Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

“They wouldn’t be Horseclansmen if they didn’t spend a couple of days and nights discussing the matter, then two or three more days arguing about how to divide booty that they don’t yet have in camp. Then they’ll take at least a day getting organized. Both chiefs and every warrior will insist upon coming, but in the end, half will stay behind to guard the camp and the herds.

“But maybe the week will give me time to read the rest of the records in that office. What I’ve found in there so far is damned interesting. Back-breeding then-living animals to produce extinct ones they were descended from wasn’t then new, as I recall—the Europeans had reproduced a decent facsimile of the aurochs that way.

“And that could damn well be the origin of those cats, come to think of it. The only cats I ever heard of with fangs that long were called sabertooth cats , and they’ve been extinct in this hemisphere for ten, twenty thousand years. And those huge, long-horned bison, there’re more of them around this part of the country than in any other place I can recall; they could easily have originated here.”

“Uncle Milo,” Djim mindcalled. “Elk dung, fresh, still hot!”

Shortly the two men came out of the forest into more open terrain. Well ahead, among the stumps verging a beaver pond, a solitary bull elk had cleared the deep blanket of snow from off the frozen ground and was pulling up bunches of sern grass. Raising his head with its wide-spreading rack of deadly tines, the beast gazed at the two men without apparent alarm. He had been hunted often by men and now realized that the quarter-mile of distance separating them was too far for the black sticks to travel.

A single shot of the antique hunting rifle dropped the half-ton animal, but Milo put another round into the head at close range as a precaution. Bull elk could be highly dangerous adversaries. Then he and Djim set about the skinning and butchering.

“The Hunter,” thought Milo, “and her brood should be very happy with elk meat, and that’s good. I want her in a damned jolly mood when I broach the subject of her and them leaving here for good and living with the clans. I think the idea of a steady, reliable, and effortless food supply will appeal to her, so that’s one point in favor of my plan. For all her stubbornness, she’s highly intelligent—more intelligent then even a dog or a pig, and they’re supposed to be the most intelligent four-footed animals—and if you can convince her something’s for her own welfare, she’ll do what you say—as witness the fact that she hasn’t pulled off her bandages once.

“If she’s a sport, she’s breeding true, because all three of her kittens can mindspeak, too. When she’s better, she and I will have to travel around and see if we can find a mate for her, since she avers that there are more of her kind in this neck of the woods.”

When they had arranged the choicer portions of meat into two weighty but manageable packloads, he and Djim dragged the hide, the rest of the meat, and the exceptionally fine antlers back to the nearest tall tree and hung them well out of reach of any but the smallest predators and scavengers to be picked up later. Then they set out for the ruin.

Thoroughly convinced of his own powers of persuasion, Milo chuckled to himself.

“Who knows—in time there may be yet another Horse-clan, a four-footed and furry one”

James Bedford looked at the cover of the folder and frowned. Project latifrons . “It might excite some of them,” he thought, “but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I took over. After all, what measure of charisma has an oversized, long-horned bison got, compared to a sabertooth cat or a weasellike creodont the size of a black bear? Hell, the Poles brought back the aurochs close to eighty years ago and the South Africans rebred themselves quaggas nearly five years back.”

He sighed, leaned back in his chair, extended and crossed his legs, then closed his eyes, thinking. “I happen to know for a fact that Pearson’s group in Alabama are getting all sorts of funding on their mammoth replication project. That’s the kind of thing that grips the imagination, dammit! Why in hell can’t I get the hard facts of life and funding across to Stekowski and Singh, to Harel and Marberg and the rest, why can’t I?

“What we need are the kinds of projects they talked about when they first conned me into this operation, something that will grip the imaginations of the folks I have to impress. A ton or so of shaggy-haired moo-cow is just not in that category, unfortunately, and there is a fast-approaching limit to the amounts of my own bread I can plow into this without serious trouble.

“Furthermore, with the length of a bison’s gestation period. it will be years before we can come up with anything worth showing or shouting about. But that ass Harel seems to be about as fond of predators of any kind as he is of bleeding piles, the Republican Party or inherited wealth. Hell, I guess it’s fitting: a vegetarian who specializes in Bovidae. But he would be a whole lot easier to take, to work with, if he wasn’t so damned arrogant, so critical of everyone else and so bloody sanctimonious about the fact that he doesn’t eat meat.

“The longer I think on it, the more I’m coming to the certainty that this pack of multi-degreed con artists suckered me into this outfit for the sole purpose of milking me and my connections bone-dry. Executive director, huh? Ha! I have less real authority here than most of the hired help. The only time I’m made to feel at all important is when fresh inputs of money are needed.”

Sitting up, Bedford switched on the voicewriter, made certain that the paper supply was adequate, refilled his mug with hot coffee then began to speak.

“I’m just back from my latest fund-raising trip, which was a near-bust. Magori Hara, in Tokyo, avers that in the photos, the new calf looks most like the outcome of a Scottish Highland cow and a Tibetan yak than like any kind of bison, and I tend to agree.

“Uncle Taylor, in Washington, was raving over the progress of the Steakley Foundation, in Texas. Despite the failure of their glyptodont project, they have produced a capybara that weighs over two hundred kilos, he says, and replicated creodont types twice or more the size of the biggest living wolverine. He reminded me that Project Patriofelis was basically my idea and pointedly stated that he thought I should go back to where I was appreciated as something other than a money tree. He won’t get us any more funding unless we come up with something a bit more colorful than Pleistocene bison, though.

“The New York types were cool, but polite, of course, and very evasive. Nor can I say that I blame them. This latifrons thing is at best lackluster, when compared to Alabama’s mammoths and the great things the Steakley Foundation is accomplishing.

“In the replication-funding circles of Chicago and L.A., most of the interest seems to be in the O’Toole thing that’s going down in Australia now. Their southern branch already is well on the way to a giant short-faced kangaroo plus a Pleistoceine giant wombat that they say will be bigger than a tapir, almost rhino-sized. As if that weren’t enough, their northern branch, in cooperation with the Indonesians, are going great guns on an accelerated-growth project designed to replicate the Megalania , a half-ton Komodo dragon.

“The only place I got any money was right in the lap, almost, of my previous affiliation. McLeod, in Fort Worth, gave me six million, though he made it abundantly clear that it was the last of his money we’d see unless we embarked on a more promising project.

“I knew better than to even try Houston or Atlanta, eyebrow-deep as they both are in Alabamian mammoths. And all you can hear in any part of Florida is the six or seven accelerated-growth projects set to produce ten-meter alligators and caimans for the leather trade; they’ve already got a few twenty-footers, I saw some of them last year. Grim. Jaws nearly a meter mid a half long. If only the accelerated growth processes worked on mammals as well as they do on reptiles… .