Robert Adams - Horseclans' Odyssey

“They are truly a feisty bunch, and the few things that they do fear are all completely natural and feared with damned good reason—prairie fire, pestilence, the huge and very dangerous winter wolf packs…” Fleetingly, Milo recalled a wintry day now more than five centuries past when he and a handful of dismounted clansmen had been trapped in a crumbling ruin in the mountains of what had once been southern Idaho by a combination of a three-day blizzard and one of those packs of a hundred or more starving wolves. “Now that was a damned chancy thing,” he mused. “If I hadn’t lucked across that sealed room of emergency supplies and that scoped rifle with enough ammo to wipe out most of the pack… “No, these people have good reasons for fearing the few things’ that they do, especially the stinkers and the blackfeet. Those predators are always devilish hard to kill. It’s just a damned fortunate thing that there’re so few of them, and most of those stalk the elk on the high plains or follow the caribou herds hundreds of miles north of here.

“It’s funny, too, back in the days before everything fell apart, a lot of scientific types carried on at length about the mutations of men and animals’ and plant life that an atomic war was certain to produce in survivors. But unless the mindspeak in which each new generation of these clansfolk seems to be more proficient is such a mutation, I cannot see where any real change has taken place in men.

“ I am no mutation, at least not of that bit of manmade hell, for I was just as I am today, with every one of my… well, oddities… sixty years before the Two-Day War.

“The prairiecats are not mutations, but rather the result of a deliberate, scientific, prewar attempt to breed the sabertooth cats back into existence by that group in the Idaho mountains. And that was the origin, too, of these damned beasts they call shaggy-bulls. The journals I read while we were waiting for the rest of the two clans to join us there told it all. Bison primogenus or longhorn bison is what that group was shooting for; I think they got them, too, by breeding back the regular, smaller bison and certain of the more primitive breeds of cattle like the Texas longhorn, the Highland strain and the yak, plus—as I recall—the gaur and the European wisent. “The director of that project who wrote those journals did allude here and there to other, earlier attempts with other species of beasts, and so conceivably those humonguous mustelids could be an outcome of his breeding pens. But I tend to doubt it, for be was trying to recreate extinct species, and I never heard or read anywhere of twelve-or-fifteen-foot mink or ferrets, past or present. “They…”

Blind Hari’s voice abruptly broke into his musings. “What says the war chief then? Does the tribe bear to the north and cross the Great River where it is not so wide and swift, or do we rather follow the Traders’ Trail and cross over as do they?”

Milo shrugged. “Unless we backtrack far west and then north, we still would be faced with a wide, swift and deadly river before we could reach the headwaters of the Great River. Why should we do that and risk the chance of a much harder winter in a northern land? Let us continue on to Traderstown and see what transpires there. If the dirtmen of that town will not afford us use of their barges for a reasonable fee, then we shall take the barges, the town and all in it by force of arms. It is the sacred destiny of this tribe to return to the Holy City of our Sacred Ancestors’ birth, and neither man nor Nature shall impede us.”

Stehfahnah lay on her side with her naked body bunched as closely together as she could to conserve its heat, but still her little white teeth chattered. She had been captive in the trapper’s cramped, filthy hut for a week, bound hand and foot each time he left for any reason, and as his traplines ran for many miles up and down the riverbanks and deep into the forests, he and his small but sturdy ass were usually absent from a bit after sunrise until nearly dark. The girl once more ran her dry tongue over even drier lips, wishing for her captor’s return almost as much as she dreaded it. It was purest torture to lie watching the bulging waterskin hanging but a few feet distant and not be able to reach it: and torture, too, was the need to forcibly restrain the needs of her body to empty itself during the long hours alone, but the man’s hard-swung belt had drawn blood from her bare back on the two occasions she had lost control and wetted or fouled the mattress of grass-stuffed hides whereon she lay. For a pitifully short time each night and morning he had made a practice of freeing both wrists and ankles that she might eat, drink and void. He did leave her ankles unbound all night… but only so that he might easily use her body whenever the mood struck him through the night hours. Once more Stehfahnah had reverted to the behavior pattern which had sustained her through the long weeks of her previous captivity, separating her mind from her body during the abuse she could not resist, trying not to show pain or any sign of emotion.

She might have experienced loneliness, had she not been a telepath. But the second room of the hut was stall for not only the little ass but for the trapper’s other animal, a mare he had captured from the wild years before, and brutally broken to the saddle. During the third morning of her captivity, whilst she had been silently conversing with the two female otters, the previously uncommunicative equine had suddenly joined the “conversation.” Mother-of-Many-Many had just apprised the girl that Killer-of-Much-Meat-in-Water had swum upriver seeking the creature that might be able to help her, the one that they called The-Bear-Killer. Stehfahnah had no idea what sort of beast the otters had in mind. The only impressions she could glean from them were of a huge (to them, at least), dark, furry creature with longish legs, a mouthful of sharp, white teeth and broad feet studded with long, curved claws. Stehfahnah had known that the mare was a mind-speaker—else she would have possessed no mindshield—but the girl’s earlier attempts to converse had been fruitless. Now the small dun mare said silently, “You are truly, then, a twolegs of the Clans. Long has this one been slave to this brutal dirtman twolegs. Sad day it was when you became such, sister.”

According to the mare, she had been separated from her herd—a sept of the Horse Tribe attached to Clan Mehrfee— while fleeing a terrible grass fire on the prairie seven years past. Stumbling with exhaustion, she had entered the riverside forest belt, having scented water. She had been taken at a small spring, too tired to really offer much resistance to the big, strong man and his hateful rawhide noose.

Knowing or suspecting that his catch was a Horseclans mare, he never took her onto the prairies when he worked for the traders each spring and summer, boarding her and the ass in Traderstown, where the stable owner also rented out their services now and again.

The girl had had but little “conversation” with the ass. The small creature was intelligent enough, but his mindspeak seemed minimal and had never before been employed with humans. As Stehfahnah lay there on the smelly hide mattress, a new but familiar thought transmission nibbled at her mind, and abruptly her thirst, the cold, even the aching of her full and distended bladder were forgotten. “Good-Twolegs,” announced’ Killer-of-Much-Meat-in-Water, “The Bear-Killer swam back down the river with me. He stopped where we came out to eat a muskrat caught in one of Bad-Twolegs’s hurt-leg-things. But we must wait until next sun to free you, for Bad-Twolegs and his long-ears are not far.” Eely Maidjuhz led his pack ass—the smallish beast staggering under its load—into the small clearing before the log hut, hung the dwarf antelope he had bagged by chance, then began to affix the day’s catch of skins to the drying racks. Once the last skin was up and the antelope’s small carcass butchered, he cleaned his knives, took up the ass’s halter and led him into the hut and through the front room to join the mare in the lean-to addition.