The Memories of Milo Morai

I

While the cats came into camp to eat, the young warriors and their two big dogs guarded the horse herd, not returning until the three feline guardians had once more assumed their vigil. When the party rode back in, Little Djahn Staiklee, the acknowledged leader of the group, sought out Milo.

“Uncle Milo, the horses all are restless this after-noon. The king stallion says that a strange cat has been sniffing around for days now, and it seems as if it trailed us here from the old campsite, too. You know, I’d been suspicioning that maybe Spotted One had been responsible for taking our hounds off, one at the time; teegrais always has had them a pure liking for dogmeat. But maybe I was wrong, Uncle Milo, maybe it’s another teegrai, a wild one, been stalking around camp wherever wewas .”

Milo frowned. “Surely the cats would have noticed if any of their wild cousins were getting close enough to us to present any danger to the horses—though, knowing them and their inborn and unconcealed pre-judices, they might have just neglected to mention any wild cat that was concentrating on killing, carrying off and eating dogs.”

Staiklee nodded. “Well, the cat that tackles either of the two tooth-hounds I brought back, Bearbane or Brutus, is going to purely have a bellyful of trouble before it gets a bellyful of anything else. Them two has killed or been in at the killing of bears, pigs, teegrais, tree-cats, wild bulls, bufflers and more kind of deers than you could shake a stick at. I raised and trained both of them out of a litter one my paw’s bitches throwed by his lead tooth-hound, Ballbiter. They is two tough hounds, Uncle Milo. You never seen the like of them in all your born days.”

“Probably not,” replied Milo, adding, “Nonetheless, please keep both of those dogs in your yurt tonight; we all have another long, hard trek tomorrow, remember, and the very last thing that any of us—man or beast—needs this night is sleep-robbing excitement. Once we arrive at the new camp, then we’ll see about this strange cat.”

The night passed peacefully enough, but at day-break, while the twolegs were nibbling their hard cheese and drinking down the mugs of a bastard brew that the far-southern Kindred clans called by the name of “kawfee,” the two tooth-hounds, roaming out beyond the perimeter, began to make anxious-sounding noises.

At once, the young warriors dropped their mugs, crammed the last remnants of cheese into their mouths and lunged for weapons of the hunt—bows and quivers, darts, spears, slings, riatas and bolas. Even as they all trotted off in the direction from which came the canine sounds, Little Djahn Staiklee beamed to Milo, Bard Herbuht and Gy Linsee, “Brutus and Bearbane, they done found where something big and mean has been, sure as rain. They don’t use that there tone for just deers or bulls or pigs and the like.”

Fretfully, the middle-aged tribal bard beamed back, “If you lot want to go rambling off into that high grass down there after who knows what, then go; but you’d better leave at least a couple of you here to strike and load your yurt and gear, saddle your horses and hitch up your team. Otherwise, we’ll leave them here. You must learn to honor precommitments under any circumstances.”

“Djeri-Djai, Sami-Hal, you twostay back yonder and do for the rest of us, heanh?” Clearly grudgingly, the two young men trudged back up the hillock, stacked their weapons and commenced to strip the coverings from the frame of their yurt, muttering under their breaths to each other about elderly spoil-sports.

While their women dismantled the yurts, Milo and Gy called in their mounts for this first part of the day’s march and saddled them before calling in the cart horses and harnessing them. They had not quite, either of them, finished this last when a furious din erupted down on the prairie some hundreds of yards distant from the hilltop camp.

Their ears buffeted by snarls, barkings, growlings, human shouts and at least one agonized scream, Milo, Gy and Bard Herbuht ran to their saddled and equipped mounts and were quickly astride and all stringing bows. Mindcalling the two young warriors who were themselves about to mount, he said, “Not so fast. Call in the mounts of those out there and saddle them all before you leave here. If we three can’t be of help in whatever is going on, then the addition of two more would be of no value either. And if this develops into a chase, everyone will be needing a horse, not just five of us.”

