Horses of the North Page 12

  Through all those years, just as through the many years that had preceded them, Milo's appearance had never changed; no sign of aging had ever occurred and, indeed, he looked far younger than many of those who had been teenagers when he had taken them under his wing thirty years before. But, oddly enough, they and the Krueger group and all the current crop of youngsters had come to accept Milo's immutability of aspect without giving thought to the matter. He was just Uncle Milo, who had always been there to guide and help them and who, conceivably, would always be there when needed.

  For the first five or six years of their ten-year sojourn in the Snake River country, now as devoid of other living humans as had been most of Nevada and southern California, there had been few problems. The land had been productive, the graze abundant; the deserted homes and outbuildings they had acquired through merely moving in had been commodious and comfortable in both warm weather and cold. Early on, Milo and Paul Krueger and some others of the older men had rigged new and existing windmills to provide electricity to most of the farms and ranches, with bicycle arrangements as a backup source of power generation.

  What with wells, springs, smaller streams, ponds and the nearby river, lack of water was never a problem to them. Both the hunting and the fishing were quite productive of protein, and other than coyotes, wild dogs and the rare bear, there were few predators about to menace livestock larger than chickens. If things had been fated to stay to idyllic, they might well have remained longer in the beautiful, fruitful area, but they did not.

  Each succeeding winter snowfall seemed heavier than the last, and the resultant spring floods began to render the fields soggy and difficult to work at just the wrong time in the cycle of farming. The stupendous quantities of snowmelt also turned burbling brooklets into wide, turbulent torrents, ponds into shallow lakes covering many an acre of fields or pasturelands and the Snake itself into a horrifying flood that bore all on or before it and against which there was no defense.

  So terrifying and deadly were the floods of the eighth spring in the Snake River country that Milo, after consulting with Harry Krueger and the half-dozen or so other natural leaders who had emerged from among the maturing first generation, decided that they must move on to a place less prone to annual disaster, in Wyoming, possibly, or Colorado.

  The group of leaders agreed upon long and very careful preparations for this impending migration, setting a tentative departure date two years ahead.

  "Well, at least most of us still have our wagons and carts and U-Haul trailers. My family's trailer has been a chicken coop for the most of the last eight years, but we can get it cleaned up and scrounge new tires for it somewhere, I guess," remarked Chuck Llywelyn, grinning. "But living in that nice, big, warm, dry house for so long may have spoiled us for going back to trailers and tents and wet and cold."

  But Milo frowned. "I don't think we'd be wise to plan on using those trailers any longer, Chuck. These heavy snows and floods are probably not a purely local phenomenon, and everyone here is aware of the havoc that the weather and thirty-odd years of no maintenance have wrought on roads and bridges hereabouts. And Chuck, those trailers were designed for use on hard-surfaced roads, not cross-country. Their axles and wheels contain a lot of needless weight for animals to draw, and their ground clearance is so low that it sometimes seemed on the trek up here that we spent half our time whenever we had to leave the roads unloading and reloading and manhandling the damned things. Also, they are none of them light or waterproof enough for crossing deeper fords or floating across waters that have no ford . . . and those are possibilities we are going to have to anticipate and prepare for, this time around.

  "No, I think we'd better start collecting hardware and metal scrap that can be reforged and lots of seasoned wood and set up a wagon works around Olsen's forge and commence the building of more carts as well as renovating and refurbishing the ones left from eight years ago. Parties had better set out on regular foraging trips to every settlement within reach, for we're going to need a veritable host of large and small items, from harness fittings and stirrups to tents and canvas sheeting and a thousand and one other things.

  "From what I can recall of the country as it was before the War and from recent study of contour maps and whatnot, I think our best eventual destination would be somewhere in southeastern Wyoming or in eastern Colorado. But, gentlemen, both of those areas are a long, long way from here, and in order to reach either of them we are going to have to nurse our herds and our families and our wheeled transport over and through some of the roughest terrain on this continent. We are going to have to move at a much faster pace than we did coming up here from southern Nevada, too, lest we be trapped up there by an early winter.

  "In order to see what the general condition of the roads and bridges and cuts and fills may be, I'm going to be choosing men to ride with me over several alternate lines-of-march to a number of alternate settlement sites. Consequently, a largish portion of the preparations carried on here is going to fall squarely on Harry and Chuck and Jim Olsen and the rest of you. And the usual round of farm and ranch work is all going to have to be performed at one and the same time, mind you; this will all take two years to jell, and everyone has to eat between now and then, as well as put up stores for the journey.

  "Harry, you have your father's journals from the first migration, and I'll loan you mine, as well. Pore over them and you'll have an idea what to tell the foragers to bring back here. One thing they all should seek out is coal, hard coal, lots of it, for the forge—it produces a steadier and longer-lasting heat for metalworking than either wood or charcoal."

  Jim Olsen, the smith, nodded his agreement wordlessly. He never had seen the sense of wasting words and breath. He was vastly talented at his new postwar profession and continued to perform it every day for all that he now was sixty-two years of age. Despite his advanced years, however, he still was as strong and active and vital as many a man of half his age, and he owned the liking, admiration and respect of every man and woman of the community.

