He thought hard, thought back and back, trying to dredge from out his memory the America of the last quarter of the twentieth century. He sought to recall how it was nearly eightscore years now past, before most of the nation’s two hundred millions were returned to the dust, before the cities and towns were become only ruins, crumbling and overgrown.
At last, he desisted. He could evoke a dim ghost of a memory, but no more. It had just been too long; too many more recent scenes overlay that long-dead past now. Funny, he could easily remember women he had had, back then, in some detail, could recall the performance of fine cars and boats he had owned, but still the broader picture of that lost world eluded him.
“Just as well, likely,” he muttered under his breath. “Let the dead stay buried. They’d be as lost in this time and environment as we would be in theirs.”
The bowman ahead of him in the single file half turned. “Yes, Uncle Milo … ?” he mindspoke.
Milo smiled, and answered as silently, “Never mind, Pat. I was talking to myself.”
The ground was harder underfoot, under the layers of snow; the men’s bootsoles now frequently slipped on the surfaces of rocks and boulders thrusting up from out of the frozen earth, forcing them to throw out their arms for balance or grasp at trees and shrubs for support.
At an overly thick copse of brush and trees, the spoor veered to the right, and the hunters relentlessly followed it.
The Hunter was aware of her pursuit very soon after it commenced, since her pursuers made almost as much noise as a stampeding herd of shaggy bulls. But she was easily maintaining her lead, despite the weakness and lancing agony that her left foreleg was become with the strain of dragging the stiffening, heavy carcass through the breast-deep snow and over the rough ground beneath it. Only when she neared the hillock atop which lay her den did she decide to take action against the persistent two-legs. Perhaps if she killed one of the pack, the others would feed on him as wolves did, and give her time to cover her trail to the den.
The Hunter had never had much contact with two-legs, but she had seen her mother killed by them, pierced through and through with the hateful little black sticks, then pinned to the ground, still snarling and snapping and clawing, by a longer stick in the hands of a two-leg sitting high on the back of a hornless four-leg. She did hate two-legs, did the Hunter, but she also respected them, so she laid her ambush with care.
She continued well past the spot she had chosen, then adroitly broke her trail by leaping atop a fallen free bole from which the night winds had scoured the snow. Climbing atop the mass of dead roots and frozen earth, the Hunter reared to her full length and carefully hung her precious deer over the broad branch of a still-standing tree. Below that branch, the trunk stood bare and the bark was slippery, so the carcass should be safe from the depredations of any other predator save perhaps a bear or another cat. And the only bear that stalked hereabouts was denned up a full day’s run to the north. The few small cats ran in mortal fear of the Hunter and would never venture so close to her den.
The soil was thin and rocky on the hillslope, and over the years many a tree had fallen to storms and winds. The Hunter now made use of these raised ways to make her way back to the ambush point she had chosen without leaving telltale tracks in the snow. Arriving at last in the thick brush, she bellied down and made a swift and silent passage to the opposite side of the copse. There she crouched, motionless as the tree trunks themselves, waiting.
The first two-leg, slightly crouched above her tracks. came abreast of the Hunter, then passed her, a long shiny-tipped stick dangling from one forepaw. Then came two two-legs, each grasping one of the horn-covered sticks that threw the deadly little black slicks; them, too, she allowed to pass around the point of the copse.
The third was bigger than the others, which most likely meant that he was leader of the pack, thought the Hunter. He bore neither long stick nor short, but three of an intermediate length. Soundless as death itself, the Hunter hurled her weight upon this pack leader. Even as she bore him to earth, she thrust her good, right forepaw around his head, hooked her big claws into the flesh over the jaw, then jerked sharply back and to the right.
The Hunter growled deep satisfaction at the snapping of the neck. Then she spun upon her haunches and bounded back into the brush-grown copse, leaving the other two-legs shouting behind her. Many of the little black sticks were hurled after her, but only one of the hastily aimed missiles fleshed, and that one only split the tip of her ear before hissing on to rattle among the tree trunks.
Well satisfied with her strategem, the Hunter negotiated the width of the copse and made her way back to where she had cached her deer, directly this time, for there now was no need to hide her spoor. Soon she and her three kittens would be feasting upon tasty deer flesh, while the two-legs would probably be tearing at the carcass of their dead leader.
Milo could not repress a groan as Dik Esmith dabbed a bit of homespun cloth at the hot blood gushing from the claw-torn cheek.
“Let be, Dik, let be,” he gasped. “That cat is not only canny she’s strong as a horse. She broke my neck like a dry twig, but it will knit quickly enough. Just leave me here.
“She’s most likely broken trail, so some of you had better scout around and see where the spoor takes up again. Djim, you and a couple of bowmen backtrack her through that copse, but be damned careful—you’ve all seen what she can do.”
Milo lay still feeling the pains of regeneration of bone and tissue already commencing. He was aware that Dik and one other squatted nearby, unwilling to leave him hurt and alone in this cold and dangerous place.
“They’re good men,” he thought, “all of them. I’m glad it was me that that wily flea factory chose as victim, and not one of them. In thirty minutes, those tears in my cheek will be fading scars and even the vertebrae will be sound again in an hour or less. But if she’d jumped one of them, we’d be bearing a well-dead Linsee or Esmith back to camp.”
For the many-thousandth time he wondered what had made him the kind of being he was, wondered if he was unique on the earth, or if, somewhere, there might be others of his kind. Over the course of the hundred fifty-odd years of life he could remember, he had suffered wounds enough to have slain a hundred ordinary men—he had been gunshot, stabbed, slashed, cut and clubbed. Once an axe had taken off his left hand above the wrist, but it had regrown; twice he had lost the same ear, yet he now had two.
With an agonizing tingle, life was coming back into his arms and legs and body. When he could easily flex his limbs and abdominal muscles, Milo rose to sit propped on his hands.
Shortly Djim Linsee approached and proffered a horn cup of clear, icy water. Milo gulped the fluid gratefully.
The tracker sank down before him. “There are many fallen trees just beyond this place, Uncle Milo. The cat must have doubled back across them, for we could only find the tracks she made when she ran away. She had hung the deer up in a tree, and after she took it down, she went uphill at an angle to the right until she came to flowing water. The stream bed is all rock, so where she went from there, upstream or down, is anybody’s guess. But I have a feeling …”
“That she went upstream?” asked Milo.
Djim nodded quickly. “Cats always seek high places. I climbed a tree on the stream bank and looked uphill. The slope is very much steeper farther on, but the top of the hill is flat and level and virtually treeless. Near the center of the hilltop is a high and spreading pile of rocks. True, I could not see any openings that looked big enough for such a cat to go into, but then I could only see the one side.