It was none too soon for Milo and his nomads, either, for—despite the necessary hunts they had undertaken in order to keep both themselves and the cats fed adequately—the long confinement inside the ruins was resulting in severe cabin fever and resultant ill-humor and short tempers.
More important to Milo, who intended to get as much as possible of the many-volume Bedford Journal read before the clans arrived, the supply of gasoline for the lanterns was running perilously low; therefore, immediately he thought it possible, he rigged a movable windbreak on the top of the brick tower and thenceforth spent much of many sunny days reading by natural light, often joined by one or more of the growing cubs and, less frequently, by their mother or one or both of the newcome adult cats. The cats usually did little more than curl up and snooze; nonetheless, the still-biting gusts of air that sometimes found a way around the windbreak frequently made him glad for the nearby sources of body heat.
Because the recuperating mother cat’s forelegs still were not equal to absorbing the necessary shock of her not inconsiderable weight after a drop of the more than eight feet from the tower top to the platform below it, he used a mostly cloudy day to take all the nomads, a coil of strong rope and a couple of the fine, sharp twenty-first-century axes down into the woods just below the plateau. There they felled and roughly trimmed a sizable pine tree, then managed to get it up one side of the sheer wall of rock and snaked it across the soggy ground to lean it against the tower and so provide easy access and egress to or from the tower top for any beast with claws.
While they were at the welcome exertion, they dismantled the yurt left below by the clansmen visitors (left behind in order to pack more wolf skins on the packhorses), then hoisted it, too, up onto the plateau. That night, even Milo willingly forewent the bunk beds in the disaster shelter in order to huddle on the cold ground inside the familiar, homey, unconfining confines of the simple felt yurt.
As the deep layers of ice and snow began to melt away from first the tower and then an ever widening periphery of the ruins, Milo and the nomads went about finding thawing, hideless wolf carcasses and dragging them to where they could be cast over the verges of the plateau before they thawed out, decomposed and not only made the environs of the ruins unbearable with the stench but attracted all manner of scavengers and noxious insects to the feast.
From the very first attempt, the men had all discovered that the two adult cats were, with their telepathy, an invaluable pair of hunting partners. Hunting in company with one of them made the hunting much easier on both men and cat and far more certain of edible conclusions. The men, armed with bows and spears, needed only to spot the prey beasts position themselves and then have the cat or cats circle around so as to show themselves or give the game their scent or mock-charge them into fleeing in panic past the positions taken by the waiting men. It was relaxed, almost completely dangerless hunting, and all parties seemed to enjoy it.
After the first experience, however, neither of the big cats would accompany any hunting party that included Milo, not when he chanced to arm himself with the ancient rifle and his dwindling stock of cartridges; the flat crack of shots hurt their ears, they beamed bluntly, going on to beam that if the two-legs wanted to accompany another two-legs carrying such an insufferably loud, smelly thing, they were welcome to do so, but that no sensible cat could or should be expected to willingly subject itself to such sensory abuse.
With a shrug, Milo cleaned and oiled the fine weapon, then repacked it and the thirteen remaining cartridges for it back in the way he had found them. The cats were worth far more to him and the clans, now than the use of an archaic hunting rifle. Without a doubt, the rifle’s barrel could have been worked into a fine blade for sword or saber by a Horseclans smith and the smaller metal parts into many other useful item, tool or weapon, but the rifle had served him and the nomads and the cats well, had saved their lives from the huge, ravenous pack of wolves that had cornered them up there in these ruins and was sitting siege on them all, and he was sufficiently sentimental to return it to where he had so fortuitously discovered it in their time of dire need, to let it go back to its ages-long rest to await there the improbable finding of it by another who might know what it was and how to use it and be in need of its awesome, deadly power.
Questioning of the cats relative to the existences and the possible locations of others of their kind was tricky and not very rewarding, Milo had discovered. The big adult male recalled first awareness in surroundings that, from his hazy description, Milo could only assume had been a cave in some mountainside, but what side of what mountain and where from hem that mountain might lie were questions that the massive beast could neither answer nor really grasp as important. Apparently, he had left his parents and siblings—his pride?—when he became sexually mature and so presented an incipient threat to his sire. He had hunted alone for either two or three cold times before finding scent of his present mate. Their last year’s litter had all died of mishap before becoming more than mere cubs and so poor had been the hunting this terrible winter—before they had wandered into this area and found no recent signs of a territorial resident—that she had not gone into estrus.
The female, for her part, had seen no cats of her sort other than her mate since wandering off from the ruin two cold-times in the past, but she did recall having smelled the relatively recent presence of two others of her kind in her circuits, though—most frustrating for Milo—she recalled neither where nor when and finally stalked off when he kept probing at the matter. Feline priorities, he reflected, differed markedly from those of his kind.
“The only answer, I guess,” Milo thought, “is to keep the clans in this general vicinity for as long as I can, this year, winter on those cold plains down there again, then come back up here and keep doing that until we can gather a decent-sized breeding stock of these intelligent, telepathic cats … either that or take the chance of trying to make it with what we have on hand, all but one of which are very closely related. Hell, all of them may be for all I or anyone else knows of it, really knows of it.
“Interesting and really fascinating as are Bedford’s varied experiences away back when, much as I enjoy reading them through, I do wish he’d get into a little more detail about the replication of this Panthera feethami a little more quickly, for perhaps if I knew a bit more about the particular types of cats that were used in that replication experiment, I’d be better able to judge how and where to find these existing cats. Are these the descendants of those? Hell what else could they be, pray tell? At one time or another, back then, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I was in various parts of five continents and I never saw or heard of the like of these cats, not living ones. And even as sparsely settled as this area was back then, it was pretty thoroughly hunted each year, and no large predator such as these cats with their thick, beautiful, stunning coats and those distinctive fangs would’ve been unnoticed and at least reported by a hunter or ranger.
“He’s already noted his buying of two replicated cave lions, and these present cats seem to live at least in family groups, as lions do, too; furthermore, the adult male’s family did live in a cave, rather than just use it for bearing and weaning of a litter, such as other cats and, for that matter, not a few other animals of many kinds do. I just know too little right now to know how much I need to know, yet, I guess. So I suppose it must be back to the Bedford Journal, for me.