The Clan of the Cats

VI

In the dank little underground room, James Bedford’s sometime private office, now lit brightly by a gasoline lantern as ancient as the other artifacts cluttering the space, Milo set bis eyes once more to the laminated pages of Redford’s personal journal.

“I’m beginning to suspect unplumbed depths to Dr. Harel,” he read. “His behavior, all of what I thought to be mere bluff and impressive bluster performed for simple shock effect. may well be in truth that of a really violent, incipiently dangerous man. So, although I’ve left the v-phone cable disconnected for the nonce, I’ve just placed some calls on my private, scrambled line to some folks back east; I want to know more about Harel, a great deal more, and in as much detail as possible. If his tantrums are not as deliberate as I thought, are really more or less uncontrollable, then we’d best—for our own safety—get him the hell out of here.”

The next page in the binder began: “Just spoke with contacts in re the snow leopards. Cheers! They’re still available to me and this project. I’ve arranged, moreover, to trade the surviving bull and cow wisents for them—even trade, no cash involved, which will certainly help us here, under the circumstances. I’ve put Juan and Joe to preparing a place for them and such other cats as we might later acquire or breed.

“Everyone seems exhilarated over the prospect of changing our project over into another direction … everyone except Harel, of course. The man is always either sullen and completely uncommunicative or livid, shouting, beating on inanimate objects, throwing things and stamping his big feet. When I refused to reconnect the v-phone at his order, he proceeded to go into a towering rage and smash and batter the set into so much plastic and metal junk, roaring that if he couldn’t use it, no one would. He’s used the regular phone, though, to place several late-night calls of some duration to Russia, to his buddy, Piotr. Those calls weren’t scrambled, but as they were conducted in some dialect that no one here seems to understand, they didn’t need to be. After each succeeding call he’s been more hostile.

“Singh, on the other hand, is ecstatic, there’s no other word to adequately describe him and his demeanor since we decided to override Harel’s Latifrons obsession and go back to Stekowski and Singh’s original Project Feethami. He and Stekowski have been on the phone to Canada, among other places, and have been assured that the genetic material will be here any day now, they’ve also gotten word of the capture of one of the exceedingly rare white, mountain jaguars and have been heating up the lines between here and South America trying to get either her or genetic material from her.

“Nor is Singh the only one. I’ve never seen this place throbbing with so much life, such intense purpose. Dr. Marberg has found us a replacement for Harel, too, an old friend of hers, a German, a Dr. Wilhelm Müller, who worked on both the Panthera spelaea project in Greece and the Thylacoleo project in Australia. Old as he is. and he’s quite a few years Stekowski’s senior, such a man still will be invaluable to this project. His in-depth knowledge of and vast experience with the very species we are attempting replication and eventual reproduction of should speed up our success, and, strapped as we now are, every day saved is precious.

“Once we get close enough to even apply for an international patent, of course, we’ll be out of the woods, every investor and his maiden aunt will be clawing each other for an opportunity to put money into the project and we’ll be as rich as the mammoth project down in Alabama or the creodont project in Texas. But until that happy day, we’re going to be on a tight, an exceedingly tight, budget, even if I plow every available cent of my own year’s income into our project.

“But back to Harel. I want the loud, arrogant bastard out of the project altogether and off this plateau. If my investigators come up with information to indicate that he’s not dangerous to people he works with, maybe I can get him a slot in that new project down in Southern California, that dwarf mammoth thing—surely he’d be happy with that, and he does seem to know his stuff professionally, so he would certainly be valuable to them.

“I’d still like to know just how he so quickly buffaloed Singh and Stekowski and, later, Baronian; maybe the investigations will shed some light on that little matter, too. All of his available records certainly appear to be in order, but then, skillful, well-funded experts can forge just about any document needed by anyone for any purpose … though I cannot for the life of me figure out just why anyone would want to sidetrack so innocuous a project as was Singh and Stekowski’s original one.

“Now if some other foundation or government was racing us for completion of a Pantherafeethami replication or a closely related project? But, hell, the Canadian government project was put into abeyance, wasn’t it? And they’re the only ones I know of who were even trying, who had the necessary genetic material to try … Wait just one goddam minute, here! The fucking Russians!

