The Clan of the Cats

XII

Slowly, ever so slowly, with many a stop and start, the winter was relaxing its cruel, deadly grip on the plateau and the surrounding montane wilderness. Though meltwaters that rushed and pooled deeply during the days always still froze over at night, some of the days were sunny-warm in comparison to the long cold that gradually was dissipating.

It was none too soon for Milo and his nomads, either, for—despite the necessary hunts they had undertaken in order to keep both themselves and the cats fed adequately—the long confinement inside the ruins was resulting in severe cabin fever and resultant ill-humor and short tempers.

More important to Milo, who intended to get as much as possible of the many-volume Bedford Journal read before the clans arrived, the supply of gasoline for the lanterns was running perilously low; therefore, immediately he thought it possible, he rigged a movable windbreak on the top of the brick tower and thenceforth spent much of many sunny days reading by natural light, often joined by one or more of the growing cubs and, less frequently, by their mother or one or both of the newcome adult cats. The cats usually did little more than curl up and snooze; nonetheless, the still-biting gusts of air that sometimes found a way around the windbreak frequently made him glad for the nearby sources of body heat.

Because the recuperating mother cat’s forelegs still were not equal to absorbing the necessary shock of her not inconsiderable weight after a drop of the more than eight feet from the tower top to the platform below it, he used a mostly cloudy day to take all the nomads, a coil of strong rope and a couple of the fine, sharp twenty-first-century axes down into the woods just below the plateau. There they felled and roughly trimmed a sizable pine tree, then managed to get it up one side of the sheer wall of rock and snaked it across the soggy ground to lean it against the tower and so provide easy access and egress to or from the tower top for any beast with claws.

While they were at the welcome exertion, they dismantled the yurt left below by the clansmen visitors (left behind in order to pack more wolf skins on the packhorses), then hoisted it, too, up onto the plateau. That night, even Milo willingly forewent the bunk beds in the disaster shelter in order to huddle on the cold ground inside the familiar, homey, unconfining confines of the simple felt yurt.

As the deep layers of ice and snow began to melt away from first the tower and then an ever widening periphery of the ruins, Milo and the nomads went about finding thawing, hideless wolf carcasses and dragging them to where they could be cast over the verges of the plateau before they thawed out, decomposed and not only made the environs of the ruins unbearable with the stench but attracted all manner of scavengers and noxious insects to the feast.

From the very first attempt, the men had all discovered that the two adult cats were, with their telepathy, an invaluable pair of hunting partners. Hunting in company with one of them made the hunting much easier on both men and cat and far more certain of edible conclusions. The men, armed with bows and spears, needed only to spot the prey beasts position themselves and then have the cat or cats circle around so as to show themselves or give the game their scent or mock-charge them into fleeing in panic past the positions taken by the waiting men. It was relaxed, almost completely dangerless hunting, and all parties seemed to enjoy it.

After the first experience, however, neither of the big cats would accompany any hunting party that included Milo, not when he chanced to arm himself with the ancient rifle and his dwindling stock of cartridges; the flat crack of shots hurt their ears, they beamed bluntly, going on to beam that if the two-legs wanted to accompany another two-legs carrying such an insufferably loud, smelly thing, they were welcome to do so, but that no sensible cat could or should be expected to willingly subject itself to such sensory abuse.

With a shrug, Milo cleaned and oiled the fine weapon, then repacked it and the thirteen remaining cartridges for it back in the way he had found them. The cats were worth far more to him and the clans, now than the use of an archaic hunting rifle. Without a doubt, the rifle’s barrel could have been worked into a fine blade for sword or saber by a Horseclans smith and the smaller metal parts into many other useful item, tool or weapon, but the rifle had served him and the nomads and the cats well, had saved their lives from the huge, ravenous pack of wolves that had cornered them up there in these ruins and was sitting siege on them all, and he was sufficiently sentimental to return it to where he had so fortuitously discovered it in their time of dire need, to let it go back to its ages-long rest to await there the improbable finding of it by another who might know what it was and how to use it and be in need of its awesome, deadly power.

Questioning of the cats relative to the existences and the possible locations of others of their kind was tricky and not very rewarding, Milo had discovered. The big adult male recalled first awareness in surroundings that, from his hazy description, Milo could only assume had been a cave in some mountainside, but what side of what mountain and where from hem that mountain might lie were questions that the massive beast could neither answer nor really grasp as important. Apparently, he had left his parents and siblings—his pride?—when he became sexually mature and so presented an incipient threat to his sire. He had hunted alone for either two or three cold times before finding scent of his present mate. Their last year’s litter had all died of mishap before becoming more than mere cubs and so poor had been the hunting this terrible winter—before they had wandered into this area and found no recent signs of a territorial resident—that she had not gone into estrus.

