In a way, Milo felt sorry for the pack of merciless killers he was engaged in extirpating, for they none of them had the faintest notion who or what was killing them. The crashingly loud reports tended to keep them well away from the tower, and that distance simply made it easier to shoot them accurately with the long-range weapon.
He tried hard to make each kill a clean one, and the tremendous shocking power of the mushrooming bullets helped him toward his goal. He never knew how many, or how few, of that pack survived, but those that did were those that, for whatever reasons, were not on the plateau that morning, for he stopped firing only when there were no more targets.
When he finally stood up, his joints crackling and protesting, to survey the slaughter he had here wrought, he felt more than a little sick. Of all of the animals, he had always admired the great cats and the wolves. Sight of the tumbled, furry bodies—scores of them, scattered from side to side and end to end of the plateau—and thought of all the fierce vitality that his skill with the ancient weapon had snuffed out so safely and effortlessly pricked his conscience.
But the Horseclansmen, who had climbed up onto the roof of the ruined tower as soon as they could be reasonably sure that those earsplitting noises had ceased, did not any of them share his anachronistic squeamishness, not when they had gotten a good look at the windfall out there on the plateau.
Whooping, they lowered themselves down the sides of the cower and ran to the nearest dead wolves, skinning knives out, Winter wolf pelts were heavy, warm and valuable. They would become wealthy men at the next tribe council, through trading wolf pelts for cattle, sheep, horses, concubines and inanimate treasures.
By the morning of the fourth day after the blizzard had ended, the deer carcass was become but well-gnawed bones, and the den of rattlesnakes an assortment of curing snakeskins. The cat and her cubs had avidly lapped up every last drop of the three gallons of milk Milo had prepared them from some of the milk powder, so he decided to take Dik and Djim down into the forest below the plateau to seek game more edible than frozen wolves.
However, in the wake of the thorough scouring to which the winter wolf pack had subjected the country roundabout, four hares were all that the hunters had to show for three hours of the endeavor. Then Djim’s keen eyes picked out some large beast moving through the thick, snow-weighted brush among the tree boles.
Alerted by the soundless mindspeak. Milo raised the rifle and almost loosed off a deadly bullet before the scope told him precisely what the animal was, Lowering the piece and thumbing the safety back on. he pursed his lips and whistled the horse-call of the clans, whereupon the chestnut broke off her browsing to come trotting out of the scrub.
Milo put out a hand to the mare, but she shied away, going instead to Dik and nuzzling against his chest.
Smiling broadly and patting the shaggy neck of the mare, he said wonderingly, “Why, this is my hunter, Swiftwatcr, Uncle Milo. But I left her with the other horses, back at that deer yard, days ago.”
“Then it’s a pure wonder that she’s not now wolf shit,” commented Djim laconically. “I figure most of those horses we left there are such long since.”
Dik hugged the mare’s fine head to him, saying, “Well, she won’t have to fear that now. I’ll take care of my good girl.”
“Then we’ll have to set you up in a tent down here in the woods,” said Djim bluntly, because there’s no way we’re going to get a live horse up onto that plateau. Dik.”
Dik set his jaw stubbornly. “I’m not going to leave down here alone again.”
Milo nodded. “No. Dik, you’re not. You’re going to her right now and ride back to the camp. Her fortuitous appearance changes the complexion of things. You’ve got your bow and your dirk. Djim will give you his arrows his spear, as well.
“Fil says that the big cat may never recover her strength in those forepaws. I mean to persuade her to come back to camp with us, her and the kittens.”
Neither Horseclansman showed or felt any surprise at Milo’s stated intent, for both had “chatted” often with the invalid cat and Djim was now become not only a frequent companion but a virtual parent to all three of the cubs. To their minds, the four cats were human, anatomical differences notwithstanding.
Milo continued, “Dik, tell the chiefs of all we have found and all we have done here. Tell them to come with a large party and plenty of spare horses. We’ll strip that ruin up there of anything and everything we can use; then, too,” he grinned “none of you will want to leave any of your wolfskins or snakehides behind.
“Tell the chiefs that I say to hurry, Dik. If they heed me in this instance, they stand to be chiefs of fairly wealthy clan by the time they leave this winter’s camp.”
With Dik departed, Milo and Djim continued to hunt vainly, for a while, but then Djim mindcalled, “Uncle Milo elk dung, still hot!”
Following the clear trail, the two men shortly came out of the thick woods into more open terrain. Well ahead, among the stumps verging a beaver pond, a solitary bull elk had cleared enough snow from off the frozen ground to give him access to the bunches of sere grass that underlay the white blanket; now, he was grazing.
Raising his head with its wide-spreading, still-unshed rack of deadly tines, the huge beast gazed at the two men without apparent alarm. A brief scan of the elk’s surface thoughts told Milo the reason for this unconcern—this particular bull had been hunted by men more than once and he now realized that the long distance separating them was just too far for the hurting-sticks to travel through the air. If the two-legs kept to this distance, he was safe. Should they try to close, he would flee. Meanwhile, he would eat grass. Simple.
A single well-placed shot from the ancient hunting rifle dropped the half-ton animal, but Milo put a second into the head at close range as a precaution, for bull elk could be highly dangerous adversaries. Then he and Djim. taking time only for a few refreshing drafts of hot elk blood, set about the skinning and cleaning and butchering of the kill.
“The Hunter and her brood,” thought Milo, “should be very happy with some hundreds of pounds of elkmeat, and that’s to the good. I want her in a very damned jolly mood when I breach the subject of her and them leaving here for good with us and living out their lives with the clans.
“I would imagine that the idea of a steady, reliable and effortless—on her part, at least—food supply will appeal to her, so that’s one point in favor of my plan. For all of her stubbornness, she’s highly intelligent—more intelligent than any dog or pig that I ever came across, and they’re supposed to be the most intelligent of four-footed creatures—and if you can convince her that something new or different is for her own or her cubs’ welfare, she’ll usually do as you say—as witness the fact that she has not pulled off her bandages even once, for all that those healing injuries must itch like pure, furious hell.
“If she’s a sport, she’s breeding true, for all three of her cubs can mindspeak, can beam every bit as strongly as can she, though not yet as far. When she has recovered her physical strength, she and I will have to travel around and see if we can locate a mate for her, since she avers that there are more of her kind in this neck of the woods.”
Secure in the belief of the efficacy of his own powers of persuasion, Milo chuckled to himself on that long-ago, snowy, bitterly-cold day, “Who knows? In time, there may yet be still another Horseclan—a four-footed and furry Horseclan!”
“And so there is,” beamed old Bullbane. “The Clan of Cats must be the most numerous of all the Clans of the Kindred, for every two-leg Horseclan has an allied sept of Cats. And there must be many claws-count of Kindred clans.”