To the gasping, whimpering cub, Milo beamed, “I suggest that you go back to the den with your mother and sisters now. Other two-legs will presently be bringing down meat for you all.”
“You hurt this cat!” was the cub’s reply. “You hurt Killer-of-Two Legs … and he will not soon forget it.”
“Good,” he beamed. “Remember that hurting well, and whenever you think of attacking me or one of the others again, recall that the sure outcome will be more hurting of you.”
“You remember, Two-Legs,” beamed the cub bitterly. “You are bigger and stronger, now, but Killer-of-Two-Legs will be bigger than you, one day. On that day, he will claw loose your belly-parts, he will rip out your throat and drink your hot blood, he will—”
Milo broke in with his own beaming. “He will be dead before he so much as touches claw or tooth to any one of us two-legs, rather. Enter your mother’s memories and learn from them just how difficult it is to slay two-legs. Learn how easily I slew, in her sight and hearing, a dozen or more adult wolves on the day I came first into the den. You must quickly learn and accept a fact that your mother and your sisters already have learned and accepted; you cats and we two-legs are not enemies, but now friends; we are, however, not in any way servants, one of the other, but partners against the rest of this hard, cruel world and its adversities. One of us does not order the other or feel any compunction to do so, for we both willingly work together for the common good, as true Kindred should. In this and in no other way can cat and two-legs forge out a secure bond between us.”
VII
Project feethami had wound up with not two but three of the nearly extinct snow leopards, two females and one male; all three of these cats were zoo-born and -bred, and the largest weighed only some forty-six or so kilos; this was the male, and the females ran only a bit over two-thirds of that weight. The white jaguar which finally arrived, on the other hand, was quite another matter; he had been trapped while roaming wild as a full-grown adult, and a couple of years of caged captivity had not done much either to improve his temper or to reduce his desire to regain his freedom. Nor was he at all small, being twice as heavy as the male snow leopard, his weight spread over a longer-legged, rangier frame. He had cost over twice what the total had been for all three of the snow leopards, and so Bedford prayed that he would prove to be worth so large a chunk of the project’s already slim budget.
There were two other cats, both females. In order to obtain the initial pair of snow leopards, Bedford had had no option but to buy the two ringers—which the dealer had apparently been unable to unload on anyone else—which were derived of a bankruptcy sale that had marked the end of some underfunded European project. He was not sure just what to call them. The dealer had claimed that they were spotted lions, and they did bear a fleeting resemblance to leonine shape, but they were neither of them any larger than the white jaguar, lacked both the bony spur and characteristic tuft on the end of the tail and had upper cuspids as long in proportion to their heads and jaws as snow leopards. Although they were about two years old—to judge from their overall physical and sexual development—their reddish-tawny coats were speckled thickly on the back and sides with darker spots, with a few more lighter and less distinct ones even extending down the legs and onto the tail. Whatever they were, they were gentle, obviously used to the presence of humans and cooperative.
Bedford had, on the journey back with the four cats which would join the one female snow leopard already arrived, been very worried about the reception of the two strange felines. But he found he need not have so fretted, for Singh, Stekowski, Ruth Marberg and Zepur Baronian had all been ecstatic over the chance acquisition.
In the staff meeting later on the day he and the four cats had arrived back, Singh had explained their exceeding joy to him. “James, you are of course familiar with the recent success and the patenting of the Panthera spelaea replications by the Greek-Yugoslavian group? Well, what you may not know is that their efforts, though eminently successful, of course, were not truly original. No, there was a somewhat earlier project aimed at the selfsame replication: Panthera spelaea.
“That project was backed by an Italian investment group, and it overreached itself along many financial fronts. When there was no more money, almost all of the project’s physical assets and records were brought up by the hurriedly formed Greek-Yugoslavian group; they even hired on some of the original group’s personnel. All of this took place about eighteen months ago, and just how, at that time, two little cubs of no more than four or six months of age went astray and into the hands of this animal dealer, I cannot at all begin to imagine. If only he had known, he could have set almost any price for them and received it, too, had it gladly paid to him by the then-ongoing project in the Balkans.
“Awaiting only more detailed examination, we all here are firmly convinced that those two specimens are, can be nothing but, replications or reproduced examples of the Panthera spelaea—a spotted lion, somewhat smaller than the average of our extant lions, generally adapted to colder weather, denning in caves and possibly originally a predator of montane forests, like the uncia or snow leopard of today and, most likely, the extinct Panthera feethami, as well.”
“The unexpected possession of these two cats should be a really tremendous advantage to us, to our own project, Jim.” said Dr. Baronian. “We already have the feethami material in the lab freezer, so whenever the jaguar gets here, we can start to work. With all of us together—”
“But it will not be all of us together, Dr. Baronian!” snarled Harel, who had been sitting in glum silence since the beginning of the meeting. “I told you all from the very outset, I will never have anything to do with, take any tiniest part in, replicating any damned, blood-drinking, murderous predator species.
“What now is to become of the bovines out there? Are they all to just be left to starve in the snow? Or is it the predaceous Mr. Bedford’s intention to have them slaughtered and butchered, one by one, to feed those stinking, treacherous cats … and his own unnatural meat-eating tendencies?” For the first time in several days, the big, beefy man emphasized his question by slamming his broad palm down on the table before him, sullen hatred in the stare he glared at the group at the other end of the table.
Bedford sighed resignedly. “Look, Dr. Harel, I’ll go through it one more time. See if you can get it into your head this time around. While I did order the skinning and butchering and hanging of the carcass of that wisent cow, I did not order her killed and I had nothing to do with the killing of her; she was killed in order to save Dr. Stekowski’s life. Yes, I ate and continue to eat of the carcass, just as I eat of the other meats in that cooler out there. I like game, this is excellent game-hunting country hereabouts, I hunt and so too do some other members of our staff, so there will continue to be game aging in the cooler no matter how much that fact displeases you.