The female, for her part, had seen no cats of her sort other than her mate since wandering off from the ruin two cold-times in the past, but she did recall having smelled the relatively recent presence of two others of her kind in her circuits, though—most frustrating for Milo—she recalled neither where nor when and finally stalked off when he kept probing at the matter. Feline priorities, he reflected, differed markedly from those of his kind.

“The only answer, I guess,” Milo thought, “is to keep the clans in this general vicinity for as long as I can, this year, winter on those cold plains down there again, then come back up here and keep doing that until we can gather a decent-sized breeding stock of these intelligent, telepathic cats … either that or take the chance of trying to make it with what we have on hand, all but one of which are very closely related. Hell, all of them may be for all I or anyone else knows of it, really knows of it.

“Interesting and really fascinating as are Bedford’s varied experiences away back when, much as I enjoy reading them through, I do wish he’d get into a little more detail about the replication of this Panthera feethami a little more quickly, for perhaps if I knew a bit more about the particular types of cats that were used in that replication experiment, I’d be better able to judge how and where to find these existing cats. Are these the descendants of those? Hell what else could they be, pray tell? At one time or another, back then, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I was in various parts of five continents and I never saw or heard of the like of these cats, not living ones. And even as sparsely settled as this area was back then, it was pretty thoroughly hunted each year, and no large predator such as these cats with their thick, beautiful, stunning coats and those distinctive fangs would’ve been unnoticed and at least reported by a hunter or ranger.

“He’s already noted his buying of two replicated cave lions, and these present cats seem to live at least in family groups, as lions do, too; furthermore, the adult male’s family did live in a cave, rather than just use it for bearing and weaning of a litter, such as other cats and, for that matter, not a few other animals of many kinds do. I just know too little right now to know how much I need to know, yet, I guess. So I suppose it must be back to the Bedford Journal, for me.

“But there’re other problems, too. This trouble that the clans have experienced this winter with indigeneous nomads means that if we’re going to stay up in this neck of the woods for the length of time we may need to if we’re going to go about rooting out cats, we’re going to be obliged either to hammer out a way to peacefully coexist with the locals or actively make full-scale war on them to the point where we wipe them out or drive them elsewhere. Of the two latter alternatives, the first is preferable I’ve found in similar cases over the years; driven out, they can always lick at their wounds, regroup and come back at you, come back mad for your blood; wiped out, they’ll be done for—well-hacked, arrow-quilled corpses never regroup and counterattack anyone.

“Naturally, I’d much liefer make peace with them, at least. Or better, join them with my people, my Horseclans, just as I did with the Scotts and the Lindsays and not a few before them; there’re still not all that many human beings left on earth that we can afford to butcher large numbers on anything approaching the scale of warfare during the last century of the old world, the old civilization’s horrendous wars. But much as I’d like it, as much real sense as it makes under the circumstances and in light of mankind’s drastically reduced numbers on the face of the land, it still may not be possible, may not work in this case, with this particular group or groups of people; old General Eustace Barstow hit the nail squarely on the head when he averred that mankind was grossly misnamed, that, indeed, he was the least kind and the most savage, cruel and unremittingly bloodthirsty of all the creatures on the planet, more bestial than any beast, never forgetting, never forgiving, ever able to recall or imagine a good excuse for slaughter of his own kind or any other, seldom allowing either age or sex to stand in the way of his insatiable bloodlust.

“Well, his world, the one he tried so hard and so vainly to save, ended just about as he predicted it would end, and that end only missed his timetable by a few, a very few, years, too. It’s such a goddam pity that more people couldn’t have seen, have realized just how right that man and the handful of ones of like mind were in time to have joined with them and saved that world, maybe have kept it and its technology and its institutions going long enough to find a way to cure humanity of its savagery.

“Reading Bedford’s reminiscences, through these long weeks, I’m recalling so much, so very much, of my own life, my own experiences in the dear, dead world. There was a lot of good in it, despite all the undeniable cruelties and horror and inhumanity. Even within the less than a century of it that I recall, things had gotten better in many, many ways for a wide swath of human beings around that world.

“Yes, millions starved to death, but those that did so did so either because they bred unchecked until there were too many of them for the land to support, because they were on marginal land to begin or because of the mismanagement—sometimes the deliberate and cruelly calculated mismanagement—of governmental structures or regimes. In any case, the overall percentage of people who starved to death in that world in those times was far and away lower than those who died similarly in earlier, less technological times on the planet.

“So terribly much would’ve, could’ve been different and better if there had been one overpoweringly strong and, more important, resolute and determined government to take control of the world in the wake of World War Two, point it in the proper path and ride tight herd on all of it until it was firmly set in its course. It was what Eustace Barstow wanted the United States of America to do, what it should’ve done, even if that had then meant pasting the holy living hell out of Josef Stalin and ‘our brave Russian ally.’ Though that might not’ve been necessary, at that point in time, for we had the Bomb then and they didn’t; moreover, for all its size, if we’d stopped supplying the Russian Red Army. it would quickly have ground to a halt long before it could’ve raped its way across Poland and eastern Germany.

