The Clan of the Cats

by Robert Adams

  “Now I don’t know spit about those wisents, other than that they look and act a lot like our native buffalo . . . bison, if you will . . . but I do recall having read somewhere that yaks are a mountain animal, even live high up in the Himalayan massif, so a puny little Rocky Mountain plateau was probably no obstacle — actually, more of a lighthearted romp to them.”

  James grimaced and remarked, “Well, that lighthearted romp of those bovids has already taken a sizable chunk out of what little the group had of existing funds and will take more before it’s over and done. See, not only did they damage the fencing, they wandered around for a while near the plateau and then just seemingly disappeared from off the face of the earth. I had to hire on half a tribe of local Indians and actually put up cash bounties for their safe return before any of them turned up.”

  “They were found, though, I take it?” asked the senator.

  James grimaced again. “In a way, I wish they had really just disappeared from off the face of the globe, all things considered. Yes, they were found, but not by the Indians. Twenty-odd crow-flight miles away, some state rangers who were on the lookout for poachers saw buzzards and rode into some very rugged country to find a dead bison bull — one of the forest bison, rare and so valuable, worse luck for our group.

  “The beast was breathing his last and his wounds were acrawl with maggots, but even so it was easy for the rangers to see that be hadn’t been done in by the hand of man but rather by another horned animal. They put him down with a bullet, took off his ID tag to turn in to the proper authority and set out to backtrack him, but had to turn back before they found what had been his herd.

  “That night it started to rain, and it alternately rained, drizzled and threatened for three days, then came a weekend, so it was a total of five days before a larger number of men, with jeeps, horses and a chopper, went back up there to find what little the scavengers had left of the bull’s carcass. The chopper it was finally located the herd — five bison cows, two calves, three wisent cows and a calf, one bull wisent that had been in a recent fight, and one yak cow.

  “The wisent bull apparently had driven off the smaller, lighter yak bull while they all still were fairly close to the plateau area, because the yak Look off in another direction, chanced across a pasture of a small dairy operation and decided this must be his new home and harem laid out for him. You can imagine the shock of the gentleman-rancher on finding a long-haired, long-horned and rather cantankerous wild bull among his prize cows; it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot the bastard out of hand, but he didn’t.

  “When we were passed word of where the escapee was, we went down there with the big truck and brought him back. But now the owner of the cows is rumbling about suing the group for probable damages to his purebred, prize-winning cows . . . and if he does, he’ll probably win, be awarded a hefty settlement by any jury of locals, and we will be faced with the unhappy choice of either paying it or of paying more in the long run by going through the appeals process and, if we choose the latter, making local enemies we do not either need or want.”

  Taylor Bedford shrugged. “Settle out of court — that’s the best way, I’ve found, in damage cases.”

  His nephew made a rude noise. “Tried. The bastard wants a truly stupendous sum, more than I think his entire hashup up there is worth, seems to be under the impression that we’re a lavishly funded or endowed government project or, at least, a tax writeoff for some gigantic corporation or conglomerate. Gouging bastard!

  “Even so, were that the only cost, I just might be able to do it, much as bowing to his demands would grate. But it’s not. No, far from it. When the rangers found the wisents and the yak cow, they notified the project, of course, announcing that if we wanted any of them back alive, we had better get up there and get them out, pronto. Seems the wisent bull had taken the whole of his new-won herd up into an area that was almost inaccessible to even a horse. The big fucker had already injured one saddle horse and treed its rider for some hours, and the rangers were seemingly anticipating shooting him with some relish.”

  “So what did you do, James?” asked the senator. His nephew sighed and cracked a knuckle, “Zeppy . . . Dr. Baronian and I jeeped up there, borrowed a brace of horses and rode up fairly close to the herd, then went in — very cautiously, mind you — afoot to find that the rangers were right about that big wisent bull being as mean as a Kodiak bear with a toothache, as murderous as a great white shark. He came close to getting us, too, he and the wisent cow with the calf. It was on our ride back to the jeep track that we two decided the only feasible way of getting the brutes out alive was by drug gun, cargo net and copter, and that’s what we promised the rangers we’d do.

  “Back at the project center, I phoned the outfit that had been providing us with copter services and explained the problem, and the next day, the president of the firm arrived aboard one of his smaller helicopters. He had been all smiles and cheery words when he first arrived — for after all, the group has been a really good, cash-on-the-barrelhead customer during our time up there — but after he had heard the details and had carefully studied the maps, seen exactly where he or one of his other pilots was going to have to take a copter large enough for the job — furthermore, take it up there and back for each of the animals — he became much cooler of manner and far more serious. After he had done some calculations, he came up with a figure that jarred me, nor would he budge from it, wouldn’t come down one red cent, telling me in effect to take it or leave it, though offering the names of a few other copter services that might be willing to undertake the work.

  “As I continued to try to haggle him down, he finally took my arm, walked me out to his copter, strapped me into it and then flew us both up to the area in question. Uncle Taylor, I’ve heard you and others — racing yachtsmen — speak in the past of ‘living, prescient gales and storms,’ but I never then knew, could not really picture, just what any of you meant by the phrase; well, I do now, please believe me, I do.