As he passed out of camp at a fast walk, Djoolya ran over and placed in Milo’s hand a six-foot hunting spear. The grass below the cleared hilltop was as high as or higher than a mounted man and grew more thickly with every yard they descended, severely hampering visibility if not movement, the rough, sharp edges of the grasses slashing at exposed hands and faces like so many knives.

But they did not need to see to find the scene of the bayed beast; they had ears, still, and the sounds of battle still smote them, not seeming to move fast or far. Bard Herbuht and Gy Linsee both nocked a shaft, grasping a brace of others between the fingers of their bow hands, ready for rapid loosings if need be. As they got nearer to the uproar, Milo beamed a mindcall to Little Djahn.

“What have the dogs cornered?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Milo,” came back the telepathic message, “and I thought I knowed every critter on the prairies and plains, too.”

“Well, what does it look like?” beamed Milo. “No, don’t try to tell me—open your mind and let me enter and see for myself, boy.”

Milo had never seen anything exactly like the beast either. He thought it bore a vague resemblance to both the badger and the wolverine, though it looked more like a monstrous stoat or weasel. It was as big as a black bear, though far more slender, and most of its supple body was the color of dead grass, though its feet, legs and part of its tail were either black or very dark brown, as too were its ears and its muzzle. The jaws were filled with white teeth of a respectable size, most of those easily visible being cuspids—biting, tearing teeth. If there were more than just the one of these predators around . . . !

He mindcalled the king stallion, his warhorse, “Brother, take the herd onto the hilltop, where it’s easier to see for a distance. Crooktail will stay with you, but I have need of the other cats.”

Then he mindcalled Snowbelly, saying, “Cat brother, bring the Spotted One and come to the sounds here in the grass. There is a very singular beast here and I need to know if there is more than just this one about.”

To Djoolya, he beamed, “Leave off whatever you’re doing, you and all the others. String your bows and be ready for the herd to shortly come up there. Keep your eyes peeled for a light-tan-colored animal. It looks like a bear-sized weasel with black feet and tail and ears. Tell those boys that I said to stay up there, too. That herd is of more importance than anything else, and this thing is easily big enough to kill a horse or just about anything else that takes its fancy.”

As the three riders finally cleared the patch of tall grasses, they could see the knot of men and beasts less than a hundred yards distant in a trampled-down area of two-foot grasses. The beast now bore a resemblance to a porcupine, so many were the arrow and dart shafts standing up from its snaky body, but apparently no one of those missiles had struck a really vital organ, for the beast still moved fast as greased lightning, as it tried its best to get a few teeth into the dancing, bleeding dogs and the cautiously stalking men. That it had already succeeded in its purpose more than once was evident from the gashed hounds and one of the young warriors who sat hunched over in the grass. Since the remaining five men were advancing with spears and bolas, Milo assumed that they had expended their supplies of arrows and darts.

To Gy, he beamed, “You’re our best archer. If I can get the beast on my spear and hold him more or less still for an instant, do you think you could sink a shaft into one of his eyes?”

“All I can do is my best, Uncle Milo,” was the reply.

Cursing himself for not having chosen to ride a trained and experienced hunting horse this day, Milo rode as close as he was able without losing all control of the nervous, clearly frightened dun gelding, then he slung his bowcase-quiver across his back, took his spear into his left hand long enough to wipe the sweaty palm of his right on his thigh, dismounted and trotted toward the fray.

Close up, the stink of musk almost took his breath away for a moment. Yes, this creature was definitely of the mustelid clan; whatever else it might be, that much was patent truth. He also now recalled where he had seen a creature—also a mustelid—that had at least a superficial resemblance to this one. The American plains ferret was colored almost exactly like this beast, but there the resemblance ended abruptly, for the few black-footed ferrets he had ever seen were none of them more than eighteen inches long, including the tail, where this one was, overall, a good eight feet or more.

