Horses of the North

by Robert Adams

  Many long centuries later, Milo was to recall these words.

  As that year's crops were tended and finally harvested, the schools went on. So, too, did the work in and around Olsen's forge. So, too, did Olsen's preachments anent the giving over of the settled, farming life for the existence of nomadic herders. The smith was forceful and voluble, and by the coming of winter, he had managed to convince and convert Harry Krueger and most of the other leaders of the immigrants, not a few of the lesser heads of household and even a few of the Cheyenne people, none of whom had ever before lived for more than a few days at best in portable housing, which last feat was, in itself, something of a real accomplishment.

  At the first meeting of the council following the first hard freeze of the early winter, Milo readily yielded the floor to Olsen, who had come to the conclave directly from the still-operating forge and wagonyard, grimy with coal dust and from the ever-constant wreaths of smoke in which he and his helpers labored. His presence filled the small room with the mingled odors of smoke, sweat, wet woolens and singed hair.

  Olsen arose, standing and resting the weight of his thick torso on the skinned knuckles of his two clenched fists as he leaned on the table of what was become the council chamber. He cleared his throat and began, "All right, let's us get the bitching out of the way, first. I know that Les Folsom means to complain to the rest of the council that when some of his folks brought me and the wainwrights sheet metal they'd scrounged to have their cart bodies fashioned of it, I junked the aluminum and had the sheet steel cut up to make straps and whatnots."

  Folsom, a blond, clean-shaven man of early middle years, grunted and nodded and looked on the verge of speaking, but Olsen just spoke on—after all, he had the floor and he knew it. "Les, boys, there is a damned good reason or three that I ordered what I did. When we first emigrated up to Nevada from southern California, years ago, we found us a whole bunch of U-Haul trailers, which were better than the travoises we were all using back then, but that's about all.

  "Because we were then in danger, pressed hard for time, we used those same damn trailers on the march up to the Snake River country from Lake Tahoe. But when we knew we were headed east, coming here, we built new wooden wagons and carts and left every damned one of those old sheet-metal trailers to rnolder in the Snake River Valley.

  "Les, your folks ranted and raved about how heavy and thick wooden wagon bodies were and how messy the waterproofing we used of tar and resin and oakum is, and they're right, for as far as their thinking and the limited experience that that thinking is based on go.

  "But, Les, boys, when a sheet-metal body is holed—and they are, too, damned often—it ain't any way to patch it, short of taking it off the running gear, dragging it over to my travel forge and trying to hammer-weld a piece of steel over the hole, and that fails as many times as it works, I've found; besides which, I'm generally up to my ears in trying to do really urgent, important things like keeping the draft beasts and the riding horses decently shod so they don't turn up lame at a bad time for everybody.

  "Wooden boards, now, if they get holed, you just stuff the littler ones with oakum and resin or break a chunk off the nearest road and render it in a pot for the tar. Bigger ones you might have to nail a short piece of wood over and then recaulk it. If a board is smashed bad and there is no seasoned lumber to replace it, you can straighten it out, reinforce it lengthwise with long steel or iron straps, then use short straps or angle straps or whatever you need for that job to give the repair support from the whole lumber around it, then just caulk it all up so's it's watertight again."

  "It sounds like a hell of a lot of needless work, to me," said Folsom dubiously. "I still think that a properly welded sheet-metal body would be better in all ways than a wooden one. Look at the automobiles and trucks—they took a hell of a beating, but the manufacturers never stopped using sheet metal to make them, Olsen."

  "Have you got any conception of how long it would take us to hammer-weld all the seams of a ten-foot wagon body, Mr. Folsom?" Olsen demanded in controlled heat. "With cars and trucks, back before the War, it was a body shop in damn near any direction you looked all over the country, and mostly, they didn't repair as much as hang new fenders or doors or whatever, even then. If it came down to welding, they had oxyacetylene torches. Man, I don't!

  "You tell your people to bring me all the sheet metal they can find—except that thin aluminum, which is good for nothing. I need it at the forge, as much of it as I can get. But if they or you think I'm going to waste time and energy and fuel to try to make them welded sheet-steel wagons, they better find them a way to put in an order to Detroit—maybe Ford or Chrysler is still in operation up there."

  Folsom's long-fingered hands clenched into fists on which the prominent knuckles stood out white as the new snow, and his fine-boned face turned almost livid. It was abundantly clear to all those present that it would not take much more to precipitate open violence between him and the smith.

  This was not exactly what Milo had had in mind for the discussion at this meeting, so he moved to halt it before it reached the sure conclusion for which it now was headed.

  He bespoke the fuming smith first, since he had known him longer. "Jim, there's no need to be so sarcastic to Les. Recall, if you will, that he and his people have never been on a trek, and that around here they have gotten good service out of their sheet-metal-bodied farm wagons and buggies and whatnot. Allow for a little honest, well-meaning ignorance of just how conditions are from day to day on a migration. Remember, you've done it three times; Les and his folks have yet to do it once.