  “That man is an exceedingly skillful copter pilot of many years experience, and I thank God for the fact, else I’d likely not be here talking to you now. The winds up in those mountains, in and over the small, deep canyons we had to fly into, then lift out of, seemed to know just the best ways in which to see us crash into a wall of rock and seemed to do their utter damnedest to see us dead somewhere up them. I can’t recall ever being so damned scared in my life, I mean it, every word of it.

  “After that, after we’d gotten back safely to the project and I was outside a very stiff drink, I left the pilot nursing one of his own, met with the others in private and explained just how much the man was demanding for the services of his men and his copters, how hazardous was the area in which they would have to operate. I said that having flown in and out of there, I felt the astronomically steep price to be cheap, all things considered, did we feel it necessary to get those bovids out alive at all.

  “Drs. Baronian and Marburg were of the opinion that we should just cut our losses there and then, and allow the rangers to put all the exotic strays down and, if nothing else, have a barbecue of wisent and yak up them. But, of course, Drs. Stekowski and Singh felt that as we had been responsible, at least in part, for having the animals imported to this area, we owed them all possible protection. whereupon Dr. Marburg took Dr. Stekowski’s side and Dr. Baronian and I were outvoted.

  “So I went out and signed a contract and gave over a check for a healthy deposit, then contacted the rangers — who, of course, would’ve been happiest had everything been done yesterday if not before — and we all went about setting up schedules, tentative ones, naturally, tricky as the weather can be that high up.

  “The copter people got out the heavy-duty cargo nets they had used to transport some of the animals up to us with, before we’d acquired the big truck. Dr. Baronian and I tested the two carbon-dioxide-powered anesthetic rifles, and she carefully measured the doses for each syringe of dope. Then, on the appointed day, we jeep
ed back up there, rode and walked in, and put that damned killer of a wisent bull out first, then had to do the same for the nursing cow before we could even get close enough to wave in the copter and the men who’d help us get him in the net.

  “To make a longish story a bit shorter, we did get all the big beasts out of that high canyon and back down to our plateau, though it ended up taking us two days and therefore costing us a good bit more, but that was the fault of the devilish weather and couldn’t have been avoided. The only one we lost was that biggest wisent cow. Being sedated twice in two days was apparently more than her constitution could take, and she never woke up after she was back on the plateau, so I just had her skinned, dressed, butchered and hung . . . waste not, want not, you know. Besides, it was that much less flesh I had to buy for the cats, not to mention far fresher and far less likely to be full of chemicals and hormones.”

  “The native buffalo . . . ahh, bison, gave you no trouble, then?” asked the senator.

  The younger man grinned. “Not really, no, though they did get into the way a lot, whenever the copter came in low and hovered. But, as the rangers explained, in really bad weather up there, the mountain bison herd is dropped bales of hay from choppers, so they’ve learned to associate the sounds of a low-flying or a hovering copter with food drops; they just thought it was chow time and were jockeying to be first in line. But compared to the damned wisents, the bison are almost tame as milk cows.”

  The senator nodded, smiling. Then, suddenly, he raised his eyebrows and snapped his fingers. “By the way, James, something you’d better know early on about that piece I gave you is this: the second, third and fourth round in each of those magazines is loaded with a very special bullet, a purple load.”

  “Purple load?” queried the younger.

  “Explosive,” replied his uncle. “Explosive on impact against anything hard, explosive very shortly after penetration of flesh or muscle. They’re supposedly safe until fired and thereby armed — at least, so the manufacturer avers. Nonetheless, be very careful about dropping them or the magazine in which they’re loaded, eh?”

  James Bedford hissed between his teeth. “And this weapon came out of your private arsenal, Uncle? By God, you play hardball . . . and for keeps, don’t you?”

  A grim look came over the senator’s patrician face. “James, you have spent precious little time in cities of past years. or you’d know whereof I speak. The entire megalopolis here, from Boston to Norfolk, is become a jungle. Even with police and security people thick as flies hereabouts, still there exists all too often a real need for self-protection if one appears at all afluent, and that is not even to mention the plots of one or another sort always bubbling somewhere in some embassy or terrorist group. Yes, I do have personal bodyguards, quite a few of them, but sometimes they might not be sufficient. Therefore I go armed, well armed, at all times and in almost all places, day and night. And now that it is made clear that some one has targeted you, you must quickly learn to emulate me in regard to self-protection.

  Furthermore, the problems never seem to improve, only to get worse and even worse, everywhere . . . and those are only the problems of which almost everyone is aware, things that can be easily seen, experienced, read in everyday life. There are other things, however, things of bone-chilling terror, which I am forbidden to impart to you or most people due to my security oaths, and seemingly there is nothing that the Congress, the Executive or any others can do to halt or even slightly ameliorate these things.

  “My boy, I am deeply fearful. I am fearful that we now are living out the last days, weeks, months, possibly years of civilization as we know it. I feel a sense of foreboding, of an impending doom looming, glowering, gathering closer and ever more closely around us all . . . and I, I just feel so utterly helpless. With all my wealth, despite all my power, I feel completely alone sometimes, and as defenseless as a day-old baby. I can only pray that I be proved wrong.”