“Call off the dogs,” he beamed to Little Djahn Staiklee. “And try not to get into Gy Linsee’s way. I’m going in and try to hold it on the spear long enough for Gy to put an arrow into its brain through an eye.”

“Not alone you’re not, Uncle Milo,” Staiklee beamed back. “You don’t know just how fast and supple that thing can be, and I do. No, I’ll take Djim-Bahb’s wolf spear and go in with you; that critter might dodge one point, but not two, and with any kind of luck, we’ll get both of them into it.”

Milo shrugged, then beamed to Gy, “This stubborn young Kinsman insists on going spearing with me, and I long ago learned the utter hopelessness of trying to get logic into the head of any of the Teksikuhn Kindred. Do you think you can do it with two of us there instead of just me?”

“As I said before, Uncle Milo,” came the reply, “I can do but my best.”

Milo tested the point and the whetted edges of the spearhead with a thumb, made certain that the steel crossbar below the head was riveted tightly in its place, then took a grip at the midpoint of the hard-wood shaft where rawhide thongs had been wet-wound and shrunk on to offer a sure hold; with his right hand, he grasped the shaft about halfway between the midpoint and the horn-shot butt of the spearshaft. Then he began his cautious advance on the outre beast, erect, but with his knees slightly flexed, moving on the balls of his feet, ready to jump or shift suddenly in any direction necessary.

The well-trained dogs had drawn back from the attack, but they still half-crouched, one on either side of the wounded predator, just out of easy reach of its slavering jaws. The other four young men had each accepted the loan of an arrow from Bard Herbuht’s quiver and now they and he had taken up positions around the killing ground, lest the beast essay to bolt.

Milo could see why the bolas and riatas had not been used by these young warriors who, of all the far-flung Kindred clans, truly excelled in the use of them—this beast was relatively short-legged and went just too close to the ground to be easily snared up in the rawhide ropes.

With a bear, one could often slash a forepaw sufficiently deep with the knife-edge spearblade to cause the ursine to stand erect on the hind legs and give a spearman a clear shot at the heart or throat, but this beast did not look to be of a shape to be able to attack in such a position. Nor did it look to be of the sort that would leap, like a cat, giving a well-coordinated and iron-nerved spearman the opportunity to let the predator impale itself on the spear. No, he thought, this one will come in low to the ground and without a doubt very fast, too; so . . .

He had just set himself to stab at the head of the beast when that toothy head and the rest of the creature lunged at him with what seemed the speed of light. His too-high spearblade just slid across the top of the beast’s flat head, slashing only the edge of a black ear, but then he was able to raise the butt and lower the point enough to sink it deeply into the sinewy neck at its confluence with the shoulders.

Putting his weight on the lucky thrust, he held the beast pinned even while he felt the burning agony of sharp teeth tearing through the thick leather of his boots and into the flesh of the leg beneath. That was when Little Djahn Staiklee stepped up and, crouching, buried the five-inch steel head of his spearblade behind the near foreleg of the beast, just below the withers. At the same time, Gy Linsee took a few quick steps and, at a range of two feet, drove an arrow into the right eye of the outsize mustelid.

As soon as the beast’s remaining eye began to glaze over in death, Milo drew out his spearhead from its body, thrust it into the earth a couple of times in order to at least partially cleanse it, then paced over to where the Teksikuhn still sat crouched in the grass, grimacing with pain, part of his left trouser leg soaked in blood, his face as colorless as fresh curds where not weather- tanned.

When mindspoken, the boy looked up with pain-filled blue eyes, not releasing, however, his hold on the bowstring-and-stick tourniquet in place high up on his thigh. Shaking his head even as he mindspoke, he beamed back bitterly, “No, Uncle Milo, that critter didn’t do meno harm. No, it was that damn fool Bili-Fil come close to killing me! Cast his dart at that whatever-it-is and put the fucker into my leg instead. Sometimes I think my brother is purely set to see ever drop of blood I owns.”