“Father Karl, that slimy little pervert, the one we called Padre in the Munich operation at the end of that war, was horrified in my first conversation with him that Barstow might persuade the Powers-that-then-were to do just that, to use our then awesome military force to establish hegemony over the world and all its people. Of course, the reason he was so horrified is that he was plugging something similar—a bastard mixture of Moscow and the Papacy to take over and run the world. That was years before he gave up on the Papacy entirely, in favor of the Kremlin’s variety of Communism. Oh, how I wish I’d strangled the skinny swine in Munich, or given one of the DPs a pack of cigarettes to do it for me—how much misery I would’ve saved myself and who knows how many others, over the years.

“But he’s gone now—good riddance to filthy sewage, in his particular case—and so are Barstow and Bedford and all the other people who were of that world, except for me … and, maybe, Clarence Bookerman and, to believe what he wrote, possibly one or two more like us, somewhere.

“And if Barstow and his few had succeeded, where would I be now? What would I be doing? If he had really succeeded, had gotten the world into the shape it would’ve had to be maintained in to survive, there would be no need of small private armies, no small insurrections to be put down here and there every few years in out-of-the-way generally unpleasant parts of the globe, so surely I wouldn’t be plying the trade I followed for most of the time after the U.S. Army decided I was too old to longer serve.

“Well, whatever and wherever, I wouldn’t’ve been hurting for living expenses, good old Jethro Stiles saw to that much long, long ago. No, I’d most likely have not been soldiering, training soldiers or teaching others how to properly train them, going from continent to continent, nation to nation, war to insurrection to guerrilla as I did for so long; but even so I might well have had to follow the course that Bookerman did: living in areas until too many people were become aware that I didn’t age, then moving on, changing my name and identity, only to have to move on again after a few years or a couple of decades, at the very most, tops.

“Over the years, since he decamped so precipitously, back in Kansas … or was it Nebraska? I can’t now recall … I’ve often wondered about him, speculated on the forces that shaped him, that so warped him as to make him a still-fervent adherent of German National Socialism while seemingly completely forgetting, mentally blanking out, all of the horrors attendant to that ill-conceived, ill-starred philosophy and regime, even scores of years after its overdue demise.

“I’ve just about come to the conclusion that it was the constant moving, the rootlessness, the never-ending fear of apprehension by civil or, worse, ecclesiastical authorities, the endless round of losing all whom he held dear, respected or loved that brought him to cling so passionately to Adolf Hitler and his cause, immediately he discovered Hider to be such a one as himself … and. God help me, like me, too, if he guessed right.

“Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers’ Patty, and the Third German Reich became in Bookerman’s mind, then, not simply a cause but truly a family—the loved and cherished family he had for so long sought and been denied. People, even my kind of people, tend to magnify the good and gloss over the bad qualities of those they love and cherish, and so did Bookerman with his “family.” In his eyes, his mind, Hitler could not possibly do anything wrong, all of his aims were lofty, exalted.

“Clarence Bookerman is not, himself, a bad or an evil man, I believe, I have come to believe. He is brilliant, multitalented, a worthy product of the Renaissance that spawned him; he is, can be, generous, compassionate, self-sacrificing and intensely loyal to those he feels deserving or needful, and all of these have always been considered to be commendable qualities for any human being to possess. Yes, admitted, he can be narrow and very cruel, too, but in all the cases I saw of him, only in regard to his loyalties, to those he knew to be dependent upon him and his protection.

“An excellent case in point is what he did to that bushwhacker we captured in Colorado. God, it was gut-wrenching to have to watch and hear while he used a stainless-steel teaspoon to take out that bastard’s eyeball—especially so for me, since I knew just how it felt to have eyes gouged out, the damned Vietminh having done that and other things to me before they shot me and left me for dead after I’d escaped from Dien Bien Phu.

“What Bookerman did on that day so tore up and alienated Gus Olsen and Harry Krueger that neither of them ever after that would have any more to do with Clarence than absolutely necessary. But what he did was the only thing that would have worked to break that tough young bastard, that got for us the location of the place in which his gang of marauders had holed up and enabled us to surprise them and slaughter them, removing a deadly menace that could well have cost the lives of most or all of our people, had it been allowed to continue to exist.

“And then there were so many other things he did for the good of our people, such as boiling old, hellishly unstable dynamite in order to render out and provide us with nitroglycerin with which to attack the camp of that same bunch of bushwhackers in Colorado, or insisting to be the one to be put out on the prairie alone and beyond any sort of assistance in order to test out that first felt yurt he’d designed and put together, and so planned it as to ride out a terrible blizzard out there in isolation. Those are examples of selflessness and very real concern if such ever existed, to my way of thinking.

