The Clan of the Cats Page 5
“Uncle Milo,” Djim mindcalled. “Elk dung, fresh, still hot!”
Shortly the two men came out of the forest into more open terrain. Well ahead, among the stumps verging a beaver pond, a solitary bull elk had cleared the deep blanket of snow from off the frozen ground and was pulling up bunches of sern grass. Raising his head with its wide-spreading rack of deadly tines, the beast gazed at the two men without apparent alarm. He had been hunted often by men and now realized that the quarter-mile of distance separating them was too far for the black sticks to travel.
A single shot of the antique hunting rifle dropped the half-ton animal, but Milo put another round into the head at close range as a precaution. Bull elk could be highly dangerous adversaries. Then he and Djim set about the skinning and butchering.
“The Hunter,” thought Milo, “and her brood should be very happy with elk meat, and that’s good. I want her in a damned jolly mood when I broach the subject of her and them leaving here for good and living with the clans. I think the idea of a steady, reliable, and effortless food supply will appeal to her, so that’s one point in favor of my plan. For all her stubbornness, she’s highly intelligent — more intelligent then even a dog or a pig, and they’re supposed to be the most intelligent four-footed animals — and if you can convince her something’s for her own welfare, she’ll do what you say — as witness the fact that she hasn’t pulled off her bandages once.
“If she’s a sport, she’s breeding true, because all three of her kittens can mindspeak, too. When she’s better, she and I will have to travel around and see if we can find a mate for her, since she avers that there are more of her kind in this neck of the woods.”
When they had arranged the choicer portions of meat into two weighty but manageable packloads, he and Djim dragged the hide, the rest of the meat, and the exceptionally fine antlers back to the nearest tall tree and hung them well out of reach of any but the smallest predators and scavengers to be picked up later. Then they set out for the ruin.
Thoroughly convinced of his own powers of persuasion, Milo chuckled to himself.
“Who knows — in time there may be yet another Horse-clan, a four-footed and furry one”
Chapter IV
James Bedford looked at the cover of the folder and frowned. Project latifrons. “It might excite some of them,” he thought, “but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I took over. After all, what measure of charisma has an oversized, long-horned bison got, compared to a sabertooth cat or a weasellike creodont the size of a black bear? Hell, the Poles brought back the aurochs close to eighty years ago and the South Africans rebred themselves quaggas nearly five years back.”
He sighed, leaned back in his chair, extended and crossed his legs, then closed his eyes, thinking. “I happen to know for a fact that Pearson’s group in Alabama are getting all sorts of funding on their mammoth replication project. That’s the kind of thing that grips the imagination, dammit! Why in hell can’t I get the hard facts of life and funding across to Stekowski and Singh, to Harel and Marberg and the rest, why can’t I?
“What we need are the kinds of projects they talked about when they first conned me into this operation, something that will grip the imaginations of the folks I have to impress. A ton or so of shaggy-haired moo-cow is just not in that category, unfortunately, and there is a fast-approaching limit to the amounts of my own bread I can plow into this without serious trouble.
“Furthermore, with the length of a bison’s gestation period. it will be years before we can come up with anything worth showing or shouting about. But that ass Harel seems to be about as fond of predators of any kind as he is of bleeding piles, the Republican Party or inherited wealth. Hell, I guess it’s fitting: a vegetarian who specializes in Bovidae. But he would be a whole lot easier to take, to work with, if he wasn’t so damned arrogant, so critical of everyone else and so bloody sanctimonious about the fact that he doesn’t eat meat.
“The longer I think on it, the more I’m coming to the certainty that this pack of multi-degreed con artists suckered me into this outfit for the sole purpose of milking me and my connections bone-dry. Executive director, huh? Ha! I have less real authority here than most of the hired help. The only time I’m made to feel at all important is when fresh inputs of money are needed.”
Sitting up, Bedford switched on the voicewriter, made certain that the paper supply was adequate, refilled his mug with hot coffee then began to speak.
