Horses of the North

“This would, of course, have required complete cooperation on the Fuhrer’s part, but I think that his despondency at the foiling of all his plans and hopes and aspirations nurtured for so very long might have rendered him suicidal, knowing his mind as well as I did. Other causative factors might have been the announced intentions of his friend Josef Goebbels to take not only his own life but those of Frau Goebbels and all of his children, the deaths or desertions of so many men he had liked and trusted over the years and last, but far from least, the unhealthy influence of the Braun woman, who was at best a borderline manic-depressive personality and harbored suicidal tendencies almost constantly. She never was good for him, but he would hear no scintilla of her true nature from anyone, no matter how close or sincere.

“In 1975, I entered Germany on a tourist visa as an Uruguayan citizen, traveled on in slow, leisurely stages to Switzerland and drew upon my last untouched account. With these funds, I returned again to Germany and, through certain persons, was able to purchase a new identity as a citizen of the Federal Republic and a physician.

“Then, in 1980, I took advantage of the shortage of medical practitioners in the United States of America, emigrated and married an American-born woman of Germanic descent. Nurturing pleasant memories of my so-enjoyed and most comfortable captivity in Colorado, I moved there and set up a practice in an affluent suburb of Denver. It so happened that my wife and I were looking over investment property in Wyoming when the missiles were launched and Denver died.

“As I am certain that you recall, friend Milo, ‘chaotic’ is a very mild term for the two weeks that followed the War, and in the interests of simple safety for my wife if for no other reason, I decided to remain in our hotel suite in Casper rather than try to make it back to who knew what in my home area.

“Then those horrible, deadly plagues began, killing ninety-five or ninety-six out of every hundred who contracted them, and I, like every other person with even a soupcon of medical training or experience, was desperately needed in the overflowing hospitals and makeshift wards in commandeered buildings. My dear wife, Brigitte, had been a registered nurse when I met and wedded her, and she insisted on joining me in my labors despite the risk.

“The emergency brought us all together as equals—doctors, surgeons, nurses, osteopaths, chiropractors, dentists, medical technicians of all sorts, paramedicals, midwives, veterinarians, pharmacists, morticians, orderlies, even sitters and military veterans with antique medical-corps training. But those terribly contagious plagues quickly weeded out almost all of the volunteer staff despite the most stringent precautions, and the man or the woman working beside you in the morning might well be just another dying patient before the fall of that night. Poor Brigitte lasted through three weeks of work in that hellish charnel house, then she came down with a combination of the two worst, most incurably deadly varieties, and, seeing the inevitable, I stole enough of the proper drug to give her a quick, painless death, for she had been to me a very good and loving wife.

“Being what I am, of course, I neither sickened physically nor died. Although I grieved over the loss of my sweet Brigitte and missed her terribly for a while, I did recover in time and then saw for me and my talents a new and a pressing need. No leaders were left alive among the few pitiful survivors still rattling about in the almost empty city of Casper. Food stocks were perilously low, and no one seemed to know just what to do, how to go about the business of remaining alive. So I took over, took command, and won them all over to me with my abilities to so do.

“I organized the survivors, disciplined them, had certain of them do a thorough inventory of our remaining resources and supplies, then set up rationing of food and fuel for the remainder of that mild winter. With the spring thaw, those with any knowledge or experience of farming were set to preparing selected land for the harrowing, plowing and planting, while others were sent out into the surrounding countryside to bring back cattle, horses, sheep, swine, goats, domestic fowl, seeds, farming machinery and equipment and all of the thousand-and-one other necessities.

“Knowing that spoilers would make an appearance, soon or late, I collected firearms and ammunition, trained my people in the proper use of them and waited for the inevitable worst. When it came, each time it came, we drove them back with heavy losses and mounted counterattacks which extirpated their entire strengths, or as good as did so, then appropriated their arms and munitions and explosives to our own use to utilize against the next pack to descend upon us.

“After some years and for a number of reasons, I persuaded my folk to move south to Cheyenne, where we found a few more of the survivors already in residence, but sorely beset by spoilers and overjoyed to be reinforced by trained and well-armed fighters. I was chosen mayor—which should be read to mean ‘paramount leader’—and had served as such for a bit over four years when you rode in that day with your scouting expedition.

“Friend Milo, alte Kamerad, I had wanted so very much to tell you many of these things over the years we have been co-leaders of the folk. Had you proved less hostile in regard to my rational beliefs about breeding our folk along reasonable lines, I might have told you much of this that night by the camp-fire. Better yet, I might have awakened your clear, but now latent, telepathic powers and then have opened my memories to you, that you might more quickly have realized the truths, the validities of my beliefs, based as they are upon centuries of experience and of deep thought with which I occupied my mind through countless lonely nights of exile enforced by my differences from humans. “Now, with me departed, you will just have to awaken your mind yourself. I have left under this rather long letter copies of two books which will be of assistance in this endeavor. Also you will find in this locker formulae for the fullering and the hardening agents for felt, all derived of natural substances, all of these native to the prairie hereabouts; this must be my last gift to the folk once mine and now yours. I know that you will lead them well, probably as well as might I have led them, and possibly better.

“I must soon depart, old friend. This typewriter has surely all but drained the storage batteries and I can hear the morning shift of felters cursing even now at the necessity of mounting the bicycles and recharging them so early in the day, none of them knowing that I and my laboratory will no longer have need of that electricity.

“So, my work—such of it as you would allow—is done and I now make my exeunt, as it were. I am taking my Schnellig, of course, two spare mounts and two of the Bactrian camels to bear my yurt, gear, food and essentials, grain for the horses, et cetera; I believe that the folk and you owe me at least this much, friend Milo.

“I feel most certain that we two will meet again, one day, be it in a few hundred of years or in a millennium, but meet we will. As you will then, perforce, be an older, sadder, but much wiser man, perhaps we can then converse as true equals.

Your true friend,

Clarence Bookerman, M. D.