  "As for you, Les, the things that Jim Olsen has told you and your people are nothing less than the clear, unvarnished truth—wooden wagons or cart bodies are better, more serviceable on the march and easier to repair, despite the weight and bulk and the necessity for using frayed rope and resin or tar to pack the seams and interstices. And none of your arguments to the contrary are going to change that which is, to those of us who have made it through several treks, proven and incontrovertible fact.

  "Jim, here, is in or near the last stages of utter exhaustion, if you need to be told, and his nerves are as frazzled as the rest of him. He has been working eighteen- and twenty-hour days for months on end and really needs to go home and sleep for at least a week; but his skill, his expertise, his experience, these all are irreplaceable in that forge and wagon-yard down there, and he knows it and is damned nearly killing himself for the common good—for you, for all of us and all the other people. Think hard on what I've said the next time you are moved to ride Jim, to needlessly antagonize him, Les. We could probably do it all without him, but it would take one hell of a sight longer, and be done far less well and at risks we have not the right to take for the well-being of families, women, children."

  He turned to Krueger, saying, "Harry, I understand that you and Jim and some others have spent a good deal of time poring over the maps. Have you come up with any ideas for an eventual destination for us all?"

  Krueger looked at Olsen, and Olsen looked at Chuck Llywelyn and several others of the Snake River group, as well as at a couple of the Cheyenne leaders. Then the rancher arose and said:

  "Uncle Milo, it wasn't for farming sites we were studying those maps, but for the best grazing lands, whereall they seem to lie and how far from each other, and then we tried to figger out how long it would take a herd the size of ours to use up the grass and force us to move on.

  "You see, farming is all well and good and all for them as likes to suffer, but we don't, and we think we could live just as good if not a sight better off game and wild plants and our herds as we do scratching at the dirt and hoping and praying that whatall we plant comes up before the snows come in or before there's an early freeze that kills everything. When that happens—and it's been happening more years than not—we've worked and sweated our asses off and we still have to end up making do until the next harvesttime on game, wild plants and the produce of the herds.
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  "What it all boils down to, Uncle Milo, is we're thinking of moving out come spring, right enough, but moving only as far as the flatter country in eastern Colorado and only staying where we finally stop until we've used up the graze and the game and all, then moving on to the next good graze and hunting. Does that sound crazy to you, Uncle Milo?"

  Chapter IX

  Once more, Milo closed the pages of his memories to beam a telepathic encapsulization of the long-ago events for Arabella Lindsay.

  "Of course, my dear, it wasn't that easy, that quick a decision. No, the council chewed over it for nearly the whole of that long winter, with shouting, pounding of fists on tables and walls and, occasionally, on each other, exchanges of insults and some very harsh words between the pro-farming and the pro-nomad factions—in other words, all of the usages and forms of polite, gentlemanly discussion. The only thing on which everyone seemed to agree for a while were the facts that we must leave the environs of Cheyenne, that south of southeast seemed as good a direction as any to travel and that the building of the carts and a few wagons were essential, along with the training of teams and drivers. About everything save those few points, they argued endlessly and ofttimes violently.

  "Slowly, however, one and two at a time, Jim Olsen and Harry Krueger and Chuck Llywelyn began to wear down and win over their opponents; sometimes it appeared to me that they were managing the feat solely by outshouting them, but nonetheless, it was done. By spring, as the snows began to melt off, a very few diehard holdouts remained adamant about the benefits of farming over those of a nomadic herding and hunting existence, but even these were by then ready and more than willing to accompany the others at least as far as a decent area of arable land to farm and settle upon, and Olsen and the rest were still confident that even these few stubborner cases could be won over once on the march.

  Despite a winter of unremitting labor, almost around the clock, in the forge and the wagon works, it slowly dawned on the council that all would not be ready by the time that the countryside had dried out enough to begin a journey of such proportions. Therefore, Milo suggested that he and his scouts set out to ride a reconnaissance of at least the first part of the projected route of the trek. Most of the leaders agreed readily; it was better to know precisely what you were moving into, especially with families, herds and all one's worldly possessions at stake. However, Dr. Clarence Bookerman flatly refused his consent to the venture unless he was included in the party of scouts, and, at length, Milo felt compelled to grant this demand, for all that he was more than a little leery of riding out on what might well be a very rough and possibly dangerous trip with a man of Bookerman's advanced years. Milo consoled his conscience with the thoughts that, firstly, the mayor was in splendid, almost unbelievable physical condition for a man who admitted an age of between sixty and seventy and had not lived anything approaching an easy life during the last thirty-odd of those years, and secondly, that the man was after all a medical doctor who surely would know and recognize his own limitations . . . and whose skills just might come in handy, anyway.

  By now, the herd of camels had become just that, there being a full dozen of the tall, long-legged, irascible beasts, and Milo had, mostly by trial and error, trained four of the younger, slightly more malleable and less vicious beasts to riders rather than pack-carrying, constructing traditional camel saddles from pictures and descriptions gleaned from books in the stacks of the main Cheyenne library. The tamest of the quartet were Fatima and Sultan, both of whom he had gotten away from the older camels and bottle-fed when they still were spindly-legged calves, but even these would often end a day of riding with a serious attempt to savage Milo with their cursive canine teeth. He had found out early on why camel riders, no matter what their other gear and equipment, always kept a stout stick ready to hand when around their treacherous mounts.

