Hysteria, Nelson thought. Bravado, reaction against fear. But why not? Why not?
He crept upwind upon a little band of deer feeding by a pond. For a time he lay in the long grass and watched them, slender lovely things with their moist black noses and great eyes. A tall buck and two does and a fawn. The rich sweet odor of them made his mouth water.
Presently he rose and walked boldly out into the clearing. They lifted their heads and froze, staring at him-fleet-limbed children of flight and fear. Then they snorted the wolf-taint out of their nostrils and were gone.
He went to the pool and drank. His reflection looked up at him from the moonlit water, and he ran his tongue over his teeth and glared back wolf-eyed at himself.
He went southward again, ever southward toward An-shan, and he found no rabbits. He began to be aware that the game was moving. Time and again he crossed the new trails of deer and smaller beasts, all drifting westward. Word had gone through the forest that even the true beasts who were not of the Brotherhood could understand, and they were moving on both sides of the river, back to the barrier cliffs, leaving the forest to the Clans.
The wind, which had been blowing steadily from the south, dropped and then died altogether. Nelson felt a strange muffling of his senses then. It was like being partly blind and deaf because he could no longer tell what was happening upwind. He moved with increased caution and he was hungry, very hungry.
He came down to the edge of a wide shallow stream and suddenly, with a flying clatter of hoofs, a dappled mare and her foal came splashing across the fiord and up the low bank beside him.
"Greetings, Hairy One," came the mare's thought, She stopped to blow and, through Asha's wolf-senses, Nelson could smell the fear on her. The little inky-black foal whickered and pushed his head against his mother's flanks, his long ridiculous legs planted far apart and trembling. Both of them were streaked with sweat. "You have run far, oh Sister," said Nelson, through Asha's mind.
"North from Anshan," answered the mare, and shivered. She nosed the foal's thin neck tenderly and added, "I could not come before because of him."
"Anshan?" said Nelson. "I go toward there now."
"I know. The Clans are gathering for war." The rolling eyes of the mare showed white in the moonlight, "There is death in the forest, Hairy One! There is death in the valley of L'Lan!"
And the little black foal started. With lifted head and rolling eyes in imitation of his mother, he echoed, "Death! Death! Death!" His tiny hoofs made a rattling sound on the stones.
"Hush, little one," whispered the mare and stroked his quivering neck. "What do you know of death?"
"I have smelled it," said the foal. "Red in the wind." His nostrils showed pink as they flared to his frightened breathing.
"I pastured on the slopes above Anshan," the mare told Nelson, "because my mate was taken by the Humanites and I wanted to be near him. The foal was born there. There was killing in the valley below us. The outlanders had come with their new fire-weapons and many of the Brotherhood were killed."
"Death," said the foal again, and whinnied like a child crying. "I am afraid."
Nelson reassured with his thought. "You're safe now, little one. There is no death here."
But there would be, Nelson knew. Sooner or later the fire-weapons would bring death to the gates of Vruun and the little foal, if he lived, would one day be bitted and shod and bridled, broken to bear the weight of man.
Looking at them there in the moonlight, Nelson was aware of a strange revulsion at that thought, as though they had been his own kind, enslaved and toiling in chains.
The mare's gentle thought came into his mind.
"Take care, Hairy One, if you go toward Anshan. Shan Kar and the outlanders have cleared the forest edges of our scouts, and their weapons guard the city well."
Then she turned to the foal. "Come, little fleet one. Only a little farther, and then you can rest"
He watched them go, the dappled mare with her flowing mane and tail, a graceful shape of silver in the moonlight, her ink-black foal rocking along beside her. Light feet that had never known the weight of iron shoes, proud high heads that had never bent to the curb and the cutting bit.
Nelson had always liked horses as a man likes them. Treat them well, take pride in them, feed and groom them and occasionally drop the old phrase, "That horse is almost human!"
But these of Hatha's Clan were different. By whatever unholy alchemy the thing had been done, these horses were human in intelligence. He remembered the bitter pride of the captive Hoofed Ones in Anshan, when he had ridden out with Tark and Lefty and Shan Kar on their ill-starred mission.
He turned slowly to cross the stream but he did it mechanically, because he had been headed that way before. Nelson's mind had been jarred and some gate had opened between it and the subconscious mind of the wolf. He remembered Kree's words, "Asha's instincts, memories, latent knowledges—"
Memories.
He had been too occupied before with his own terror and his own rage and, after that, the miracle of new and alien sensation. But now a whole spate of memories stored away in Asha's mind broke loose and flooded into Nelson's. They were not the simple memories of an animal but, in their own strange way, as human as his own.
Cubs rolling in the sun-warmed grass, the newness of the world, the lessons, the first hunt, the first kill, the first sight of Vruun's glittering towers, the entering of the young wolf into the full rights of the pack. Little details, tastes and smells and thoughts and dreams. Yes, dreams, akin to those of the boy Eric Nelson lying under his green Ohio trees, half asleep in the summer stillness.
But these were only the ripples on the broad deep river of Asha's mind. Below them ran strong the currents that bound the individual to the Clan and the Clan to the Brotherhood. In the flashing glimpse of Asha's past Nelson saw a whole new way of life, where intelligent beings had adjusted themselves to a society that was at once as simple as Eden and as complex as modern New York.
A society in which the five great clans-man and wolf, horse and tiger and eagle-lived in perfect equality without even thinking about it, just as in Nelson's own world different races of men lived together and accepted it as natural. A society with its own laws, that forbade murder and theft and governed the rights of the hunt, and in which loyalty was freely given. A sort of freemasonry that was in very reality a brotherhood.
They were not perfect, these creatures of the clans. Some of the memory-flashes gave Nelson a jolt of fear and others made him laugh at the spectacle of foolishness. Again he felt contempt because he had seen cowardice or the theft of another's kill. But their very imperfections made them the more human.
When he shut his mental eyes and looked only at their minds, Nelson was forced at last to realize the truth without reservation. The creatures of the Clans were no more beasts than he. Less, he was forced to admit, for he had killed for money, whereas the Brotherhood killed only for food. And he had killed men, whereas the Brotherhood killed only the deer and the rabbit.
Quite suddenly it did not seem strange at all to Nelson that he was trotting on four legs through the forest. The intimate contact with Asha's mind had dissolved that strangeness. It seemed no more to him now than if he had put on a foreign dress. He was at home.
Abruptly a hare bolted in front of him. He caught it in easy bounds and broke its back and fed.
It was then that the gray brothers of the pack came upon him, drifting silently between the trees from the east. He had no wind to warn him and his hunger had betrayed him into carelessness. He started up from his half-eaten kill and would have run, only that the leader, an old gray dog-wolf who lacked an eye, uttered a thought to him.