With Milo’s help, the young man stood and then managed to mount one of the horses. “Gy,” said Milo, “get him back up to the camp and tell Djoolya that he took a dart in his thigh. She’ll know what to do. Then ride back down here with some more horses, one with a pack saddle; I don’t want to stay down here in this grass any longer than absolutely necessary. Another of those things”—he gestured at the arrow- and dart-studded body of the strange beast—“or a whole pack of them could be in one of those patches of the higher grasses and we’d never know it until they chose to show themselves.”

Of course, it was not that easy;Milo reflected that it seldom was. The packhorse did not like the smell of the dead beast and refused to go and stay in close proximity of it. The other horses, even the hunters, were no better, and no amount of coaxing or mind-speak soothing by Milo and Gy could achieve equine cooperation. Finally, Gy made yet another trip to the hilltop campsite and came back with one of the big, powerful, gentle mules of the pair that pulled Milo’s cart on the march. She snorted her plain disapproval of the stink and stamped a couple of times, but made no other objections to having the furry, blood-soaked thing tied onto her back.

Once back up on the top of the hill, Milo found the yurts all back up and layered. This time they were arranged in a circle with the empty carts parked between them, the whole forming a barrier to the horses the milled around the rest of the hilltop.

The lashings were loosed and the heavy body was dumped from off the mule-mare, then Milo called in all three cats—the two prairiecats and the jaguar—to thoroughly examine and scent-record the beast, beaming, “Remember this smell, all of you. Spotted One, is this beast at all familiar to you?”

“Who could ever forget such a stench, brother of cats?” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head in distaste. “No, if this cat had scented or seen one of these before, even as a cub, she would certainly recall it.”

To Djoolya, he beamed, “How is the boy? Is he still bleeding?”

“Not much, now,” came back her response. “But even so, I don’t think he should fork a horse or even walk around much for a few days, my dear.”

“Hmmm. Well, I suppose I could rig a horse litter out of two of the pry-poles, a couple of riatas and a cured hide or two. But knowing these southern Kindred, we’ll also have to use a third riata to tie him into that litter, unless you can brew him up a tea to knock him out for the day.” Milo shook his head dubiously. “Or do you think we could pad the load of a cart enough to bear him without further injury?”

“You do mean to move on today, then, Milo?” she beamed. “Do you think that best for us?”

He shrugged. “Far better than staying here, I’d say. That high, dense grass surrounding this hill bothers me; it bothered me to begin, but now, combined with that huge, vicious thing we just killed, it has me very worried, and I’d much rather move on to an area where we can at least see more than a bare score of yards out from the camp. True, mustelids are usually solitary beasts, but I have seen pairs of them hunting together here and there and the thought of so much as one more of that ilk”—he waved at the body with the women, children and cats gathered around it and the flies crawling all over it—“sets my nape hairs to twitching.”

“So, yes, let’s start getting the yurts down and loaded up, the teams harnessed and hitched. Two of the warriors ought to be enough to do for the hurt dogs, two more to go about their yurt and cart. Gy and I and the other one will get the hide off that thing.”

Djoolya wrinkled both her brow and her button nose. “Do you think you’ll ever get the reek out of that hide, Milo? And even if you do, finally, will it be worth the effort of scraping and curing and then sewing up all the rents and punctures and tears with sinew? If you’ll observe, that’s a warm-weather pelage, not a thick winter one.”

“We always get the muskiness out of mink and fisher and martin and even wolverine, don’t we, Djoolya?” he replied. “Does that skunk-skin cap of yours now smell at all like the former owners?

“You’re right, of course, about the light fur, but if this beast is as rare a one as it seems to be, it should have value as a novelty, if nothing else, and we might get something of more worth in trade for it, some-where along the line.

“Oh, by the way, that two-handled gray-steel box from the ruin—where is it now?”

As he squatted at the tail of a canted cart, feeding the fat, stubby, ancient but still shiny .45 caliber cartridges into three of the silvery stainless-steel magazines, Milo felt a brief stab of longing for that world now long centuries in the dead past, that world of which these deadly artifacts were only pitiful reminders.