“Harel and his damned Russian bunghole-buddy this Piotr, the dude who got us those wisants hard on the heels of Harel getting the project headed his way. Could it be? Could it be that darling Piotr and his colleagues are themselves working on a sabertooth or dirktooth replication? Or could it be that they have even somehow ‘acquired’ by hook or by crook feethami genetic material? Could Harel be a Russian himself? He speaks Russian languages well enough, true, but according to his records, he was born and reared and educated in Israel. So we come back to the possibility of forged records, again.

“If anyone is capable of such forgeries, it would certainly be the Russians. But they wouldn’t, I think, be doing it for the money—more likely, for the prestige, the international acclaim, the damned propaganda value to them, still trying to prove socialist science the superior of western, capitalist science, just another rendition of the same old tune.

But if Harel is a Russian, why is he so openly contemptuous of all things western? One would think that he would cover his true beliefs thoroughly, in order to not be even suspected of … But of course, God, I’m dumb, at times! He’s supposed to be an Israeli Communist, this fact covers his close contacts with Piotr and the other Russians he’s always phoning and praising and bragging of knowing intimately. Clever, clever, Dr. Harel … or whatever your real name is.

“Now, next question: Should I phone these suppositions to the investigators? No, no, I think I’ll just let them work on unraveling the loose ends they already have in hand and see if they come to the same conclusions. After all, I could very well be wrong on this matter; God knows, I make my full, honest share of mistakes in life.”

Milo kept suppressing the urge to skip ahead through the boxes of binders and see whether or not Bedford’s conclusions regarding Dr. Harel had been proved correct in the end. The man Bedford described sounded to Milo like a type who would definitely benefit from application of a prolonged knuckle massage about the regions of the head and torso. He recalled that such men had been much more common in that long-ago world where few persons went armed than in this present one wherein everyone did so. Who had it been who averred back then that an armed society must be perforce a polite society?

“Most of the societal problems, back then, in the more or less civilized portions of the so-called western world, were directly caused by the lofty but totally incorrect premise that all persons are created completely equal,” the ageless man mused, while puffing in vain at his cold pipe.

“I’ve always been dead certain that what that group of rebels, revolutionaries, eighteenth-century radicals really meant when they framed those words was that all free, white, Anglo-Saxon gentlemen were created equal and they were wrong even at that. No two men or women are ever exactly, precisely equal in any meaningful ways, never have been, never will be.

“Some are physically stronger, some weaker, some are taller, some shorter, some are smarter, some denser, some are faster, some slower, that’s just Nature’s—or, if you will, God’s—way of it all. Some are gutless wonders, some are brave, some are very good, decent, honorable, some are bad and incredibly vicious, and the only provably sovereign ways to protect the good from the bad are very forceful and often fatal.

“The mistake of many of the western nations of the decades just preceding the horrendous eclipse of their era and the dawn of this present one was in allowing far too much power to the rather fuzzy-brained sociologists and experimental psychologists; given entire populations to play with, they and their ivory-tower supporters wreaked hellish havoc, turned beautiful, populous cities into places more deadly and dangerous than any jungle could ever have been.

“They and their minions first virtually disarmed the law-abiding segments of those populations with restrictive laws in regard to the private possession and use of firearms, then virtually tied the hands of the various strata of law-enforcement persons, insofar as apprehension and treatment of real criminals was concerned, so that in the end the only people who could live and work or play in any degree of physical safety were either those rich enough to afford private bodyguards or those willing to or scared enough to break the gun laws and carry deadly force.

“The so-called social scientists could never seem to get it through their pointy heads that some people are just born bad. No, they continued to prate about all criminality being ‘society’s fault,’ no matter how heinous or despicable the crime, no matter how arrogant, unrepentant or recidivistic the perpetrator.

“Those self-proclaimed ‘saviors of mankind’ wreaked an inordinate amount of mischief with their crackpot theories and out-and-out wrecked a proportion of real civilization, and I am very glad to say that in the end, none of the bastards survived. There are none of them and their harebrained disciplines extant in this world; folks here live by might and by right and mostly are too busy wresting out enough to eat to spend much time scheming against others.”

