And the two kzin pursuing. “Come back!” he screamed incredulously. Hans looked at him; the humans shrugged, and began to follow.
Horses did not like kzin. That, it seemed, was an immutable fact of life. Hans watched the last of them go bucking off across the dusty square of Neu Friborg with a philosophical air.
“Waste of time, horses, anyway,” he said. “Die on you, like as not. Draw tigripards. Mules are what we need; mules for the gear, and we can walk. Kitties’d have to walk anyhow, too heavy for horses.”
“I eat herbivores, I do not perch upon them,” Bigs said, and stalked off to curl up on a rock and sulk.
“Will these.. mules be more sensible?” Spots asked dubiously.
The stock pens had been set up for the day, collapsible metal frames old enough to be rickety; most of the work animals being offered for sale had been stunned into docility by the heat. High summer in the southern Jotuns was no joke, with both suns up and this lowish altitude. Jonah fanned himself with his straw hat, wiped sweat from his face and looked dubiously at the collection of bony animals who turned their long ears towards him. It was probably imagination, the look of malicious anticipation… and planets have lousy climate control systems, he added to himself. His underwear was chafing, and he was raw under his gunbelt. The pens stank with a hot, dry smell and buzzed with flies, Terran and the six-winged Wunderlander equivalents.
“I haven’t had much to do with animals,” he said dubiously. Except to eat them sometimes, and he preferred his meat prepared so its origin wasn’t too obvious. In space you ate rodent, mostly, anyway, or decently synthesized protein. It made him slightly queasy, the thought of eating something with eyes that size and a large head.
“You’ll learn,” Hans said, running his hands expertly down the legs of one animal. “Won’t do,” he added to the owner, in outbacker dialect. “Galls. Let’s see t’other one.”
“Yep, you’ll learn,” he continued to Jonah. “Unless you want to carry three hundred kilos of gear yourself”
“I see your point,” Jonah replied.
The mule stretched out its neck at Spots and gave a deafening bray with aggressive overtones. The kzin’s fur bottled, and he hissed back at the mule, which blinked and fell silent. From the way its eyes rolled, it was keeping a wary watch on the big carnivore…
“Thiss’un‘ll do,” Hans told the owner. “And the other five.”
The grizzled farmer nodded and whistled for the town registrar, who came over with a readout pistol and scanned the barcodes laser-marked into the mules’ necks.
“Set down,” she said, tucking the instrument into a holster in her skirts. “New system, just back on line-haven’t had a computer link like this since way back in the occupation.” She gave Spots a hard glare; that was extremely bad manners by kzinti standards, but the felinoid stared over her head.
Poor bleeping pussy must have had a lot of practice at that, Jonah thought with some compassion. Stares and jostling and tobacco smoke; life was not easy for kzin under human rule. On the other hand, we don’t enslave or eat them so matters are rather more than even.
“Might as well get started,” Hans concluded, after slapping palms with the farmer. “You fellas need to learn how to do up a pack saddle. Got to be balanced, or you’ll get saddle galls and then we’ll be stuck without enough transport to carry our gear. Couldn’t have that. All right, first lesson.”
He handed one of the wood-and-leather frames to Spots, together with a blanket. “Fold the blanket, then put the saddle firmly across.”
Spots picked up the gear in his stubby-fingered four-digit hands, conscious of the village loafers and small children watching him. So conscious that he did not realize what the mule’s laid-back ears meant, and the way it turned its head to fix him with one distance-estimating eye. The kick was swift even by kzinti standards, and precisely aimed. Spots made a whistling sound as he flew back, folding around his middle. The onlookers laughed; he fought back to all fours. His back arched, fir bottled out, ears folded away in combat mode, and his tail stood out like a pink column behind him. He was beyond lashing it, in his rage, and his lower jaw sank down on his breast in the killing gape as he whooped for breath. Adrenaline surge and lack of oxygen sent gray across his eyes and narrowed his vision down to a tunnel. When a human moved at the corner of it, he whirled and began the upward gutting stroke with barred claws.
The motion froze. It was the human Jonah, and he stood calmly in the position of respectful-nonaggression, with no smell of fear His teeth were decently concealed. Slowly, slowly, willpower beat down the aching need to kill and the rage-shame of mockery. The loafers had tumbled backward at the blurring-swift kzin leap that left Spots back on his feet, though some of the children had cried out in delight as at a wonder. Spots’s pelt sank back toward normal, and he forced his ears to unfold, his tail to relax. Jonah bent and picked up the saddle and its blanket pad.
“Shall we do this together?” he said in an even voice. “I wouldn’t care to be kicked by that thing, myself- I don’t have cartilage armor across my middle the way you Heroes do.”
Stiffly, Spots’s ears waggled; the equivalent of a forced smile. “Mine is not in very good condition, at the moment. How shall we approach?”
“One on either side,” Jonah said. “We shouldn’t give him a target.”
“Hrraaaeeeeeeee!” Rigs shrieked and leapt.
The gagrumpher froze for a fatal instant, its six legs tensed and head whipping backward, then spurted forward in a desperate bound. Spots rose out of the underbrush almost at its feet and lunged for the exposed throat, fastening himself with clawed hands and feet to the big animal and sinking his fangs into its throat. Blood bubbled between his teeth, hot and salty and spicy across his tongue, but he concentrated on squeezing his jaws shut. Air wheezed through the punctured windpipe and he gave a grunt of triumph as it closed beneath the bone-cracking pressure of his grip. Suffocation killed the prey, when you got a good throat-hold. The animal collapsed by the forelegs, then went over on its side with a thump as Bigs arrived and threw his massive form against its hindquarters. A few seconds more and it kicked and died.
They crouched for a moment, panting, forepaw-hands on the warm body. The soft night echoed to the throbbing killscream of triumph, and then they settled down to the enjoyable task of butchering and eating. Spots cuffed affectionately at his sibling as they ripped open the body cavity and squabbled over hearts-gagrumphers had two, one major and one secondary, like most Wunderland higher life-forms-and liver. It was a big beast, twice the weight of an adult male kzin, half a human ton, hut they made an appreciable dint in it, before feeling replete enough to pile the remainder in torn-off segments of hide; it would be fresh enough to eat for a couple of days. With the chore done they could lie at leisure, cracking bones for marrow with rocks and the hilts of their w'tsai-knives, nibbling at treats of organ and tripe, grooming the blood and bits out of each other’s fur.
“it is well, it is well,” Bigs crooned, working over the hard-to-reach places at the back of his sibling’s neck. It was amazing where the blood got to, when you stuck your head into the prey’s abdominal cavity.
“It is well,” Spots confirmed, yawning cavernously. “If I never eat synthetic protein again, it will be far too soon. Nothing is lacking but ice cream, or some bourbon with milk.”
“Your pride-mate provides,” Bigs announced, unslinging a canteen and two fiat dishes that collapsed against it, “The bourbon, at least”
A throaty purr resounded from both throats. This is how the Fanged God meant kzinti to live, Spots thought The night was bright to their sight, full of interesting scents; a gratifying hush of terror was only gradually wearing off, as the native life reacted to the mar of hunting kzin.