  * * *

  Riffling back through the read pages until he found a date, Milo shook his head sadly. “No, you weren’t wrong. Senator. Only a few more years prove your forebodings with a vengeance. And you were helpless to stop it, by then. Of course, no one will now ever know exactly who started that last, deadly exchange, not that it is of any importance; it just happened, and a whole world, billions of its people and ten thousand years’ worth of cultural accretions, went down the tubes in mere weeks of elapsed time.

  “The Russians of course thought we, the U.S., had started it, and we immediately assumed that they had, but from what little I was able to pick up over that powerful private radio setup, other persons around the world had other culprits in mind. A few of them suspected China, though how they could’ve gotten their relatively short-ranged missiles to points as far distant as Cairo and Rome or why they would’ve targeted such cities to begin, no one seemed able to imagine, not even their accusers.

  “Some accused the Union of South Africa, too, but here again the distances and targets would’ve been unreal for South African equipment and motives. Not a few thought it to have been Cuba, but if so it was most odd that some of the earliest strikes were on a couple of far-southern Russian areas. The same is true as regards Iraq, too. Why would Iraq have struck at its longtime ally and armorer?

  “A good deal of suspicion, from a good many quarters, fell on Israel, and with good reason. For decades, by then, they had been growling a nuclear-tipped threat at all their neighbors while their so-called Defense Forces gobbled up a bit of land here and a strip of land there from neighboring states for ‘purely defensive purposes.’ Had they for any reason or none at all come to feel threatened? Well, both their civil government and their military had full quotas of hotheads who could’ve launched at all real or imagined enemies. Others suspected India and/or Pakistan, too. But the weight of opinion was that it had been done by an aging, megalomanic Moslem dictator in North Africa — a man who had been so meddlesome and erratic over the years that even most of his own coreligionists had ended by virtually outlawing him and his country, and after a brief flirtation following his illegal seizure of power, not even the Kremlin or its satellites would have any more dealings with him than selling him military hardware for hard cash on the barrelhead. And what in hell could this United States senator have done to halt such an act of hatred and madness from so totally unexpected a quarter? What could anyone have done?

  “And, sadder still, even if that one madman had been taken out of the world picture by some fortuitous happenstance prior to his final act of savage aggression, I’m dead certain that it would’ve been only a matter of time — likely a very short time, all things weighed and considered at that — before one of the other suspects or yet another aggregation of fanatics or lunatics did the same thing.

  “And, saddest of all, in the world political and military climate of that era — every nation of any power or aspiration armed to the teeth, treatied to the eyebrows, trusting the sworn words of neither allies nor enemies but fully expecting treachery at any moment, scared shitless of annihilation, yet determined to take any attacker down into death with it — what finally happened to the world and its people was a foreordained outcome, the worldwide nightmare of billions of folks for decades of time that became horrible reality overnight.

  “By the time of Senator Taylor Bedford’s tenure of office, it was become impossible for anyone to do anything to reverse the trends, save the nations from themselves, almost half a century too late. But my country the one nation that could have done something to help set the other nations and nations then unborn, undreamed of, on a different, less destructive course, didn’t; it let the brief chance slip by. The U.S. just let . . . hell, helped! . . . the juggernaut of global disaster start to roll, ignored by everyone until it had gained such momentum that no one, no nation or group of nations could’ve stopped it or even slowed it down.

  “Eustace Barstow,” he thought, his lips shaping the words, soundlessly, a horde of bitter memories welling up from
below his conscious level, “General Eustace Barstow might, just might’ve been able to do something, there very shortly after the beginning of the thing, of that juggernaut’s roll that took so much of the world and its people down into dark disaster, doom, death.

  “He recognized the menace, the true enemies of all freedom, of all civilization, early on, before World War Two even was concluded in Europe, but those who even took him seriously mocked him and his aims, called him ‘superpatriot,’ ‘red-baiter’ and much, much worse, most people just ignored him, wrote him off as some variety of looney-tune and forgot him. And I, more’s the pity, especially so as I had experienced firsthand just what the foe was capable of in pursuance of its selfish ends, deserted him too, got to hell away from him and the army and set about getting married and falling into a pisspotful of money I’d done nothing to earn or even deserve, a fine and loving woman I deserved even less and four children I adopted and reared as my own. And the end of it was suffering and death for all five of them and uncounted billions more, and all because none of us few who might’ve helped the even fewer who knew, who could look below the surface or into the future, if you will, and see what must be unless it could be quickly brought to a screeching halt, would do so.

  “Eustace at least was able to keep his freedom, his status, his life, despite his lifelong efforts to fight the menace, to convert others to his beliefs. Some of the visionaries were not so fortunate. Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for nearly half a century, the last twenty-one years of it in what amounted to solitary confinement, until at last the poor old man hanged himself. General George Patton, unabashable, suffered an auto ‘accident’ that proved fatal. Others, like Ezra Pound, were locked away for years in madhouses and there subjected to the spate of twentieth-century tortures known as ‘behavior modification’ or were rendered intellectually impotent through means of icepick lobotomies. Most were simply pressured or ridiculed into silence.