfaces, washed-out fills and bridges, cuts blocked or partly blocked by rockfall, it was difficult enough for our party of horsemen and pack animals to negotiate.

“The central route is little better. We probably could eventually get the vehicles and the herds through, but it would be very hard work clearing cuts and refilling fills, and felling trees to build makeshift bridges, and this all would require a great deal of time, the one commodity of which we lack are we to get through the worst, highest country safely before the snows are upon us.

“The far-southern route, now, is the one that I and all the other scouts would prefer except for a certain factor. Use of it will require that we either use a less-than-satisfactory stretch of roads to get over into Wyoming and then down to this southern route—roads that are going to require all the aforementioned work that the central route would, though for a shorter overall distance—or choose the following alternative.

“The much easier way to get our people and herds to a point at which we can set our feet to the better-preserved road that will take us east to the richest lands is to take old Route 30 down south, curve around the southern tip of Bear Lake and proceed on into Wyoming. But here lies a serious, a dangerous problem, gentlemen, that cost me the lives of two men and some horses.”