  "The seasoned woods are going to be the hardest thing to find—I know they were last time, down south. We need hardwoods, not softwood building lumber, you see—ash, oak, fruit or nutwoods, elm, maple, ironwood, birch and the like. Nor should any of them pass up pieces of solid exotic woods of a usable size—ebony, lignum vitae, mahogany, teak and rosewood, cypress, too.

  "Harry, are the camels still on your ranch?"

  The man addressed nodded. "Yes, they were Pa's pets, kind of, nasty and ornery and vicious as they are, so they're still around, biting cows and horses whenever they feel like it and scaring the hell out of honest coyotes and bears. Why?"

  "I'll be wanting them to pack supplies for me and the advance scouting parties, Harry. See if you can turn up the packsaddles we used on them eight years ago, too. The loads that they can easily carry would break a horse's back—that's the reason that Paul doted so on them. With the five of them to pack our water, supplies and equipment, we won't need any other pack animals, only spare mounts."

  "There are now six of them," said Harry Krueger. "A calf or foal or whatever you call it was dropped four years ago. But the critter's not been saddle-broke or even gentled. I wouldn't know how to go about breaking one, and I have too much regard for keeping my hide in one piece to go near those loud, smelly, dangerous abortions."

  Milo and his intrepid band of explorers rode back and forth along the tentative routes until winter and snow-choked passes confined them in the Snake River country. The country over which they rode and walked had never been in any way thickly settled, even before the War and the subsequent Great Dyings. Now there were almost no signs that men had ever trod most of it, save for the crumbling roads and bridges that, where not washed out, were often of questionable safety for the passage of anything heavier than a mounted man or a pack animal.

  Not one of the scattered habitations and business structures along the routes appeared to have experienced human occupation in twent
y or thirty years, being all weatherworn, of warped wood, sun-damaged plastics, oxidizing metals and cracked, deeply eroded concrete. In many places, the roofs had fallen in, and many more seemed teetering on the brink of similar collapse.

  Not that there was no life at all, for indeed there was. Game of ail sorts was more than merely abundant. Deer herds abounded—common black-tails, elk and some spotted cervines that Milo was certain were fallow deer, though how they'd gotten into Wyoming was a question now unanswerable, and even a few bison, though these last were in herds of feral cattle and looked to have interbred with the bovines to some extent.

  There were feral sheep and goats, too, now all as chary as the bighorns on the heights. Sometimes pronghorn antelope were to be found in the herds of sheep and goats, as well. Smaller game had proliferated unbelievably, for all that there were predators in plenty about. There were, of course, the inevitable coyotes and wild dogs, which here as elsewhere seemed to be in the process of breeding up into real, sizable lupine creatures that ran in small, extended-family packs. There were bears, both the grizzlies and the blacks. There were cougars, bobcats and the larger lynxes, smaller, long-tailed cats that bore a startling resemblance to the European wildcat, and the full gamut of well-fed mustelids. Forests and open lands and skies were filled with birds of all sorts, sharp-eyed raptors glided high above on every clear day, and owls hooted from the tail trees as dusk was falling on the party's camps.

  The men ail lived well on easily harvested game, but they were forced to keep fires burning brightly and armed men alert throughout every night to protect the animals from the plethora of hungry-predators. Panicky horses frequently were more of a danger to the men than the cougar or bear that had frightened them. But the camels soon proved themselves beasts of a different water; on the first outward-bound trip, the six of them joined to merrily rip and stamp a pack of coyote-dog-wolves into furry, bloody paste when said pack assayed an attack against one of the humped dromedaries. On the way back, through the mountains, a grizzly came sniffing around the camp and the camels and suffered attack and fatal injuries as a result. At morning, Milo and some of the men followed the blood trail of the gravely crippled ursine and found him, still warm, a scant half-mile off. So thoroughly had he been gashed by the long fangs of the camels that the men did not even try to skin him, taking only his hams for meat and his teeth and claws for adornment; the huge bear was missing one eye and had suffered so many broken bones from camel kicks that Milo wondered how he had managed to drag himself off as far as he had.

  Three men lost their lives in the expedition, and some dozen horses were killed or so badly injured as to require being put down—though some of these were able to be quickly replaced by animals run down and roped and broken from wild herds—but the same six camels that had left in the spring came back in the autumn. And a spindly camel colt was dropped the following March, to boot.

  When Milo met again with the leaders of the people on a late-winter day of the ninth year, he had an armful of marked maps and a voluminous sheaf of notes compiled from the experiences of the expeditions he had led out and back again.

  "Gentlemen," he began, "there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the country, everywhere we went, is virtually swarming with game of every description, including feral horses and sheep and goats and cattle, although some few of the latter seem to have interbred with wild bison.

  "As these maps show, there are several equally attractive destinations to be considered, some nearer, some farther; should we choose one of the farther ones, perhaps we should plan on wintering over in one of those farther west, but we'll all make that decision later.

  "We saw no signs at all of recent human life until we got to what was once the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The few score people scratching out a bare subsistence in the decaying shell of that city seemed overjoyed to discover that someone else had survived, that they were not the only humans left on the continent, and their leader, a man named Clarence Bookerman, wants to join us in our community wherever we decide to establish it.

