Robert Adams - The Memories of Milo Morai

Still and unmoving as two statues, the men sat, waiting for one of the browsing, slowly shifting herbivores to wander within range of the short, powerful bows with which they were armed. The spring was now far enough advanced for the beasts to have begun to fatten, and so, even after they had been dressed out, two of them should provide food for all of the party for which the men were hunting this day. Slouched forward over the necks of their grazing horses, in constant telepathic contact with their mounts and with each other, the two ignored the flies that crawled upon them, the sweat that poured from them under the hot sun and the reek of the fresh deer dung with which they had liberally smeared their hands and faces to cover the smell of predatory man from their prey.

The herd they stalked was mixed—shaggy, feral cattle, shaggier bison, an assortment of deer and an even wider-ranging assortment of antelope, a few gazelles, a few wild horses and burros, even the occasional wild goat or two. The progenitors of the animals making up the herd had been natives of widely separated habitats on four continents, and a few hundred years before that spring day on the prairie of North America, no one of the billions of humans then living would ever have seen a like herd on any of those four. But those billions of humans died long ago, precious few of them living long enough to breed and leave descendants, and the species of mankind now was the rarest of creatures upon the grassy lands, moving only in small, scattered bands with his domestic herds among the tumbled, overgrown ruins of his brief hegemony, gathering and hunting for the bulk of his food, taking only milk and blood and fiber from his precious herds save in the direst of emergencies.

Heads well down, giving every appearance of doing nothing more than grazing the fetlock-high grasses, the brace of telepathically controlled hunting horses slowly moved closer to the mixed herd, drawing little if any attention from the wary, chary prey of the motionless hunters, who had steeled themselves to not even wince at the bites of the flies, for the meat that they sought here was of importance to those back in camp.

But although they made no slightest sound, still they conversed. “Gy,” beamed the elder to the younger, “what is the nearest animal to me? Can you see?”

“Yes, Uncle Milo,” beamed back the younger, who was a bit more slender than the elder, though seemingly as tall and strong-looking, with rolling muscles.“A white, brown-faced ridged-horn ... a big one, a buck. A few more yards and you’ll be at the right range. And me?”

The elder blinked the sweat away to clear his vision slightly and silently replied, “A yellow deer and two spotted ones, close together. The yellow one looks to be best; he’s young and seems a little fatter than the other two. No antlers, of course, but I’d bet that he’s a spike buck. You are within range of him already.”

At his rider’s unspoken urging, the stallion bearing the elder of the two men moved farther forward, closer to the fringes of the widely scattered aggregation of grazers and browsers. Obligingly, the antelope that was his quarry finished stripping the leaves and shoots from a tall weed and chose that moment to move toward another plant, this one even closer to the hunger.

“Now, Uncle Milo, now!” came the imperative message from the younger man’s mind to the elder’s.

Within the bare space of a breath, the two men straightened, brought up the bows with the already-nocked arrows, drew, aimed and sent the shafts thudding into the two beasts. The shaft of the younger man sank into the eye of the deer and penetrated the brain, and the stricken beast dropped without so much as a sound or a movement. The loosing of the elder man went in behind the near shoulder of the whitish antelope and skewered lung and heart, yet the mortally wounded animal would have fled had not the man brought his horse close enough to lean from his saddle and take firm grip of one of the pair of sharp-tipped horns, lift the heavy beast almost clear of the ground and hold it against its struggles until it went limp.

Within the herd, pandemonium raged unchecked. Joining forces as they often did in the face of danger, the feral cattle and the bison drew into a tight formation, their vulnerable calves in the center, the wicked horns of the bulls and cows on the perimeter. But all around this defensive grouping, the smaller beasts fled madly in every direction, some of them in aggregations of their species, some as individuals.

Watching a band of graceful impala leap impossibly high in their flight to land and immediately leap again took the elder man’s mind racing backward over the intervening centuries to his days of soldiering in Africa. So, too, did the rapid departure of a group of fast if ungainly-looking wildebeests.

“All that’s missing,” he thought, “are the zebras and the lions.”

Not that both of those had not adapted over the years to life on portions of the vast, endless-seeming prairies and plains of the North American continent, but there were none of the stripped equines running with this particular portion of the great herds, and the lion prides did not hunt every day.

The two men, younger and elder, cooperated in roughly, hurriedly field-dressing the two slain beasts, then took the carcasses up in front of them on the withers of their mounts and set off for camp before the smell of fresh-spilled blood drew to the spot predators and scavengers too big or too numerous for them to handle. As they rode away with their booty, they left behind a section of prairie now host only to the close-packed formation of bison and long-horned cattle, all of the other beasts of the former mixed herd now having become but dots, some still moving, in the far distance.

Nearly two hours of easy-paced riding brought them within sight of their camp—four round felt yurts and as many high-wheeled carts, some threescore horses wandering, grazing around the edges of the campsite, standing belly-deep in the shallow lakelet near which the camp had been made or sipping water from the chuckling stream that issued from it.

As they approached the lakeside camp, the elder of the hunters—a man called Milo Morai or Uncle Milo—tried to picture in his mind’s eye a memory of the map of this country as it had been so many long years in the past. He thought that they were probably in northern Oklahoma now, possibly southern Kansas, surely not far enough west to be in Texas still. They had wintered in Texas, camping, with Kindred Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree, and now they were headed northeastward.

Milo meant to strike farther east than usual in hopes of finding ruins from the world before this one that had not been so thoroughly picked over and picked through as had those along the central migration routes of the game herds and the Kindred clans. Usable metals and singular artifacts gleaned from such ruins were not only valuable in their own right, useful to the nomads of the clans, but they also could be bartered for other useful things with the wagon-borne eastern traders who ventured out upon the prairies each spring and summer from the more populous areas beyond the great waterway of the Mississippi River.

As the well-laden horses ambled nearer to the camp, a very pretty, very pregnant blond girl kneeling before one of the yurts looked up from her chore of grinding grain and awkwardly rose to her feet, shouting, “Myrah, Gy and Uncle Milo are back with two kills.”

A mindspeak answered her, beaming, “Aha! Two men, two kills, that should clyster some of the over-weening pride out of that gaggle of silly Staiklee and Gahdfree boys, I should think. They were out all morning with their yapping spotted dogs and draggled in with nothing more than a half-dozen scrawny rabbits.”