Horses of the North Read online

  Milo and several of the better riders crossed the western mountains to the valley beyond. There they ran down and caught as many of the feral horses as they could and herded the stock back over the mountains to their holdings. Then Milo led another party back to that same valley, but pressed on farther north, as close as he dared to one of the places that had been nuked.

  He found that others had been there long before him, radiation or no radiation, and that all the stores and shops had been most thoroughly looted of anything of utility or value. However, on the outskirts of what had apparently been an industrial park, he and his men lucked across a huge, window-less building. Upon the forcing of a loading-dock door, they found themselves within a cavernous building which had been the warehouse, seemingly, of a department store. It required weeks of work, numerous round trips to thoroughly loot all that they could use from the variegated stocks of artifacts, but by the time that the long caravan of people, horses and herds moved out of the desiccated area that had for so long been their home, the packs and the travoises were heavy, piled high with necessaries for man and for beast.

  To everyone's great disappointment, the dusty stock had not included a single firearm or any ammunition of any sort, caliber or description; however, after their thorough lootings, every man, woman and child now was provided with a bow of fiberglass or metal, as many arrows and razor-edged hunting heads and spare bowstrings as could be carried, and two or three knives.

  Although Milo and the others had seen no living human on their trips to the western side of the mountains, not even any recent traces of humans, the trips had not been uneventful. On the way back east from the very first one, all walking and leading their heavily laden horses and therefore moving far more slowly than they had on the journey west, they had had the picket line attacked one night, a mule killed and dragged off into the darkness.

  Milo and those others armed with heavier-caliber firearms tracked the raider and found themselves, eventually, confronting a huge, full-grown Siberian tiger. But huge and vital as the beast was—some eleven feet from nose to tail tip!—he proved no real match for six crack shots armed with big-bore hunting rifles, for all that the monstrous cat exhibited no fear of man and charged almost immediately. And he was just the first animal they had to kill during the course of stripping that warehouse of things they could use.

  They shot two adult leopards within the remains of the industrial park, near the warehouse, while on a solitary, exploratory jaunt, Milo was faced by and had to kill with his pistol a jaguar. He found what he thought to be the answer to the existence hereabouts of these non-native beasts during another, longer trip, a wide swing around the radioactive core city. In an area that still was partially fenced, grazed and browsed a mixed herd of giraffes, wildebeests, zebras and several varieties of antelope. Having spent some years, off and on, in Africa, Milo was able to recognize waterbucks, blesboks, springboks, Thomson's gazelles, impalas and what, at the distance, looked much like a huge eland. He kept a good distance, observing the herd through binoculars, because he had come across tracks and immense piles of dung that led him to believe that there were elephants and rhino about the place. A bit farther on, he spotted another mixed herd, this one including wildebeests, ostriches, oryxes, zebras and half a dozen types of antelope or gazelle with which he was unfamiliar, but also some specimens of big, handsome, spotted axis deer, a few other cervines he could recognize by the antlers as Pere David's deer and a buck and two or three does that could have been red deer, sambar deer or small American elk. It was when he noticed a pride of lions moving through the high grass that he recalled that discretion was the better part of valor and also the fate of the curious tabby cat.

  Upon his return to his party of warehouse looters, he ordered the horses stabled within the huge building by night and well guarded by day.

  "I've found one of the places that the tiger, the leopards and maybe that jaguar, too, came from. Some of you men may recall being taken as young children, before the war and all, to drive through huge parks and view wild animals from all over the world. Well, there's one of them—pretty big and well stocked, too, from the little I saw of it—only a few days' ride to the northeast of where we are now. A number of the fences are down, and I'd bet that that's where the predatory cats wandered down here from. As I recall, lions and tigers don't get on too well in the same territory, and since I saw a big pride of lions up there, the tiger may have felt outnumbered and come down here to live on feral horses and deer. Those two leopards and the jaguar may very well be the reason why this area is no longer ravaged by packs of wild dogs, for both cats have a fondness for dog flesh. I'm just thankful that none of the big cats seem to have had the inclination to go east and cross the mountains to our valleys."

  The migration proved long and hard and slow, with the same drought conditions that had driven them all from their homes seemingly prevailing ail along their line of march. Game was very scarce, and many a night they all had nothing more than a few small bites of rattlesnake and/or rabbit to sustain them until something bigger was unwily enough to fall to their hunters or one or more of their herd animals succumbed to lack of graze and water.

  Milo tried to avoid stretches of true desert as much as was possible, traveling on or near highways when it proved at all feasible, adapting a fortunate find in the lot of a long-deserted business of several dozen U-Haul trailers to horse- or mule- or ox-draft vehicles. At length, he decided to head them in the direction of Lake Tahoe, figuring that at least there was certain to be a plentitude of water thereabouts, likely graze and game, and, just possibly, enough arable land to settle down and farm. He faced the possibility that there might be people already there, as well, but numbering as they did some fourscore armed men of fighting age, not to mention quite a few women who were as adept with the bow as any man, he felt certain that they could either overawe or successfully drive off any current residents.