His gaze alighting again upon the already-read stack of Bedford’s folders, Milo thought, “Although I spent damn little time in the country after the early seventies I still did a lot of reading of U.S. newspapers and periodicals, whenever and wherever I could lay hands to them, so I recall more than just a little of these replication and recreating projects, the vast sums of money that went into them, the chaotic brouhahas that preceded and surrounded some of them and the final decisions that allowed nations and groups and companies to actually patent recreations of extinct animals. As I remember, though, the antislavery factions still were squabbling about the issue of whether or not primates with enhanced mentalities could be patented right up to the end of everything, and naturally, certain religious groups fought the entire concept from the outset on the shaky grounds that if God had had the animals die out, then it were blasphemous to try to bring them back to life … not that very many people paid all that much real attention to the foaming fanatics on that or any other subject.

“And God knows, the religious and quasi-religious flakes had as many causes over the years as the left-liberal flakes, the right-wing radicals or any of the rest of the lunatic fringe. After a short while, a reader got to recognize the telltale catchwords and phrases that indicated ‘this was written by or for a bunch of flakes’ and most of us would just glance briefly over the patent claptrap or skip it entirely.

“Thinking back on Bedford’s thing, the whole business seems to have started back between World War One and World War Two, when the Poles or Hungarians or one of the other Slavic peoples of Central Europe got it into their heads to breed back various strains of domestic cattle to reproduce the aurochs, Bos primegenus I think the scientists called it, the European wild ox that was the supposed ancestor of all domestic cattle and had been extinct then for about three centuries. They succeeded, and that gave everyone big ideas, but half a century or more went by before much more was done.

“Then, in the seventies, the Russians, I believe it was, started trying to back-breed to produce the extinct European wild horse, and at almost the same time, some privately funded group in Texas set out to try to back-breed to the Pleistocene wild horse of North America. Then, in the eighties, DNA and gene-splicing were brought into the picture, followed by other advanced procedures.

“Meanwhile, the Japanese had funded secretly a research project designed to produce reptilian hides for luxury leathers faster than Nature could manage, and that project spawned the processes of artificially stimulating growth. The replicators cheered and leaped to apply the process to their various projects, only to find that no life form higher than more primitive reptiles, such as the crocodilians, could be made to grow that fast and survive. Some of the replicators did, indeed, branch out into sidelines of producing larger reptiles and certain amphibians and huge eels for their hides and meat, but mostly for the income that could be plowed into the horrendously expensive replication projects.

“Then there was that Tätzelwurm thing, too; Bedford’s not even mentioned it yet in these journals, but I recall it was a pure wonder for some time. For numberless generations, the peoples living in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Urals and in various parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland had been telling of these serpentine creatures, rarely seen. The scientific establishment had decided, early on, that the tales were rubbish, nothing but folk myths perpetuated with the purposes of gulling the gullible and frightening naughty children, and so had dismissed them.

“And, lo and behold, an Austro-Italian group of scientists, who happened to be in the Italian Alps for an entirely different reason, chanced to capture one of the things alive … and very, very pregnant! Careful examination in Torino proved that for all her snakelike appearance, the thing was an amphibian, predatory and exceedingly strong, vicious and, with her double rows of sharp, pointed teeth, exceedingly dangerous when aroused or cornered, though generally retiring by nature.

“The captive laid her eggs soon after capture. They were all taken out of the pool in her enclosure and transferred to tanks in which they were allowed to hatch. Almost immediately, someone got the idea of accelerating the maturations of some of the young, and so by the late nineties, almost every zoo of any size, worldwide, had a couple or more specimens of this distinctly unprepossessing creature, until so very recently considered but a figment of the fevered imaginations of ignorant, unlettered mountain peasants.

“I saw a few of them in various zoos, and they did nothing to thrill me. They were sort of a dirty brownish white, looking slick because of the mucus their smooth skins produced. Their front legs didn’t exist and their rear ones were just little atrophied stumps. They really looked like big, thick earthworms—six or seven feet long and about as thick as my calf, I’d say—and annulated like earthworms, too; that is, they looked like earthworms until they opened their mouths. Hell, their heads were all toothy jaws.

“Their eyes were tiny and very thickly covered with skin; you couldn’t see them if they weren’t open, in fact. They preferred, lived most of their lives, in near-total darkness—in caves, deep fissures, peat bogs, under piles of rotting vegetation, only usually coming into the open at night. Apparently, it was finally decided after years of study of captive specimens, the pregnant female that had first been captured had been out by day only because she was making haste to a pool wherein to lay her eggs.

