At last, starting far, far out on all sides, they rode very slowly toward the bull, two with bolas ready in case the beast tried to run, the rest bearing bows, nocked arrows and spare shafts between the fingers of the bowhand. None had even thought of trying to ready or use lance or spear, for the beast clearly had too much power for any man and horse to hold on a lance, and no one wanted to get close enough to put a spear into him until he had been seriously hurt by some well-placed arrows.
The monstrous black bull raised his massive head several times, turning it here and there to test the vagrant currents of air, the long, long horns gleaming in the prairie sunlight. And each time that he did so, Milo’s heart seemed to skip a beat or two, but each time, the bovine went back to grazing the grasses among which he stood. And the eight men rode closer, closer, and ever closer. Already, one or two had come to within extreme range of their bows.
But then the shaggy bull raised his great head yet again, and this time he did not resume his grazing, but stood tensely while he tested the air, then bellowed an awful, bass challenge and began to paw at the ground.
IV
The huge wild bull was clearly on the very verge of a charge, which Milo knew could mean one or more deaths of hunters and/or quite possibly the escape of the beast. He thanked his stars that all seven of his companions on this day were mindspeakers, then silently beamed his message to them.
“I doubt that he can see any better than any other kind of cattle. He seems to be dependent on scent and sound, so let’s be wolf-wily. Those of you behind him make noise. When he turns, you be still and let those then behind him make noises; in this wise we may be able to keep him confused enough to all get within killing range. But when he does charge, don’t any of you try to show how brave you are—get the hell out of his way, if you can. Big as he is, he could likely toss a horse with those horns, and one of you on that horse.”
Milo reflected that they should have brought some bigger hounds, which could if nothing else have given the monster something to occupy his mind and energies until the men were all in killing range. But he had never really liked hunting with dogs, and besides, who would ever have thought that the party would chance across so singular a beast as this brown-black mountain of muscle and bone and sinew?
In the end, no man or horse was lost or even hurt. Thanks to Milo’s wise counsel, the great bull was never able to make up his mind just which way to charge until it was become far too late for him. One bola and then a second flew, spinning to enwrap those tree trunk-thick rear legs, then the bowmen came swooping in at a hard gallop from either side of the roaring, struggling bovine, to drive their shafts nearly to the fletchings in the heaving, shaggy sides.
When bloody froth began to spray from the bull’s nostrils, two horsemen risked riding in close enough to hamstring both the near and the off rear legs, then Milo dismounted and dashed forward, burying the six-inch razor-edged head of a wolf spear in the bull’s throat, neatly severing the great neck artery.
Walking, leading horses burdened with the butchered bull, they were very late in returning to the camp, but there was nonetheless tumultuous rejoicing, for no one of the Horseclans folk had ever seen the likes of the massive kill, which equaled or bettered the total in edible meat of all the other beasts slain by the hunters.
The tanning hide and the oversized horns of this particular kill were a wonder to all who got to see them, Horseclansfolk or the other nomads alike. At the feast, Chief Gus Scott and his subchiefs wondered and exclaimed over the trophies repeatedly.
“It’s all shaggy, like a buffler, ’bout the color of one, too. But who ever seed a buffler hide thet big, huh? And who ever seed horns like them on any buffler? How tall you say he stood, Chief Milo?”
“Between six and seven feet at the withers, Chief Gus, not counting that hump of muscle and cartilage. I’ve never seen any bovine just like him before. I was hoping you and your folk might be familiar with the breed—could tell me something of them and warn me of how prevalent they are, hereabouts.”
The Scott chieftain just shook his shaggy head.
“Not me, mister. Iain’t never seen no critter like thet, not out here on the prairies, nor neither on the high plains. Mebbe hecome down outen the mountains? I dunno, but I’m sure glad you and your mens kilt the big bastid is all. The less of his kind a-roaming ’round about here, the better.” His subchiefs grunted assent and nodded, fingering the wicked tips of the two yard-long horns. “B’cause thet would be a whole helluva lot of he-cow to have a-coming after you.”
In the days between the kill and the feast, Milo had had few spare moments to devote to pondering, but those few he had given to trying to imagine just how so singular a creature as the massive ungulate they had slain might have originated. Although his appearance was that of a man in his mid-thirties, Milo Morai was, at that time, a very old man—he himself did not even know exactly how old, but at least something above two full centuries—and his memories spanned a period from the 1930s to the present, through all the vicissitudes that had afflicted and at least nearly extirpated the races of mankind, killing untold millions in a few, terrible months by starvation and rampant, uncontrollable diseases, a few of these new, but most old.
If the areas of what had been the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Canada were a fair example of the rest of the world, eighty to ninety percent of humanity had been brutally exterminated by various causes in the wake of the brief, horribly destructive spate of hostilities between the allied powers of West and East power blocs.
According to his own witness and things he had heard, Milo knew that very few of the larger centers of population on the North American continent had actually been nuked. Several of the West Coast cities had been, along with Washington, D. C., Boston, Norfolk, Ottawa, Chicago, New Orleans and Houston, but these had all most likely been struck by missiles launched from submarines, since the High Frontier Defensive Systems had knocked down most of the ICBMs and satellite-launched weapons.
The response had been immediate and must have been devastating in the target areas on the other side of the earth. Milo had, in his travels, seen countless deep, now empty silos sunk into the soil and rock which once had contained the retaliatory missiles and their multiple warheads.
For a few weeks during that terrible period of the past, Milo had had access to powerful radio equipment and had been able to ascertain that few nations had been spared the destruction and subsequent turmoil, disease, starvation and death.
The People’s Republic of China had had several population centers nuked, then almost immediately had found itself fighting invasions across its western and southeastern borders, as well as a concerted seaborne invasion of the Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan, a deadly-serious rebellion in Tibet and assorted smaller uprisings in every province. None of the Chinese contacts had, however, broadcast for long, many only once, and by the end of a month from first contact, all had fallen silent. The Taiwan station lasted only some weeks longer, its last broadcast reporting uncontrollable rioting in urban areas and widespread death from as yet undiagnosed, plaguelike diseases.
The only station Milo had ever been able to reach in the area of western Russia had been a strong signal from Erivan. It had been broadcast in Russian, Armenian, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Italian and had proclaimed in all of these the immediate declaration of a free Republic of Armenia. However, at the end of three days, the station had gone off the air in mid-sentence and had never again been heard, nor had Milo been able to raise a response from it.
London had been nuked, he had discovered, along with Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Copenhagen, Rome, Ankara, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Teheran, Bagdad, Damascus, Beirut, Belgrade and countless other European and Middle Eastern population centers, ports and places of greater or lesser military importance. The Russian army had swept across most of Western Europe almost unopposed until a sudden onslaught of the new diseases had more than decimated it and its foes indiscriminately along with the civilian noncombatants around them.