“But Gus and Harry never could seem to understand, after that one terrible incident, and I think that in large measure, their unceasing animosity and uncompromising distrust of him and anything that he suggested or did was a primary reason that he left us when and as he did. I, at least, know and recognize and acknowledge the patent debt we all owe Dr. Clarence Bookerman. for without his experiments and the notes he left for me to find, the survival of the group whose descendants are become the Horseclans would’ve been a very chancy, iffy thing, indeed.

“Nomadic life is hard—always has been, always will be—the mortality rate is high, the suffering severe, so that even with a bit of an edge on survival, only the very toughest ever live long enough to breed more of their rugged kind. Aspects of Bookerman’s unquestioned genius, it was, that gave the Horseclans progenitors that precious edge.

“They might’ve still survived, some of them anyway, with only my guidance, true. But despite my years of warring and hunting all over the world, I still was basically a creature of the then-recent past—of the late twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries—and, as such, far too dependent upon manufactured chemicals, drugs and equipment to have done those people all that much good in their initial, desperate struggles to adapt, to learn to survive their new, incredibly rugged life as herders on the prairie, lacking almost everything they needed in the beginning, especially the knowledges of how to adapt naturally occurring items to their needs.

“Bookerman, on the other hand, could draw upon the personal and empiric knowledge of centuries rather than just some few mere scores of years.

“From the few hints I heard from him and read in his letter and notes. I think he must have lived through at least a part of the seventeenth century and, certainly, through all of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth, so he had memories of how things had been done, made, fashioned and from what raw materials before the industrial age, even, much less the technological age. It was these memories, plus his spate of experiments, that made his notebooks so precious to the people he left in my care.

“I wonder if he has survived? Probably. I wonder just where he is now. What he’s doing? I wonder if ever I’ll run across him again, too, I wonder that often. I sure hope so.

“Back to the cats, now. They, too, could be a very definite survival edge for the Horseclans. People used to state that as opposed to dogs, horses and other domestic animals, cats were untrainable, sneaky and unreliable if not inherently vicious, and they were right as far as they took their argument and the thoughts behind it.

“Cats are indeed different from dogs or any others of the so-called domestic animals; I recall reading once that the cat tribe constitute the epitome of predator development, are one of the most highly evolved forms of mammal, very adaptable and so able to live and breed in a vast range of habitats—subarctic to tropic, swamp to desert, mountain to prairie. From a cave in a ruin to a yurt on the plains? Maybe.

“Unlike a dog, which will learn to do just about anything to please its master, will quickly adapt its life-style to fit that same master’s, cats own their own, peculiar set of priorities and will seldom forgo any of those feline imperatives for any other creature or purpose.

“Your cat has a principal imperative of keeping its belly full of high-protein food, and it knows it must feed and care for its young, protect them until they are big enough to see to their own needs. Cats sleep or rest a great deal and possess relatively little stamina over a long haul, so they must have a safe, secure or guarded place to sleep and must obtain their necessary high-protein food with as little stress and danger as possible. They feel pain and suffering as keenly as any animal and they naturally try to avoid anything that would hurt or injure them.

“These two, this mated pair of this singular kind of long-fanged cat, have adapted to hunting in conceit with me and the other men simply because I was able to convince them, to show them, that it was to their advantage to do so as much as it was to ours. This way, they get their bellies filled on a fairly regular basis with the kinds of food best suited to them and they do so with far less exertion and danger of injury than they would’ve had they been doing the usual kind of feline hunting—the kind of tooth-and-claw killing that cost the life of the Mother’s mate and her own crippling injury. The stalk always takes a long while, and it therefore bums up energy, but the most dangerous moments of a hunt—dangerous to the cat or cats—is always the kill, when it is of necessity close enough to be itself killed or crippled by the horns, hooves, teeth or sheer strength of its prey. Hunting in cooperation with us has not only shortened the stalking time, it has eliminated physical risk to the cats, and for these reasons they are more than willing to continue with us as hunting companions.

“They also seem to have quickly learned that it is safe to sleep nearby us, that we not only will not ourselves harm them, but that we will protect them from any other living creature, so they have come to feel safe and secure with us here.

“My next task, of course, is going to be to try to sell them and their certain value to the rest of the clansfolk … and the rest of the clansfolk to them. It will help that so many Horseclansfolk own at least some degree of telepathy and so, conceivably, will be able to actually communicate, mind to mind, with these cats, as they can none of them—or me, either, for that matter—with our dogs and hounds. If these strange cats are as intelligent as I think they are, that will help, too.”

He chuckled to himself, thinking, “The next clan to join us may be a clan composed of sizable, four-legged, furry clansfolk with fur and claws and fangs—the Clan of the Cats.”