  As his last-ditch argument against Dr. Bookerman's forced inclusion in the reconnaissance party, he remarked that he had intended to use the esoteric beasts not only as pack animals this time, but for riding, as well. They could not outstrip a good horse over a short stretch, but they could keep going for long after hard-pressed horses either had foundered or died; he had dug out records of dromedaries traveling two hundred miles in a day, for many days straight, and on the scouting expeditions into Wyoming, years back, he had found the camels could and would eat anything that a goat would, in addition to many things that a self-respecting old goat would not. There was, if any more plus factors were needed, the fact that camels could easily take care of themselves in confrontations with even the most-feared predators, and this would be no talent to be taken lightly by a small, light traveling, hard-riding party of men.

  But Bookerman had just allowed one of his brief smiles to flit across his thin, pale lips. "Wonderful, Milo! It has been far more years than I care to count since last I rode a camel, but I have not forgotten how."

  A bit stunned at this sudden revelation by the multi-talented physician, Milo simply acquiesced to what seemed to be the inevitable.

  Despite stops to check bridges, cuts, fills, and the general condition of the deteriorating roadway once called Interstate 87, the speedy, long-striding camels bore the reconnaissance party more than sixty miles in the first day of travel, more than halfway to Denver, their goal for the initial portion of the trip.

  The country through which they passed was breathtakingly beautiful. Game abounded, and fish leaped in the streams and small lakes the waterways sometimes formed with the help of colonies of beaver. But still Milo was saddened by the abundant evidences of the dearth of mankind—the crumbling roads, the tumbling ruins, many with caved-in roofs, now the haunts only of rodents and snakes, the faded, weather-battered highway directional signs and those advertising products and services not available for more than a generation.

  Here and there, mixed with the herds of deer, elk and bison, could be spotted feral cattle, sheep and goats, as well as a scattering of the more exotic ungulates—American, African and Asiatic antelope and gazelles ranging in size from tiny to huge. From a distance, with the binoculars, they once watched a herd of llamas, wildebeest and a few zebras and feral horses being painstakingly stalked through the sprouting grasses by a small tiger. Even as the four men watched, fascinated, the feline rushed the suddenly panicky herd, sprang and brought down a shaggy-haired zebra.

  As he cased his optics, Bookerman remarked, "A completely wild tiger killing and eating a completely wild zebra—who would ever have thought to see such a drama enacted in North America forty years ago, Milo?"

  Milo nodded. "Yes, it would have been unthinkable, back then, before the War. But did you notice the long, shaggy coats of all those beasts—the gnus, the zebras, the horses, even the tiger? They have obviously adapted to this colder, harsher climate far better than anyone, either back then or now, would ever have expected them to do. It makes me wonder just how many more surprises we have ahead, how many other rare animals have been able to make a home in this new wilderness here, in what was once one of the most populous of human civilizations."

  They could not approach too close to the place where had stood the city of Denver, for it had been nuked. But they rode well out around the still-radioactive area, cross-country, to the east and thence south, until they came onto Interstate 70. This road, for some reason, seemed to be in far better shape than had been Interstate 87, and they followed it almost to what had been the Kansas border, finally heading north once more on Route 385 to its conjunction with Interstate 76, which they followed the few miles to where it intersected with Interstate 80, the route which led them back to Cheyenne.

  Nowhere on their circuitous journey did they sight even a trace of recent human occupancy or passage. The wild game and feral beasts seemed not even to know what a human looked or smelled like. They returned with glowing reports on the countryside they had seen . . . and with three additional camels to boot—two-humped ones.

  The three, an elderly female and two younger, but ad
ult, females, had simply drifted into the camp one dawn and, since then, followed the four riding and two pack dromedaries everywhere that the journey took them. At the leisurely pace set by Milo on the return to Cheyenne, the shorter-legged, shaggy Bactrian camels had had no difficulty keeping up with the longer-legged dromedaries.

  Figuring that not even a completely wild camel could be any more vicious than their supposedly tame ones, Milo and one of his men had put a halter on the older of the Bactrians with no more difficulty and danger than they experienced every day with their riding and pack dromedaries, then strapped on a packsaddle they had fashioned from scavenged materials and filled it with odds and ends picked up here and there in the course of the reconnaissance expedition. From that day on they had had three pack camels, and Milo wondered aloud if some of the bloodlust might be bred out of the dromedaries by crossing them with the better-dispositioned Bactrians, wondering also if the two were closely enough related to breed naturally or if they might produce the camel equivalent of a mule, a sterile hybrid.

  "Oh, yes, Milo," Bookerman had assured him, "the two can be interbred, and often have been in the Middle East and Asia. However, the offspring, though completely fertile and potent, are smaller and less strong than the dromedaries, and most of them have two humps, though one is often much smaller than is the other. However, I never have heard of any improvement in the traditional camel disposition being accomplished by such interbreeding."

  "But, Doctor," expostulated Milo, "you saw how docile that camel cow was when Richard and I haltered and saddled her. She only snapped at us a few times during the whole procedure, and those snaps were halfhearted, I thought."