Spring floodings and the unexpected quagmires drowned folk and stock, while summer brought flashfloods from the terrible storms and, even more fearsome, the lightning-spawned prairie fires which often swept on unchecked for countless miles, consuming all in their paths.
Raiding and warfare claimed lives and caused wounds, but not nearly so many of either as were brought about by the usual mundane occupations of herding and hunting. The stock of the nomad herds were nowhere near as docile, most of them, as were those of the Dirtmen; they had horns and hooves and the strength and will to use both to deadly advantage when angered or frightened.
Hunting injuries and deaths were second most commonplace, killing or maiming both horses and men and, more rarely, the great prairiecats, Due to the universal Horseclansfolk craving for snakemeat, cases of snakebite were fairly common, though few died of it. The majority of hunting casualties were sustained during mounted chases at high speeds over rough ground and resulted from rider or horse and rider falling.
The most dangerous game beasts were plains grizzlies, lions, shaggy-bulls, wild swine and the rare but much-feared monster predator of the far-northern plains called a “blackfoot” by the nomads.
Of this most dangerous list, only wild swine were hunted with any regularity, and then only if there were no Dirtmen nearby who could be raided for domestic swine. Like the wolves and other predators of the plains and prairies, Horseclansfolk left the bears and the lions alone if those beasts, in turn, left them and their stock alone; for these huge carnivores were possessed of formidable strength and always died hard; arrows alone seldom sufficed to deal them death, and going in to finish one at close range with a spear was not an undertaking designed or intended for the inexperienced, the weak of body or the fainthearted.
Fortunately, it was the rare grizzly or lion that forsook the bison, various antelope types and assorted deer species to go after cattle and the men who guarded them. But in the case of the sinister shaggy-bulls, the situation was reversed. The shaggy-bulls seemed to go deliberately out of their way to try to kill men and disrupt herds of cattle. The only good thing that could be said for them was that them were not very many of them even on the high plains where they were most common.
In some ways, they resembled the bison—shaggy coats, colors, thick bodies, the prominent hump over the shoulders—but they ran to far larger sizes than any bison, with adult cows standing up to sixteen hands at the withers and an average adult bull towering as much as four hands higher. Both sexes bore wide-spreading horns, and all were, considering their weights and bulks, amazingly fast and agile in a fight. They were not herd animals, but rather traveled in small groups when not alone.
The long horns of the shaggy-bulls could be fashioned into exceptionally deep-voiced bugles; their hides were the source of the strongest leather known to the nomads, and justly proud was the man who had armor or target made of it. The meat they yielded was choice, and shaggy-bull sinews were selected for the finest hornbows. But the cost of killing one was always high.
Most often, two clans camped and moved on together, and occasionally there were three, very rarely four or more. Every five or six years, as many as twenty-five or thirty clans, they having been notified of time and location by traders or the traveling bards, would gather in conclave for as long as a week but no more, for so many folk and animals in one place quickly exhausted the supportive capabilities of even the richest area.
Unless visited by natural disaster or by heavy war or hunting losses, the average clan numbered twenty to twenty-five male warriors, fifty to sixty clanswomen-archers (both maiden-archers and matron-archers) and as many as a dozen prairiecats of fighting age. Children, both male and female. over the age of thirteen summers were counted among the warriors or the archers and were considered to be of marriageable age at fourteen, for all that few males wed before eighteen or twenty.
A chief might have three or even four wives, plus a slave concubine or two, but the average clansman had no more than one wife at a time and was considered well-to-do if he could support a second wife or a concubine.
Horseclansfolk loved children and produced as many as possible, for their life was unremittingly hard and they well knew that half or fewer of their children would survive to an age to sire or bear another generation. All of the children born into a clan were born free, no matter the status of their mothers at their birthings; moreover, all grew up as equals, save only that no son of a concubine could become chief of his birth clan unless his mother first was freed and formally adopted into that clan.
Compared to other times and peoples, the lives of the Horseclansfolk were harsh in the extreme, from birth to death. Perhaps one of each ten babes born into a Kindred clan would survive long enough to see the birth of a grandchild, but it had been ever so. since the time of the Sacred Ancestors; and simply because only the very toughest—physically, mentally, emotionally—ever lived long enough to themselves breed, Horseclansfolk were born with a great tolerance for adversity and privation. To outsiders, the image of the Kindred was of a grim, stoic, humorless, savagely fearsome people; but among themselves, they were anything but products of this mold, being warm-natured, merry, frequently quite emotional.
Of course, outsiders—Dirtmen and traders—never saw the Horseclansfolk at unguarded moments. All that the most of the Dirtmen ever saw was armed warriors, screeching warcries and killing, or driving off stock, burning buildings and crops.
But in a safe camp, Kindred seldom went about armed with anything more lethal than an eating knife, or perhaps an especially prized small weapon worn principally as an ornament. Herders carried riatas of braided rawhide, bolas, bows and arrows, and double-pointed lances (a dull point at one end for prodding cattle, a sharp point at the other). Hunters also carried bows and arrows, bolas, riatas, and usually broadbladed spears rather than lances. Too, they carried longdirks or hangers, hatchets and an assortment of knives for skinning and butchering, they might also carry a sling and stones for it.
Warriors, on the other hand, were never considered properly accoutered for war or raids without their body armor of leather boiled in wax—all lacquered and decorated with insets of brass and gold and silver—their helmet of the same material or, sometimes, steel, their heavy, cursive saber, and their target of laminated woods and leather. These, along with the double-edged war dirk and an assortment of knives and daggers, plus of course the cased bow and the quivers of war arrows, constituted the basic panoply of the Kindred warrior.
Other weapons were optional and purely of personal choice—light axes, lances, spears, javelins or darts, clubs, staffslings, bolas, even the humble riata and stockwhip.
On the morning of a late-spring day, two Kindred clans were on the march, Clans Dohluhn and Krooguh were now less than a full day’s traveling time from the rendezvous area of which the bards and traders had been telling for more than three years.
Out ahead and on the flanks of the wide-spreading body moved prairiecats and a few young stallions, their keen senses spying out any possible danger or promise of game and mindspeaking their findings back to the jagged line of maiden-archers—all riding with bows stung and an arrow nocked, two more shafts held ready between the fingers of the bow hand—who trailed the foremost cats at distances of a quarter to a half mile.
The chiefs and most of the warriors came next, riding in a line as jagged as the maiden-archers, usually, in clumps of two to four men. They rode fully armed—helmets, armor, targets, bows, sabers and dirks, with lances. spears, light axes, a handful of darts or whatever. But for all their warlike, well-prepared appearance, they rode relaxed, bantering and joking, secure in their knowledge that they would be well warned of any impending danger.