  "At all of the sites we have recommended in these reports, the land is fertile and adequately watered, though not obviously prone to the kinds of flooding we have suffered from here. There are homes and buildings on most of the lands, though all of these are by now in need of repair if not complete rebuilding; the fields and pastures are going to have to be cleared of the tough grasses, weeds, brush and young trees that have taken root in them since last they were worked by men, thirty-odd years ago, but with due care and caution exercised, we can probably burn off the larger portions of it, fell any tree trunks that the fires leave behind, then grub out the roots in jig time, and all the ashes will make the soil even richer for the crops we sow in it.

  "Now the bad news, gentlemen. The far-northern route, the first one we tried last year, would be impassable to wagons or carts. Between crumbling road surfaces, washed-out fills and bridges, cuts blocked or partly blocked by rockfall, it was difficult enough for our party of horsemen and pack animals to negotiate.

  "The central route is little better. We probably could eventually get the vehicles and the herds through, but it would be very hard work clearing cuts and refilling fills, and felling trees to build makeshift bridges, and this all would require a great deal of time, the one commodity of which we lack are we to get through the worst, highest country safely before the snows are upon us.

  "The far-southern route, now, is the one that I and all the other scouts would prefer except for a certain factor. Use of it will require that we either use a less-than-satisfactory stretch of roads to get over into Wyoming and then down to this southern route—roads that are going to require all the aforementioned work that the central route would, though for a shorter overall distance—or choose the following alternative.

  "The much easier way to get our people and herds to a point at which we can set our feet to the better-preserved road that will take us east to the richest lands is to take old Route 30 down south, curve around the southern tip of Bear Lake and proceed on into Wyoming. But here lies a serious, a dangerous problem, gentlemen, that cost me the lives of two men and some horses."

  Chapter VIII

  To men accustomed to stalking close enough to deer and other game to bring them down with a single arrow, the stalking of the nighttime sentries walking the perimeter and the settlement that once had been the Utah town of Laketon proved absurdly easy of accomplishment. Razor-edged knife and deadly garrote did their sanguineous tasks of severing or crushing human windpipes, quickly, brutally, but very efficiently, in silence so absolute that not even the domestic animals of the settlement were alerted. Milo and those few older men who had done this sort of thing before, long ago, in another world, were very proud of their proteges on that night.

  They had left the wagons, the carts, the herds and the women and children several miles to the north and come in on foot, leading their mounts for the last mile or so in the darkness. When the yodel of a loon, repeated three times, then twice, notified the waiting men that the last of the sentries was down, they mounted, rechecked their weapons and moved out, those with torches lighting them from a watchfire as they walked their horses and mules across the now-unguarded perimeter and into the sleeping town.

  All were armed with the automatics, short shotguns and handguns taken from the ambushed motorcycle outlaws years before, for unlike the other rifles and shotguns, these weapons were utterly useless for hunting, their sole utilization being the purpose for which they had been made or adapted: man-killing at very close range. In addition, some of the better archers bore bows, the arrow shafts wrapped near the heads with lengths of rag impregnated with oil, resin, lard and other flammables. Milo carried the last two grenades—one fragmentation, one concussion; the grenades had disappeared over the years in the Snake River country simply because they were a sure way to harvest large numbers of fish from a lake with little or no effort.

  At the directions of the leaders, the archers
uncased their first arrows, fired them from the blazing torches, then loosed them into anything that looked flammable—roofs, buildings with wooden siding, three half-buried strongpoints roofed with logs and weathered timbers, and the like. Other men dismounted to open the gas caps of vehicles, dip strips of cloth into the tanks, light the outside ends and run back to their horses. Detached units had dealt similarly with the flotilla of powerboats at the lakeside docks, then opened the cocks of the fuel storage tanks, following which—and from a goodly distance away—Milo had used one of old Paul Krueger's homemade spring projectors to send the single available concussion grenade to bounce along the cracked concrete in and out of the widening pools of gasoline for the few seconds it had taken for its fuse to set off the fiery main charge.

  The first explosion brought armed men boiling out of five of the larger buildings directly into the withering barrage of automatics, shotguns, pistols and even a few arrows. No unarmed man or woman was shot at—the leaders had so instructed the raiders—but those armed received short shrift in the now well-lit streets. And with the prisoners under heavy guard, needing only to look at the bleeding corpses of their comrades to guess the fate of any who attempted escape or resistance against the invaders from out of the night, Milo and the rest of the men went through every building that was not burning, rooting out any hiding humans and collecting everything that even looked like a weapon of any description as well as every round they could find of ammunition. Those they judged might be useful to them were packed on the mules they had brought along; the rest were heaved onto the nearest fire, there to explode or melt or burn or at the least have their temper drawn by the heat.

  As dawn began to streak the sky to the east, the rider was sent north at the gallop to announce to the waiting wagons, carts and herds that the way now was cleared of human opposition and that they might proceed south; the packtrain with a few guards followed close behind the rider. Then Milo had a grimy, middle-aged man with singed beard and hair dragged from out the huddle of terrified, woebegone prisoners and brought before him.