“The things ate anything animal that they could lay tooth to. They’d eat insects, worms, fish, other amphibians—including each other—reptiles, birds, mammals of any sort, eggs, dung of any provenance. Nor did their meat have to be fresh; they seemed to really prefer, to seek out, carrion. They consumed everything except bone—they lacked the proper dentition for that kind of diet, though if they happened to gulp down smaller bones or pieces of them, they seemed to have no trouble digesting them.

“The reason for the extraordinary flexibility of their bodies was revealed when there were enough specimens around to allow for killing and dissecting some of the creatures. Then it was found that save for the head, jaws and teeth and parts of the spine, the skeletons of the adults were virtually pliable cartilage, like the skeleton of the shark.

“Of course, experiments continued, but the last I heard on the subject, no use—aside from display as curiosities—was ever found for them, except that their proven existence vindicated numberless generations of mountain people of numerous races and nationalities and indicted numberless generations of self-proclaimed scientists for the elitist snobs they had proved themselves to be, utterly lacking in imagination or curiosity, hidebound ultraconformists to their dying days.

“I wonder if that cat back there in the den area and those three cubs are, could be, descendants of this project that Bedford’s group was to undertake? I’ve never seen any living feline with a set of upper Cuspids as long as hers, and though none of the cubs seem to share that trait, it might be something that comes with adult teeth and is always absent in the milk teeth they now bear.

“He was writing about acquiring snow leopards, and her coat does look more than a bit like a snow leopards—the few of the rare ones I saw in the flesh, a few skins I saw and pictures of them—but she’s way too big to be any snow leopard. Even in her state of malnourishment and illness, she must weigh in at well over two hundred pounds, So how much more would a male of her breed weigh, I wonder?

“Speaking of which, if we do get her and the cubs back to the clans and they do work out in partnership with humans of our kind as well as I hope and pray that they do, we—meaning originally, me—are going to have to try to seek out others of her type, and she avers that there are others hereabouts though just where or how close she doesn’t know. Even a solitary cat that size would require a pretty sizable chunk of territory to adequately feed itself, and if the breed are gregarious, even in pairs, you can more than double the territory involved especially when they have litters in the process of weaning.

“Not only can I and the other men here communicate telepathically with the cat and her cubs, but she and to a lesser extent they seem really intelligent, reasoning creatures. Now, the big big question is: is her particular strain the only one that has this gift that can be so priceless to us—the clans—or do the other cats of her breed share in it?

“But, okay, say we can’t find any of her kind, what do we do? We could inbreed it, breed the male cub back into her and into his two female siblings, of course. But there’re always certain dangers in breeding and rebreeding an animal that closely and just keeping it up. So what choices do we have, huh? Just let this rare and wonderful strain die out? No, I can’t countenance that alternative; cats like her and them could mean far too much to us—to the long-run survival of us all, clans and people. So, then, what can I do to perpetuate her and her promise?

“Find a big puma tom and try to take him alive and bring him back to top her? No, even if we could do it, I don’t think it would work; those two breeds are just too vastly divergent. The puma, for all its size, is still considered to be Felis, same genus as all the small cats, while the furry lady in there is clearly some species of Panthera—tiger, lion, leopard and so on.

“So where do we find a member of the Panthera in the Rocky Mountains of North America? Of course, the only one that was native within the ten thousand or so years prior to the end of the last civilization was the jaguar, the cat the Mexicans call tigre, but I’ve never seen one of them this far north, though if they can live in the Andes as they do I see no reason why such mountains as these would daunt them. But could it be … ? Could it be that the existence of this rare, long-toothed breed of cats living and hunting these mountains is the reason that the jaguars spreading slowly north from Old Mexico have never carved themselves out a niche hereabouts? There’s that to consider, too, and in further support of the theory, we’ve seen damned little trace hereabouts of anything approaching the size of a puma or a lynx, either, just a scat and a few pawprints of one solitary bobcat, and not an awfully big one at that.

