Milo and several of the better riders crossed the western mountains to the valley beyond. There they ran down and caught as many of the feral horses as they could and herded the stock back over the mountains to their holdings. Then Milo led another party back to that same valley, but pressed on farther north, as close as he dared to one of the places that had been nuked.
He found that others had been there long before him, radiation or no radiation, and that all the stores and shops had been most thoroughly looted of anything of utility or value. However, on the outskirts of what had apparently been an industrial park, he and his men lucked across a huge, window-less building. Upon the forcing of a loading-dock door, they found themselves within a cavernous building which had been the warehouse, seemingly, of a department store. It required weeks of work, numerous round trips to thoroughly loot all that they could use from the variegated stocks of artifacts, but by the time that the long caravan of people, horses and herds moved out of the desiccated area that had for so long been their home, the packs and the travoises were heavy, piled high with necessaries for man and for beast.
To everyone’s great disappointment, the dusty stock had not included a single firearm or any ammunition of any sort, caliber or description; however, after their thorough lootings, every man, woman and child now was provided with a bow of fiberglass or metal, as many arrows and razor-edged hunting heads and spare bowstrings as could be carried, and two or three knives.
Although Milo and the others had seen no living human on their trips to the western side of the mountains, not even any recent traces of humans, the trips had not been uneventful. On the way back east from the very first one, all walking and leading their heavily laden horses and therefore moving far more slowly than they had on the journey west, they had had the picket line attacked one night, a mule killed and dragged off into the darkness.
Milo and those others armed with heavier-caliber firearms tracked the raider and found themselves, eventually, confronting a huge, full-grown Siberian tiger. But huge and vital as the beast was—some eleven feet from nose to tail tip!—he proved no real match for six crack shots armed with big-bore hunting rifles, for all that the monstrous cat exhibited no fear of man and charged almost immediately. And he was just the first animal they had to kill during the course of stripping that warehouse of things they could use.
They shot two adult leopards within the remains of the industrial park, near the warehouse, while on a solitary, exploratory jaunt, Milo was faced by and had to kill with his pistol a jaguar. He found what he thought to be the answer to the existence hereabouts of these non-native beasts during another, longer trip, a wide swing around the radioactive core city. In an area that still was partially fenced, grazed and browsed a mixed herd of giraffes, wildebeests, zebras and several varieties of antelope. Having spent some years, off and on, in Africa, Milo was able to recognize waterbucks, blesboks, springboks, Thomson’s gazelles, impalas and what, at the distance, looked much like a huge eland. He kept a good distance, observing the herd through binoculars, because he had come across tracks and immense piles of dung that led him to believe that there were elephants and rhino about the place. A bit farther on, he spotted another mixed herd, this one including wildebeests, ostriches, oryxes, zebras and half a dozen types of antelope or gazelle with which he was unfamiliar, but also some specimens of big, handsome, spotted axis deer, a few other cervines he could recognize by the antlers as Pere David’s deer and a buck and two or three does that could have been red deer, sambar deer or small American elk. It was when he noticed a pride of lions moving through the high grass that he recalled that discretion was the better part of valor and also the fate of the curious tabby cat.
Upon his return to his party of warehouse looters, he ordered the horses stabled within the huge building by night and well guarded by day.
“I’ve found one of the places that the tiger, the leopards and maybe that jaguar, too, came from. Some of you men may recall being taken as young children, before the war and all, to drive through huge parks and view wild animals from all over the world. Well, there’s one of them—pretty big and well stocked, too, from the little I saw of it—only a few days’ ride to the northeast of where we are now. A number of the fences are down, and I’d bet that that’s where the predatory cats wandered down here from. As I recall, lions and tigers don’t get on too well in the same territory, and since I saw a big pride of lions up there, the tiger may have felt outnumbered and come down here to live on feral horses and deer. Those two leopards and the jaguar may very well be the reason why this area is no longer ravaged by packs of wild dogs, for both cats have a fondness for dog flesh. I’m just thankful that none of the big cats seem to have had the inclination to go east and cross the mountains to our valleys.”
The migration proved long and hard and slow, with the same drought conditions that had driven them all from their homes seemingly prevailing ail along their line of march. Game was very scarce, and many a night they all had nothing more than a few small bites of rattlesnake and/or rabbit to sustain them until something bigger was unwily enough to fall to their hunters or one or more of their herd animals succumbed to lack of graze and water.
Milo tried to avoid stretches of true desert as much as was possible, traveling on or near highways when it proved at all feasible, adapting a fortunate find in the lot of a long-deserted business of several dozen U-Haul trailers to horse- or mule- or ox-draft vehicles. At length, he decided to head them in the direction of Lake Tahoe, figuring that at least there was certain to be a plentitude of water thereabouts, likely graze and game, and, just possibly, enough arable land to settle down and farm. He faced the possibility that there might be people already there, as well, but numbering as they did some fourscore armed men of fighting age, not to mention quite a few women who were as adept with the bow as any man, he felt certain that they could either overawe or successfully drive off any current residents.
As it developed, the forty-odd families living and trying to exist safely in the environs of the lake under the overall leadership of a middle-aged onetime Regular Army officer and sometime survival buff named Paul Krueger were more than happy to see an additional seventy or so well-armed men added to their numbers, beset and bedeviled as they were by the periodic incursions of a large pack of motorcycle-mounted raiders some hundred or more strong, heavily armed and mercilessly savage.
Milo had had no stomach for settling down and awaiting the next raid. He and Krueger had pooled their available men and resources and staged a night raid of their own on the cyclists, who had become over the years so cocksure that they no longer troubled themselves to mount perimeter guards. No prisoners had been taken, but quite a hoard of secondhand loot and quantities of arms and ammunition, clothing, boots and gear had been liberated by the allies. Liberated, as well, had been scores of male and female slaves of the bikers, most of the women either with children or pregnant; those originally kidnapped from Krueger’s settlement were returned to their families if any relatives still lived, and most of the remainder accepted Milo’s offer to join his band. The things that these former slaves told him of their deceased captors caused him to wonder if it might not be wiser to move on—north, east or south, anyplace but west.
He had been informed that the bunch just exterminated had made up only the westernmost “chapter” of a highly organized pack of outlaws most of whom were scattered over northern California and southern Oregon on the western side of the mountains. He had been informed that these human predators numbered upward of a thousand, were very well armed and made regular visits to the now-extinct chapter for the primary purpose of collecting a share of loot and slaves.