“I’m just back from my latest fund-raising trip, which was a near-bust. Magori Hara, in Tokyo, avers that in the photos, the new calf looks most like the outcome of a Scottish Highland cow and a Tibetan yak than like any kind of bison, and I tend to agree.
“Uncle Taylor, in Washington, was raving over the progress of the Steakley Foundation, in Texas. Despite the failure of their glyptodont project, they have produced a capybara that weighs over two hundred kilos, he says, and replicated creodont types twice or more the size of the biggest living wolverine. He reminded me that Project Patriofelis was basically my idea and pointedly stated that he thought I should go back to where I was appreciated as something other than a money tree. He won’t get us any more funding unless we come up with something a bit more colorful than Pleistocene bison, though.
“The New York types were cool, but polite, of course, and very evasive. Nor can I say that I blame them. This latifrons thing is at best lackluster, when compared to Alabama’s mammoths and the great things the Steakley Foundation is accomplishing.
“In the replication-funding circles of Chicago and L.A., most of the interest seems to be in the O’Toole thing that’s going down in Australia now. Their southern branch already is well on the way to a giant short-faced kangaroo plus a Pleistoceine giant wombat that they say will be bigger than a tapir, almost rhino-sized. As if that weren’t enough, their northern branch, in cooperation with the Indonesians, are going great guns on an accelerated-growth project designed to replicate the Megalania, a half-ton Komodo dragon.
“The only place I got any money was right in the lap, almost, of my previous affiliation. McLeod, in Fort Worth, gave me six million, though he made it abundantly clear that it was the last of his money we’d see unless we embarked on a more promising project.
“I knew better than to even try Houston or Atlanta, eyebrow-deep as they both are in Alabamian mammoths. And all you can hear in any part of Florida is the six or seven accelerated-growth projects set to produce ten-meter alligators and caimans for the leather trade; they’ve already got a few twenty-footers, I saw some of them last year. Grim. Jaws nearly a meter mid a half long. If only the accelerated growth processes worked on mammals as well as they do on reptiles. . . .
“Now, I have to go in, call a staff conference and break the bad news to Dr. Stekowski and the rest of his jolly crew that, with very strict budgeting, we might have a year of life left here, unless the damned dumb latifrons thing is shoved onto a back burner and we start in cooking up some project with more popular appeal. I’m going to strongly recommend one more time that we take advantage of the pair of snow leopards we’ve been offered, acquire such other Felidae as we can get quickly and cheaply, then get at it at flank speed, while still we have the wherewithal to operate at all. A donnybrook with Dr. Harel is dead certain, and this time around I just may deck the son of a bitch, for I have little to lose, here and now. This place is doomed unless it changes fast, and the Steakley folks are itching to have me back, anyway, Uncle Taylor says.”
Bedford pressed the buttons for “Print,” “Separate” and then “Laminate.” When the machine had disgorged the completed page, he inserted it in his ongoing binder of personal files, then switched off the machine and made ready to leave his sanctum sanctorum for the main building of the complex. Dr. Harel and certain others never ceased to twit him about keeping private records in addition to those filed in the computers, but he liked things he could if necessary read and check back on without the power required for activating said computer
or one of its outlets.
“So that the sly, conniving sonofabitch could spy on me, pry into my notes the way he does into everyone else’s around here, that’s the real but unstated reason Harel wants me to give over my voicewriter records. No less than three times I’ve come back from trips to find that earnest attempts had been made to pick or force the locks on this office and the private storage room, down here on this level.
“Why, oh, why won’t Stekowski and Singh and Marberg back me in getting rid of Harel, forcing him to resign, get out? They clearly have little use for the bastard, either. All I can figure is that he has something on them, collectively or individually. There can be no other reason why such accomplished professionals would just supinely let the arrogant ass walk all over them the way he does. Then again, maybe it’s just the fact that he’s pushy, openly aggressive, and none of the rest of them are . . . well, not so much so, so overtly so, anyway.”