After he had threaded the webbing magazine pouch onto the pistol belt and hooked the leather holster in place, he cinched it about his waist, inserted a loaded magazine into the butt of the weapon and slipped it into the holster. Even with the holster flap secured, however, he still was worried about the possibility of the irreplaceable pistol falling out, so he snapped the lanyard to the butt ring.

He now half-wished that he had left the way clear to obtain one of those powerful rifles that had been stored with the pistol. That would have put paid to such a big, dangerous animal quickly enough, and from a far safer distance than this pistol, the primary utility of which was and had always been mankilling at very close quarters.

When he at last got around to pulling off the pierced, torn boot, there was, aside from torn, blood-stiff trouser leg and sock, no mark to show of his injuries inflicted by the creature’s sharp teeth and strong jaws and fury, but then he would have been shocked if there had been such. With a deep sigh of annoyance, he sought out his clothing chest and another pair of boots.

Sacred Sun was well up in the sky by the time the party got on the move, so they set a brisk pace, taking only such game as they came across directly in their chosen path, not taking time to actively hunt for prey. Snowbelly ranged out ahead alone, while the other two cats alternately ran the flanks of the column and trailed the horseherd, seeking out any trace of the musky stink that identified the peculiar beasts like the one whose pelt—now scraped and soaked and salted and rolled up—rode along lashed to the tailgate of a cart, dripping water and serum and covered with dust and a metallic-hued carpet of feeding flies.

Pushing onward an hour or more after the usual halting time unexpectedly brought them to the fringes of the ruined city, and, after finding a lake a mile or so north, Milo and the party set about making camp near the lakeshore among the scorched, tumbled, much-overgrown shells of the homes that had apparently composed part of a small subdevelopment, long ago, in another time, in a vanished world.

Milo still was unsure of their exact location. However, he felt they were too far north for the ruined city to be Tulsa ; they might be somewhere in western Missouri, but he suspected, rather, southeastern Kansas. With any kind of luck, there should be some-thing left still legible in those ruins to tell him precisely.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief when, after a wide-swinging circuit of the lake area, the cats reported no trace of the scent of the ilk of the giant mustelid, though there seemed to be a plentitude of game and a few of the more normal predators about.

“No lions or big bears, I hope?” queried Milo.

“Not that I sniffed out,” replied Snowbelly, adding, “There is a sow bear and her two half-grown cubs denning in a place just east of the camp, but she is not one of the big, flat-faced bears, only one of the smaller, the ones you call black. The only cats about seem to be the short-tailed ones.”

“There is at least one bigger cat,” Crooktail put in.

“Puma?” Milo asked.

“No, bigger,” she replied. “Notso big as me or even as Spotted One, though.”

“Maybe just a very big puma, then, cat sister?” beamed Gy Linsee. “They can get big. When my sire was a boy, guarding sheep of a night, he speared and killed a puma that weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“No, Brother Gy,” Crooktail beamed back. “This cat smells in no way like a puma or like Spotted One, either, although she is just a little smaller than Spotted One and, also like Spotted One, will soon throw cubs.”

Milo nodded. “All right, we’ll camp in this place tonight only. Tomorrow we’ll move farther northeast and put the widest part of the lake between the camp and herd and those ruins.

“Snowbelly, no more than one of you cats is to night-hunt at a time; I want at least two guarding the herd, constantly. With really plentiful game here-abouts, of course, the predators may not exhibit any slightest interest in trying to take a horse at all, but those who take enough chances usually suffer for it in the end.

“Herbuht, you and Djim-Bahb Gahdfree take the hunt in the morning, eh? I’ll be taking; Gy and Little Djahn over into the main ruins to see what we can see.”

It was unnecessary for him to add that they would harvest any edible animals they chanced across—that was simply the Horseclans way.