“It’s a long, hard journey down far enough south to be certain of finding a jaguar or three, and if we go that far, hell, we might as well cross over into California and see about roping us a real leopard. Last time I was in Southern California, them were both leopards and cheetahs to be found there, even some tigers and a whole hell of a lot of lions. They were why we had to leave, the good graze and hunting notwithstanding—there were just too damned many predators roaming about our herds and camps for comfort.

“And we’re back to little Arabella Lindsay again, by gum. It was her, constantly prodding at me orally and telepathically, who was primarily responsible for my suggestion to the chiefs that we find a pass, cross the ranges and winter that year in Southern California. She was so anxious to see with her own two eyes the cities I’d allowed her to see in my memories.

“And she discovered to her sorrow that my memories are the only place in which anyone will ever again see them. According to reports at the time, I believe that the vast Los Angeles area was struck by at least three and perhaps as many as five missiles, so it’s bound to still be hot, radioactively speaking, and consequently I wouldn’t allow any of my people really close to it, but what I saw of it from the hills to the west was truly heartbreaking when compared to my memories of better times.

“The missiles of course did very little real damage to most of the structures—what did them in was the horrific conflagrations that raged unchecked for as long as there was anything on which flames could feed. Also, it appeared that at some time between the time I left California and the time I returned with Arabella and the clans, there had been one or more really bad earthquakes in the Los Angeles area, and these had toppled anything standing after the effects of fires and years of natural decay. By then, there was precious little left to show above the abundant vegetation, the river and the numerous little lakes and tiny streams that man had ever settled or built there. That no one had resettled any part of the vast territory I ascribe to fear of radioactivity, no doubt passed on by word of mouth to each new generation of survivors, though a tribe of Mexican nomads we ran into farther south said that their forebears had tried to winter in the areas of rich graze and hunting on two occasions and had each time been forced to leave because of the hordes of large and small predators.

“So it just wouldn’t do to take the clans and the herds back into California—well, not far into it. anyway. We’d have to find a relatively secure place with plenty of graze and water and enough game to feed us, then send a strong party down westward to find and rope a big, healthy male leopard, truss him up and bring him back. And that is a task that I don’t look forward to, either, thank you kindly. We’ll have to time it for when our furry lady is in or near her estrus, or we’ll have to construct a cage to keep our leopard in until she is naturally receptive and fertile. And even then that mating may not take.

“No, I think the best thing for the clans to do is to bend their every effort toward finding more of her breed, around here, first, then farther afield if necessary, in other areas like this one.”

His thoughts and schemes and fledgling plans were interrupted by an insistent scratching at the outer face of the door, and he leaned over and opened it to admit the largest of the three cubs. The beastlet stalked in, seated himself, wrapped his thick tail around his big paws and mindspoke his imperious demands.

“Killer-of-Two-Legs is hungry. He wants more of the thin milk that the two-legs make from white sand and water. Get it for him, now!”

“If it’s milk you want,” beamed Milo, “I suggest you take up the matter with your mother, for you and she and your sisters have drunk up all of the powdered milk that we found here.”

“The Mother drives us away when we try to nurse,” was the cub’s reply. “Then get this cat some meat, a big, big piece. Get it now! Get it before Killer-of-Two-Legs hurts you.”

“Here we go again,” thought Milo to himself, slipping his hands back into his leather riding gloves with the thick cuffs of skirting-weight that reached almost to his elbows.

“Then go upstairs and tell one of those two-legs to hack you off a piece of the last kill and—”

“No!” The cub rippled a snarl that was amazingly deep to issue from so small a body. “Be warned, Two-Legs, this cat wants fresh meat, fresh, still warm and dripping blood, none of that old, cold meat, all icy and watery. You and the other two-legs go out and get meat for this cat, now! You will not be warned again.”

“Do you hear the wind howling, little cat?” beamed Milo. “A blizzard is raging outside this place, and no one can go out to hunt until it ends, until it’s howled itself out, so you may have your choice, a chunk of frozen venison, a frozen elk steak or nothing at all. And I issue you warning: try attacking me again and I’ll do to you just what I’ve done before; you’ll hurt, not me.”

But the warning did no slightest good, for without pause, the cub launched his furry body upward at Milo’s face, his teeth bared, forelegs and paws spread, claws out, pure murder in his eyes.