At the top of the steep concrete stairs, Bedford opened a plain steel-sheathed door and entered a short corridor. He reflected that no matter how much Harel might bitch about the primitiveness and isolation of the place, they could have done far worse in obtaining — for what amounted to almost nothing — the lease to the facility and the surrounding land.
It had first been built in the fifties or early sixties to house some super-hush-hush project of the federal government — one large and three small chambers cut out of the living rock of the plateau, with only the stair head, what was now the corridor in which he stood and a broad, stubby masonry tower aboveground, all of these spaces at one time filled with equipment of some nature, the traces of it still remaining.
When the army or air force or whoever had moved out in the seventies or eighties, then the state had moved in and erected a tall tower of steel to straddle the one of masonry and provide a firewatch facility. A succession of earth tremors had finally brought that metal tower down, and by the time Bedford first bad been shown it, the plateau and all had been deserted, though sealed and fenced and with a plethora of no-trespassing signs bearing impressive warnings.
Of course, it was state land and could not be sold; however, a thirty-year lease had come very cheaply and the state had even replaced and strengthened the access road, which had been rendered impassable in the last, strongest of the earth tremors.
What had passed into Bedford’s group’s possession had been only the nucleus of the present facility, however — the underground rooms (the largest of which the state had turned into a garage, with a ramped entrance), alcoves filled with lockers at the foot and head of the stairs, the present hallway (which then had been the entrance foyer) and the two tiny chambers within the short, squat masonry tower; the plateau had been bounded at its edges with an eight-foot Cyclone fence topped with razor wire, there had been a concrete helipad with wiry grass growing up between its joints, and the wreck of the downed fire tower stretched its length of rusting metal just where it had fallen some years before. Off to one side, now all overgrown with many years’ worth of vines and weeds. had been a long, sprawling jumble of never-used bricks which had been trucked in by the federal owners just before they had abandoned the site for good, their presence forming an enduring example of the boondoggle and lack of foresigbt of the long-ago administration of President James Earl Carter, to James Bedford’s way of thinking.
After he had brought in a seismic expert to examine the land and give the professional opinion that it was no more geologically unstable than any other part of the range, the preceding ruinous jolts having been at most a fluke and most unlikely to recur within hundreds of years, after the access road had been rendered once more sound and usable, after he had obtained detailed plans of the newly completed Steakley facility, he had contacted one of the family-owned businesses: a general construction contractor.
By the time Stekowski, Singh, Harel and the others actually saw the plateau — having flown from their temporary location in Colorado to the nearest airport and coptered from there — the crash-scheduled project was nearing completion. The only one of the group who had not seemed pleased was Dr. Harel. The big, burly man had snorted and sneered, jabbing and pounding on objects with his blackthorn walking stick for emphasis until the gangling, slow-to-anger engineer and the tough, feisty construction superintendent had seemed on the point of physical assault. In times since, Bedford had often reflected that it might have been best for all concerned had he allowed — nay, encouraged — the two to beat Dr. Harel into a state of bloody insensibility; such an experience might have taken out of the man a measure of the pigheaded arrogance and the dogged insistence on the constant having of his own way no matter the cost, which would have saved Bedford not a little trouble and the project a good deal of money in the time since.
Based on the preliminary plans that had been formulated during the courses of his series of conferences with the group of scientists, Bedford had had the onetime garage level enlarged and enclosed, then had solicited the advice of experts on the housing of big cats and fitted the space out in accordance with their years of experience and ideas.
But on the very first full conference after they had begun to actually occupy the premises, Dr. Harel had rudely dashed Bedford’s planning in that direction. “Why in the world did you not consult with me before you wasted our money in such a way, Mr. Bedford? I could have told you that there will not be, will never be, any scrap of research done here into reproduction or replication of any stripe of dirty, bloodthirsty predator beast. No, it has been decided by us scientists that we will undertake to replicate the Bison latifrons of the North American Pleistocene.”