Like the isolated ruin they had found back west on the prairie, most of the small city was tumbled and thickly overgrown and, under the vegetation, there seemed to be frequent indications of old conflagrations. The three horsemen rode slowly along what once had been metaled roadways, but now the macadam or concrete only showed through in the rare spot here and there beneath the soil that held the roots of grasses, weeds, shrubs and trees.

Milo led a curcuitous way toward the visible, multistory ruins that he thought to be the center of the dead city. He did this in part because, uneven as was the surface of the streets, occasionally rent or bisected by subsidences of varying widths and depths where subsurface piping had collapsed, still did those streets offer more reliable footing for the horses than might have been obtained by threading a way between the overgrown ruins of homes and smaller buildings that lined them. Another reason for avoiding the tangles of brush and vines was his desire to, if possible, avoid for now the beasts likeliest to be denning within the roofless, sagging walls or the tumbled piles of masonry; he and most of his clans only killed predators when the folk or their stock were threatened by the beasts or when the pelts were needed for clothing, bedding or trade—and this was no season for good pelts to be had.

As they entered upon a street forking off one along which they had been riding, the cawing of carrion crows caused them to look up into a huge-boled, ancient oak. There, some thirty feet up the tree, wedged into a crotch, was the partially eaten carcass of a white-tailed deer. All the hide and flesh were gone from the head and neck, shoulders and forelegs; moreover, the doe had been partially gutted.

“Now how in the hell did that deer get up there, I wonder?” remarked little Djahn Staiklee.

Recalling Africa, Milo said, “She was put up there to keep her out of reach of other meat-eaters until the killer comes back to feed again on her. That little trick answers the question of just what kind of large cat it was that the prairiecats smelled out in these ruins. The only cat of any size that does that is the leopard.”

“Leopard, Uncle Milo?” asked Gy Linsee. “What kind of cat is it?”

“Very similar to Spotted One, Gy,” he replied.“Spotted, like she is, very strong and agile, very territorial, and unpredictable of temperament, too. They will hunt and kill and eat anything they can catch and pull down . . . including humans, though they seem to prefer prey the size of that doe up there. Well be wise to avoid her, if possible, especially since she’ll soon have cubs to protect and to feed. That she’s placed her larder in that particular tree may mean that she’s denning close to it, so we’ll take another route out of the city and let her be.”

After about a quarter mile more of riding, the street debouched into another, much wider one, stretching nearly a hundred feet from one side to the other and lined with wrecked towers of rust and pitted masonry, some featureless fronts, others pierced with regular openings that once had been windows but that now gaped blackly like the eyeholes of bare, picked skulls.

At a distance of ten or twelve feet from the fronts of these ruins lay small, roughly rectangular mounds that Milo could still identify as the rust-eaten hulks of trucks and automobiles. The mere presence of such here meant that this city had never before been visited by the metal-hunters, else they would no longer be standing in one piece.

To young Staiklee, he said, “Here’s the answer to your father’s problems, Djahn. When we get back to camp, either you or your brother must ride back west-ward, find your clan and tell your father to bring them east, to this place, if he wants metals. This city looks to have been unvisited by man for a century or more, at least. Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree could mine it, off and on, for years to come, bartering everything they can’t themselves use to the traders.

“These hulks alone”—he waved at the remnants of vehicles—“will contain more than enough still-usable steel to outfit every warrior in the two clans with armor and weapons, shoe every last horse and mule and draft ox and still give enough left over to trade off.

“Now, let’s dismount and look more closely at some of those ruins. But, Gy, Djahn, stay with me at all times and be very, very cautious—we don’t want part of a building to collapse on us this morning.”

But most of the easily accessible metal on the building fronts proved to be aluminum extrusion and so badly oxidized as to be very brittle and utterly useless. The first lucky find was in a booth inside the ground-floor lobby of a large building; here they were able to collect and bag several hundred brass key blanks, which, properly ground down and shaped and sharpened, would become as many fine brass arrowheads.

