Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

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.