The tribal council had dragged on and on, far longer than any other council before it, as the chiefs wrangled and chewed over the issue. At great length, they had all agreed to choose Chief Milo of Moral as their first war chief, to be paramount to all until Ehlai was reached, or Morai died or named a successor, who must then be approved by the council before actually succeeding. All the chiefs felt that this final measure was necessary, for the songs clearly indicated that a score or more of winters might see the tribe still on the move eastward. Therefore, few of them would likely see the Holy City, and, as the Morai seemed to be of at least early middle years, surely he too would become old and infirm before the goal had been achieved. Had he so chosen, War Chief Milo of Morai could have eased the minds of the chiefs, at least on the final measure. For his appearance had not altered by one jot through all the time through which his memory stretched… and that was almost seven hundred years!
Where he squatted on a carpet-covered earthen dais, listening to the circle of squatting chiefs planning and discussing the order of march, this one called Milo kept his thoughts well shielded—a thing always necessary in a camp filled with born telepaths, but especially necessary in his own case. For he thought it best that none, not even old Hari, know for a while that he was in reality none other than their deified Uncle of the Kindred, returned after two centuries of tramping and riding and sailing the wide world in search of an island where, it was fabled, all folk were like himself, ageless and almost immortal. “But I never found it,” he thought ruefully. “Nearly everyone had heard of it in every land I touched, but it was a chimerical quest, for the information I received was always the same. It lay just over the next range of mountains, in the center of the next sea or in a great lake in a great continent beyond that sea.” Deciding at length that he was vainly pur-Suing a mirage, he had begun to retrace his steps, to come back to the only real home and kin he had ever known.
“But haven’t they changed?” he thought on. “Who in’hell would ever have thought that a bare hundred and fifty or so skinny, frightened, starving, sniveling little kids that I found huddled in an air-raid shelter tunneled into a mountainside could have been the progenitors of these fine men and of all the folk they lead?
“They have adapted unbelievably well to a singularly harsh and unrelenting environment Their so-called Sacred Ancestors, during that first spring and summer on the high plains, didn’t even know how to wipe their butts properly without toilet tissue, while these, their descendants, are fully capable of supplying their every need from the land alone. “Well, save perhaps the steel for their weapons and a few tools—but Blind Hari avers that very few of the blades came from the east or the south, most being produced by clan smiths who had dug the metal out of ancient ruins. And that’s another thing, too. Almost all the easterners and southerners with their anthropomorphic gods and their superstitions are scared spitless of the ruins, the so-called God Cities; yet wherever they come across them the clans camp in them—set up their yurts and pitch their tents in the long-dead villages and towns and cities of the late, great United States of America. Nor do they depart until the graze is depleted, or the game, or the diggings are not producing enough in the way of metals or useful artifacts to make the labor worthwhile, or until they just feel the urge to move on. Worshiping, as they do, only Sun and Wind and, to a limited extent, their swords and sabers—this last a rite that seems to have filtered in from the east in the last two hundred years, for I never founded it—these clansfolk harbor hardly any of the debilitating, gruesome superstitions to which most folk in this land and overseas seem addicted, and so they do not fear the supernatural.
“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…”