Milo’s powerful backhand slap took the cub in the sensitive nose with enough force to not only negate all the power of his spring but to actually reverse it and send the twenty-odd pounds of fur and flesh, muscle and bone tumbling back to finally thud against a concrete wall and sprawl in a corner of the small room, barely conscious, his big head having struck the wall first and hardest. Milo sought out the mother cat’s mind and beamed, “My lady, I once more have had to hurt the male cub.”

“You are good,” she beamed back. “Had be not deserved to be hurt, you would not have hurt him any more than this one would have hurt him. I hunger. So do the cubs. You two-legs will bring us meat soon?”

“Yes, it will be soon, my lady,” Milo silently replied, then, still keeping a wary eye on his furry antagonist, now beginning to tremble all over and whimper in the corner, he beamed upstairs to the first mind he could range, Djim Linsee. “Djim, the cat and the cubs are hungry, so one of you go up atop that tower and see if you can hack enough meat off one of those carcasses for the four of them. There should still be enough to go around, even if this blizzard lasts for another two days.”

“It will be done, Uncle Milo,” replied Djim, adding, “Yes, there is still much meat frozen up there. We are making a stew here, with deer and elk and some of the things from the old times that you found down there. It will be good, Uncle Milo, it already smells good, very, very good it smells.”

“I’ll just bet it does, Djim,” beamed Milo, grinning. “But you and the others take it easy on those powders and dried herbs. Not all of them mix together well, flavoring-wise, and when those are gone, there’ll be no more … ever. The finding of these was the wildest chance find out of inconceivable odds against such a cache surviving this long intact and still being accessible. Besides, too much of or a wrong mixture of some of those spices eaten by people not accustomed to them can make you violently ill, make you so sick you’ll pray for death. So beware.”

Memory of the first time the naive nomads had experimented on their own with the hoard of spices and condiments from Bedford’s store of foodstuffs and flavorings still could bring a smile to his lips. Some one of them had elected to dump a full three-ounce jar of piquinita peppers, most of a jar of hot curry powder, some cracked peppercorns, powdered ginger root, whole cloves and some ounces of tabasco into an otherwise innocent stew of venison and freeze-dried vegetables. The result had been a dish hot enough to have seared out any Mexican, Korean, Thai or Hunan palate and but a single mouthful of the stuff had been enough to send the nomads racing up the steel stairs to the top of the tower, there to jump down to where they could cram handfuls of snow into their burning mouths without pause or conscious thought until their sufferings had begun to ease. Milo had finally speared the larger chunks of meat from out the pot, scooped up as many of the vegetables as he could dumped and rinsed and scoured the pot, then filled it with clear water, added fresh fuel to the fire and boiled the retrieved food long enough to make it at least palatable, if tough and very much overcooked. The much shocked and thoroughly abashed nomads had been very wary of the strange bottles and jars for a while and were but just beginning to hesitantly try some of them once more in their cooking.

To the gasping, whimpering cub, Milo beamed, “I suggest that you go back to the den with your mother and sisters now. Other two-legs will presently be bringing down meat for you all.”

“You hurt this cat!” was the cub’s reply. “You hurt Killer-of-Two Legs … and he will not soon forget it.”

“Good,” he beamed. “Remember that hurting well, and whenever you think of attacking me or one of the others again, recall that the sure outcome will be more hurting of you.”

“You remember, Two-Legs,” beamed the cub bitterly. “You are bigger and stronger, now, but Killer-of-Two-Legs will be bigger than you, one day. On that day, he will claw loose your belly-parts, he will rip out your throat and drink your hot blood, he will—”

Milo broke in with his own beaming. “He will be dead before he so much as touches claw or tooth to any one of us two-legs, rather. Enter your mother’s memories and learn from them just how difficult it is to slay two-legs. Learn how easily I slew, in her sight and hearing, a dozen or more adult wolves on the day I came first into the den. You must quickly learn and accept a fact that your mother and your sisters already have learned and accepted; you cats and we two-legs are not enemies, but now friends; we are, however, not in any way servants, one of the other, but partners against the rest of this hard, cruel world and its adversities. One of us does not order the other or feel any compunction to do so, for we both willingly work together for the common good, as true Kindred should. In this and in no other way can cat and two-legs forge out a secure bond between us.”