Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

At the first touch of the needle-pointed knife, the huge cat squalled, heaved her heavy body once violently, then lapsed again into unconsciousness.

Fil was blessed with the experience to keep clear, but the overcurious Djim, peering closely, caught full in the face the jet of foul greenish pus that erupted around the blade on its initial cut. Cursing sulfurously, he sprang up and made for the water pool.

A long gash was opened, Fil cutting through to the very bone, then pressing harder and harder upon the leg until only blood and clear serum flowed, Once again, he packed the wound with dried herbs, smeared its gaping edges with salve and bandaged it with more of his shirt and part of Milo’s.

After feeling the throat pulse to ascertain that his feline patient still lived, he gathered his gear and trudged wearily toward the pool. By the time he had finished laying himself and his instruments, the straining men had heaved and manhandled the limp body of the cat back to where she had originally been lying and had released the bonds from her hind legs.

Fil Esmith took up a watch over his patient, squatting near her with the thrashing length of a decapitated rattler on the floor before him. He gobbled raw fillets of snakemeat just as fast as his busy knife could skin, clean and slice them off. Across the den from him, the redhaired Linszee twins joked and chortled while they lugged bloody wolf carcasses up to the roof of the tower for skinning whenever the blizzard died down.

In one end of what had been the snake den, Djim Linszee was squatting, cub-sitting. Killer of Two-legs, having hotly refused to tender his parole, had not been released; the furious and frustrated little beast was somehow managing to roll his ropebound leather cocoon over and over, from one side of the narrow room to the other, alternately bawling for maternal aid and beaming threats of dire and deadly retribution upon the flesh of every two-leg he had so far seen.

On the other hand, Djirn had gained at least the conditional friendship and partial trust of the two slightly smaller and much less pugnacious female cubs. The fuzzy little creatures were mindspeaking less and less guardedly as they avidly devoured the lavish gifts of fresh snakemeat proffered by Djim.

Milo had found the inner door of the fallout shelter to be only closed, not locked, though every crack in and around it had been meticulously packed with some sort of chemically treated fiber, then double-sealed with wide strips of tape. Sealant removed, the door had opened easily to reveal a virtual efficiency apartment—two double-decker bunks, a chemical toilet, a three-burner petrol range, stainless-steel sink with a chrome pump rather than a faucet and a plethora of cabinets and drawers of varying shapes and sizes built into every available inch of wall space.

After he had gone through the contents of some of the cabinets, a healthy proportion of the dragging weight of worry over their predicament lifted from off Milo’s mind. Even if the blizzard, now howling around the ruins in full force, should last for a month and the huge wolf pack should maintain their siege right up until spring, he and his Horseclansmen would be well fed on the big cans of powdered whole milk and eggs and orange concentrate, the stack upon high stack of freeze-dried foods still scaled in their plastic-lined foil pouches. There were jars of freeze-dried coffee (Milo vainly racked his brain trying to recall the last time he had tasted real coffee; although all of the nomads drank certain bastard brews that they invariably called “kawfee”) and sugar and honey and jams, tins of tea, even a full case of a Jerez brandy (ano 1972), plus a wide assortment of condiments, candies, herbs and spices and pickles.

Under one of the lower bunks was a steel chest, padlocked as well as being as thoroughly sealed with tape as the inner door had been. The lock yielded to the iron bar, however. Within, the first thing to catch Milo’s eye was a finely tooled leather case some four feet long.

With a shiver of presentiment, he lifted the case onto the bunk and unsnapped its catches, then raised the lid. Nestled into a fitted depression in the liner of impregnated sheepskin lay a scope-sighted sporting rifle, its dark-blue barrel, chrome bolt handle and stock of polished curly maple reflecting back the light of the lantern. Arrayed across the lower edge of the case were twelve brightly colored boxes, each of them labeled “REMINGTON .30-06 Sprgfld. 180 gr. pointed soft point, 20 cartridges.”

His hands shaking slightly. Milo took the beautiful weapon from it’s century-old bed and lifted, then pulled back the silvery bolt handle, The archaic Mauser action slid smoothly open and its ejector sent a glittering brass dummy cartridge clattering across the room. Under a light film of lubricants, the interior surfaces of the rifle gleamed every bit as brightly as did the exterior.

Milo slouched back against the door of the cabinet behind him, a grim smile on his lips. Twelve boxes of cartridges, twenty rounds the box, two hundred and forty rounds, then; even if it required one full box to reorient himself to firearms in general and this magnificent one in particular, that and to get it zeroed in properly, he’d still have far more than enough to seriously deplete the wolf population hereabouts; so now he and his companions were trapped here in these ruins only until the weather improved.

“But what,” he mused aloud to himself, “about those cats? Even with that big wolf pack wiped out, she’s going to be in a bad way. She won’t be able to hunt at all for at least a month, and she and those cubs will be white bones before then. True, the men and I, we can kill and butcher game and leave meat behind for her and the cubs. But how long before they ate it all or it got too ripe to eat?

“What other alternatives are there? Take them back to camp with us whenever we go? Well, for the three cubs, that would be easy of accomplishment, I guess: just strap one each on the backs of three men. But how in the devil are seven men supposed to get a two-hundred—and-some-pound injured cat down a bitch of an almost vertical hillside which also is coated with ice and full of loose rocks?

“Of course, what we really should do is just loll around in here until the big cat is mended, then give her the choice of coming with us or staying here, but if I should keep these men away that long, their clans will think they’re all dead and, most likely, move the camp to a luckier place. And that place to which they move would probably be in the opposite direction from that we’d go to look for them, too.

“Now if it only weren’t for that damned precipitous hillslope, we could easily fashion a sled or two and …”

Fil Linszee’s mindcall interrupted his musings.

“Uncle Milo, the big cat is waking up.”

When Milo strode into the den, Fil, Bili and Bahb were watching the great groggy beast, made clumsy by her bandaged forepaws, trying to get a hind claw under the strap still securing her jaws.

He moved to her side and sank onto his haunches, laying a hand on her head, because he had long ago learned that some form of physical contact always improved telepathic communication.

Then he mindspoke her, saying, “Sister, wait. I’ll take the snaps off. But you must promise not to tear off the bits of cloth covering your forepaws with your teeth. Will you promise?”

The blizzard blew for three days, but the howling winds began to slacken during the third night and died with the dawn. That fourth morning brought a full blaze of sun and all unclouded blue sky for its setting.

The fourth morning also brought back the wolves, who had wisely departed the dangerously exposed plateau during the blow. Bili and Bahb Linszee were atop the tower working on the frozen carcasses of the wolves Milo had sabered in the den with their skinning knives. As the vanguards of the pack returned to the plateau, they honored an earlier promise and mindcalled Milo.