Only by painful exercise of will had Bedford bitten down a hot reply that day. To the burly, shaggy, bearish, overbearing man he had said, coolly, “For your information, Dr. Harel, the actual funds pledged this project have not yet come through. Therefore, all of the cost incurred at this site and during my fund-raising travels I have paid out of my own pocket.”
“Now, that is true, selfless generosity, my boy.” Stekowski had spoken feelingly. “Of course, when the funding materializes, you will certainly be repaid every last penny, and —”
“Do not presume to speak for the group, you old fool,” snarled Harel, subjecting Stekowski to a glare hot enough to melt basalt. “We have agreed that only I now own that power here, you may recall. Besides” — he turned to Bedford with a cold, hostile smile — “wealthy as the Bedfords are with monies ground out of generations of poor working-class laborers, I am certain that whatever sums he has here expended are to him as pocket change would be to such as us.”
For the umpteenth time, James Bedford mentally castigated himself. “I should’ve bashed the bastard there and then, that very day, hour and minute, then resigned and gone back to the Steakley Foundation. But, of course, I didn’t, I took it. I took it for the sake of Stekowski and Singh and those others I had come to know and like before that damned opinionated Harel suddenly appeared on the scene and bulled and bullied his way to where he was virtual dictator of the project.
“But now . . . ? Hell, if the project doesn’t change course and that damned quickly, there won’t be any more funding, and that means that there’ll be no project. Odd — sometimes something in the back of my mind tells me that that’s just what Harel wants, too, that that’s precisely where he’s been heading all along, for whatever cryptic reason.”
He frowned. “And that’s just what’s so crazy about this notion of mine, too: Harel’s no big, well-known name in this field — why, I’d never even heard of him, I don’t think; if this project does go down the drain, he’ll be out in the cold, too, and with far less chance to snag a position elsewhere than people of the professional renown and stature of Stekowski or Singh or some of the others. So what could possibly be his reason for wanting to sink this venture? Creeping insanity? No, he rants and raves and swings his damned cane and, sometimes, throws things at people, but I’m dead certain that he does so fully rationally, for purposes of shock and the
intimidation effect on his erstwhile colleagues; he’s a thoroughgoing bully and behaves like one.
“Could he be deliberately putting us on the skids to benefit a supposedly former employer’s project? It doesn’t seem likely. Dr. Stekowski says Harel was last connected with the dwarf fauna thing that Britain, Israel and Greece are collaborating in on Cyprus and Crete — hippopotami, elephants, that sort of thing — and God knows Stekowski’s original felid project could’ve posed no slightest threat to them or their goals. Oh, sure, there could’ve been dwarf forms of smilodon and the related types, but none have ever been found in fossil form. Indeed, the closest thing to a dwarf of this kind was just recently pried out of a glacier in the Canadian Rockies — a strange beast, looking much like the Homotherium, but smaller, more lightly built, and with digitigrade rather than plantigrade hind feet, Panthera feethami, they’re calling it. Dr. Stekowski told me, away back when before the advent of Harel, that he had access to some genetic material from this find. It was this that he was basing the original project on.
“The Canadians tried replication, of course. Hell, that project may still be going on. But they’ve never reported much success, and Drs. Stekowski and Singh think they know why; their ideas make more sense than anything else I’ve heard about it all.
“Apparently disregarding the size of the find and certain other factors, they’ve been trying for a full-fledged, oversized, classic sabertooth cat, big as or larger than an African lion, and a damned hefty lion, at that.
“Dr. Stekowski says that as this beast was found in a montane glacier, we can safely infer that it resided and hunted and bred in mountains which — as the body showed certain cold-weather adaptations — were probably as cold as or colder than they are at the present time. He goes on to say that mountain-living species seldom become really large, as compared to their lowland cousins. The find was about as big as a largish leopard, though, somewhat heavier than a true leopard, more the build of a jaguar or an undersize, gracile lion.