A similar booth in the same building lobby was also a treasure trove of sorts. Once Milo had broken off the rusty lock of the counter cabinet—all of thick, heavy-duty acrylic plastic, now dim, dirty, discolored and slightly warped but still sound—the two younger men wondered and exclaimed at the dozens of knives and daggers of fine steel, along with stones and steels for sharpening.

The next booth yielded a quantity of cups, mugs, bowls and goblets of pewter, silver plate, gold plate and anodized aluminum, keychains and currency clips in assorted metals, a double handful of small charm pendants in sterling silver and an equal or larger number of finger rings of turquoise and German silver as well as several massive silver rings in the forms of skulls, wolf heads, cat heads, goat heads, ram heads, bull heads, Satan heads, and eagle heads.

Within the space of a bare hour, the three men had filled to overflowing the sacks they had brought along on this reconnaissance with artifacts of the civilization that had preceded their own, and Milo suggested that they ride back to camp.

“Nothing we leave is going anywhere in our absence,” he remarked jocularly.

On the ride back out of the ruined city, Gy Linsee’s flawless archery skills brought down no less than four tiny antelope—each of the creatures not much larger than a big rabbit, and two of them equipped with miniature, but sharp, horns as evidence of their true maturity, despite their size.

“Did you ever before see such little antelopes, Uncle Milo?” asked Gy.

Milo nodded. “Yes, and they were this kind, I think, too, but that was very long ago and very, very far away from here. I believe these were called dikdiks or something similar; like that leopard, they were not originally native to this continent, so there must have been a zoo or preserve or, more likely, a park where animals from other parts of the world were allowed to run loose somewhere around here. That’s where the plains lions came from, you know, and all of the antelope with unbranched horns, too.”

Once out onto the open prairie, Gy and Djahn Staiklee vied with each other in flushing out and arrowing rabbits, so that they all arrived at the new campsite with the four minuscule antelope, no less than seven plump rabbits and the heavy bags of nonedible booty.

There was already much food in the camp. Bard Herbuht’s hunt had chanced across and brought down a good-sized feral heifer only an hour or so out and, on their way back, had found a salt spring whereat they had been able to kill a ringhorn buck.

Moreover, while clearing the new campsite, some clutches of bird eggs had been discovered, and the bard’s children had brought in two armadillos. Karee Linsee had found an extensive stand of sunflowers and had dug up nearly a bushel of the thick, tasty roots. Not to be outdone by Gy’s other wife, Myrah Linsee had strung her fine bow, taken a fishing arrow or two, a spool of line and a few crickets, and repaired to the lakeshore, returning with three good-sized bass and a catfish.

There seemed to be a plenitude of firewood, for a change. Nearby was an entire stand of trees that apparently had been drowned in some unusual rise of the lake’s water level, years agone. Dried by years of the constant prairie winds, the numbers still standing were become excellent fuel, and given the frugal ways of Horseelansfolk, there was enough wood to last the small encampment’s needs for months.

Milo was inordinately pleased. With so much food on hand, there would be no need to mount any hunt on the morrow, so he could take a couple of carts, the experienced Djoolya and all but a couple of the young warriors back with him and Gy to the ruined city center with all the tools they would need to delve more deeply and thoroughly. Bard Herbuht could and willingly would remain in charge of the camp.

When they had finished the heavy meal and still were all sitting around the central firepit, Gy Linsee spoke. “Uncle Milo, on the hunt you led last fall, you let us into your memories, that we all might learn of how things were in that other world, that world which gave birth to the Sacred Ancestors. But you never allowed us, then, to know all of it—you closed your memories one night after we had learned of your return from a long, terrible war.

“Uncle Milo, I would know the rest of that tale. I would know of how folks lived in those times. I would know of your life, too, in that strange world, teeming with people.”

Milo nodded. “Yes, I recall my promise to you, Gy. I did tell you that if you came with me and Bard Herbuht, I would either tell you the rest of the tale or let you into my memories. I will. We’ll start this night, and since all here are mindspeakers, there will be no need to talk myself hoarse.”

Then he opened his memories.