“Then, in the seventies, the Russians, I believe it was, started trying to back-breed to produce the extinct European wild horse, and at almost the same time, some privately funded group in Texas set out to try to back-breed to the Pleistocene wild horse of North America. Then, in the eighties, DNA and gene-splicing were brought into the picture, followed by other advanced procedures.
“Meanwhile, the Japanese had funded secretly a research project designed to produce reptilian hides for luxury leathers faster than Nature could manage, and that project spawned the processes of artificially stimulating growth. The replicators cheered and leaped to apply the process to their various projects, only to find that no life form higher than more primitive reptiles, such as the crocodilians, could be made to grow that fast and survive. Some of the replicators did, indeed, branch out into sidelines of producing larger reptiles and certain amphibians and huge eels for their hides and meat, but mostly for the income that could be plowed into the horrendously expensive replication projects.
“Then there was that Tätzelwurm thing, too; Bedford’s not even mentioned it yet in these journals, but I recall it was a pure wonder for some time. For numberless generations, the peoples living in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Urals and in various parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland had been telling of these serpentine creatures, rarely seen. The scientific establishment had decided, early on, that the tales were rubbish, nothing but folk myths perpetuated with the purposes of gulling the gullible and frightening naughty children, and so had dismissed them.
“And, lo and behold, an Austro-Italian group of scientists, who happened to be in the Italian Alps for an entirely different reason, chanced to capture one of the things alive … and very, very pregnant! Careful examination in Torino proved that for all her snakelike appearance, the thing was an amphibian, predatory and exceedingly strong, vicious and, with her double rows of sharp, pointed teeth, exceedingly dangerous when aroused or cornered, though generally retiring by nature.
“The captive laid her eggs soon after capture. They were all taken out of the pool in her enclosure and transferred to tanks in which they were allowed to hatch. Almost immediately, someone got the idea of accelerating the maturations of some of the young, and so by the late nineties, almost every zoo of any size, worldwide, had a couple or more specimens of this distinctly unprepossessing creature, until so very recently considered but a figment of the fevered imaginations of ignorant, unlettered mountain peasants.
“I saw a few of them in various zoos, and they did nothing to thrill me. They were sort of a dirty brownish white, looking slick because of the mucus their smooth skins produced. Their front legs didn’t exist and their rear ones were just little atrophied stumps. They really looked like big, thick earthworms—six or seven feet long and about as thick as my calf, I’d say—and annulated like earthworms, too; that is, they looked like earthworms until they opened their mouths. Hell, their heads were all toothy jaws.
“Their eyes were tiny and very thickly covered with skin; you couldn’t see them if they weren’t open, in fact. They preferred, lived most of their lives, in near-total darkness—in caves, deep fissures, peat bogs, under piles of rotting vegetation, only usually coming into the open at night. Apparently, it was finally decided after years of study of captive specimens, the pregnant female that had first been captured had been out by day only because she was making haste to a pool wherein to lay her eggs.
“The things ate anything animal that they could lay tooth to. They’d eat insects, worms, fish, other amphibians—including each other—reptiles, birds, mammals of any sort, eggs, dung of any provenance. Nor did their meat have to be fresh; they seemed to really prefer, to seek out, carrion. They consumed everything except bone—they lacked the proper dentition for that kind of diet, though if they happened to gulp down smaller bones or pieces of them, they seemed to have no trouble digesting them.
“The reason for the extraordinary flexibility of their bodies was revealed when there were enough specimens around to allow for killing and dissecting some of the creatures. Then it was found that save for the head, jaws and teeth and parts of the spine, the skeletons of the adults were virtually pliable cartilage, like the skeleton of the shark.
“Of course, experiments continued, but the last I heard on the subject, no use—aside from display as curiosities—was ever found for them, except that their proven existence vindicated numberless generations of mountain people of numerous races and nationalities and indicted numberless generations of self-proclaimed scientists for the elitist snobs they had proved themselves to be, utterly lacking in imagination or curiosity, hidebound ultraconformists to their dying days.
“I wonder if that cat back there in the den area and those three cubs are, could be, descendants of this project that Bedford’s group was to undertake? I’ve never seen any living feline with a set of upper Cuspids as long as hers, and though none of the cubs seem to share that trait, it might be something that comes with adult teeth and is always absent in the milk teeth they now bear.
“He was writing about acquiring snow leopards, and her coat does look more than a bit like a snow leopards—the few of the rare ones I saw in the flesh, a few skins I saw and pictures of them—but she’s way too big to be any snow leopard. Even in her state of malnourishment and illness, she must weigh in at well over two hundred pounds, So how much more would a male of her breed weigh, I wonder?
“Speaking of which, if we do get her and the cubs back to the clans and they do work out in partnership with humans of our kind as well as I hope and pray that they do, we—meaning originally, me—are going to have to try to seek out others of her type, and she avers that there are others hereabouts though just where or how close she doesn’t know. Even a solitary cat that size would require a pretty sizable chunk of territory to adequately feed itself, and if the breed are gregarious, even in pairs, you can more than double the territory involved especially when they have litters in the process of weaning.
“Not only can I and the other men here communicate telepathically with the cat and her cubs, but she and to a lesser extent they seem really intelligent, reasoning creatures. Now, the big big question is: is her particular strain the only one that has this gift that can be so priceless to us—the clans—or do the other cats of her breed share in it?
“But, okay, say we can’t find any of her kind, what do we do? We could inbreed it, breed the male cub back into her and into his two female siblings, of course. But there’re always certain dangers in breeding and rebreeding an animal that closely and just keeping it up. So what choices do we have, huh? Just let this rare and wonderful strain die out? No, I can’t countenance that alternative; cats like her and them could mean far too much to us—to the long-run survival of us all, clans and people. So, then, what can I do to perpetuate her and her promise?
“Find a big puma tom and try to take him alive and bring him back to top her? No, even if we could do it, I don’t think it would work; those two breeds are just too vastly divergent. The puma, for all its size, is still considered to be Felis, same genus as all the small cats, while the furry lady in there is clearly some species of Panthera—tiger, lion, leopard and so on.
“So where do we find a member of the Panthera in the Rocky Mountains of North America? Of course, the only one that was native within the ten thousand or so years prior to the end of the last civilization was the jaguar, the cat the Mexicans call tigre, but I’ve never seen one of them this far north, though if they can live in the Andes as they do I see no reason why such mountains as these would daunt them. But could it be … ? Could it be that the existence of this rare, long-toothed breed of cats living and hunting these mountains is the reason that the jaguars spreading slowly north from Old Mexico have never carved themselves out a niche hereabouts? There’s that to consider, too, and in further support of the theory, we’ve seen damned little trace hereabouts of anything approaching the size of a puma or a lynx, either, just a scat and a few pawprints of one solitary bobcat, and not an awfully big one at that.