  As it developed, the forty-odd families living and trying to exist safely in the environs of the lake under the overall leadership of a middle-aged onetime Regular Army officer and sometime survival buff named Paul Krueger were more than happy to see an additional seventy or so well-armed men added to their numbers, beset and bedeviled as they were by the periodic incursions of a large pack of motorcycle-mounted raiders some hundred or more strong, heavily armed and mercilessly savage.

  Milo had had no stomach for settling down and awaiting the next raid. He and Krueger had pooled their available men and resources and staged a night raid of their own on the cyclists, who had become over the years so cocksure that they no longer troubled themselves to mount perimeter guards. No prisoners had been taken, but quite a hoard of secondhand loot and quantities of arms and ammunition, clothing, boots and gear had been liberated by the allies. Liberated, as well, had been scores of male and female slaves of the bikers, most of the women either with children or pregnant; those originally kidnapped from Krueger's settlement were returned to their families if any relatives still lived, and most of the remainder accepted Milo's offer to join his band. The things that these former slaves told him of their deceased captors caused him to wonder if it might not be wiser to move on—north, east or south, anyplace but west.

  He had been informed that the bunch just exterminated had made up only the westernmost "chapter" of a highly organized pack of outlaws most of whom were scattered over northern California and southern Oregon on the western side of the mountains. He had been informed that these human predators numbered upward of a thousand, were very well armed and made regular visits to the now-extinct chapter for the primary purpose of collecting a share of loot and slaves.

  "What you and your people do is entirely up to you," he had told Paul Krueger bluntly. "But as soon as this winter's snows are melted enough to allow for it, my people are moving on, northeast, probably.

  There's simply not enough really arable land hereabouts to support all of us—yours and mine, plus our herds—without spreading out so thinl
y that we'd be easy victims to those thousand or more bikers just across the Sierra. I haven't wet-nursed my kids and theirs for twenty years to watch many or most of them killed off fighting scum like the pack we were fortunate enough to surprise up there in Tahoe City. When the parent chapter gets up here next spring, you can just bet that they're going to be none too happy to find out that we killed off every one of the local biker-raiders, thoroughly looted the headquarters and then burned it to the ground, so I will be a damned sight easier of mind with miles and mountains between me and mine and those murderous outlaws."

  Krueger had sighed long and gustily, replying, "Twenty years, huh? Then you must be some older than you look or act, Moray, probably closer to my age. But, hell, you're right and I know it; our combined hundred and fifty men and boys would stand no chance against a thousand, not even against half of that number, not with as few automatics as we have and no heavy weapons at all except those two homemade PIAT projectors and a few hand grenades.

  "You're right about the farmlands and graze, too, and there's something else that maybe you don't know or hadn't noticed yet: the rains haven't been as regular and heavy nor the snows as deep in these last few years. Some of the smaller streams are either dried up or are just trickles and the level of the lake has dropped off several feet, and who knows why? I sure as hell don't. Maybe all the nukes changed the climate like the nervous Nellies used to claim they would if they were ever used.

  "So, okay, we all move out of here come spring. But where? We're almost completely surrounded by some of the worst, godawful deserts on this continent and we've got damned little transport and little POL for what we do have. What the hell are we going to do if we run out of gas and there isn't any at the next town or crossroads?"

  Milo had found the answer to this conundrum while, mounted on captured motorcycles, he and a party of men scouted the route northeast to the Snake River Valley, their agreed-upon destination. Just north of Carson City, they came across a roadside attraction, a "Pioneer Days Museum." Among other things within the sprawling building were two different types of reproductions of Conestoga wagons, a huge-wheeled overland freight wagon, a Red River cart and several other recreations of animal-drawn vehicles, plus a wealth of printed material detailing their construction, use and maintenance. Complete sets of reproduced harness adorned fiberglass horses, mules and draft oxen.

  After Krueger and some of his men, including his blacksmith, had journeyed north and looked over the displays, they had hitched the reproductions onto pickups and jeeps and towed them back home, then taken them all apart and set about turning out their own copies of wheeled transport, harness and other relics, while other men and women devoted themselves to training horses, mules and the few available oxen to horse collar, yoke and draft.

  It was at length decided, after a conference with the smith and some of the on-the-job-training wainwrights, that the wagons simply took too much of everything—time, materials and effort—to reproduce properly in the numbers that would be needed, and so with the completion of the wagons already in the works, all of the labor was put to making Red River carts instead.

  Other crews were kept busy through the last of the summer, the autumn and the winter bringing truckload after truckload of seasoned lumber from lumberyards far and near, seeking out hardware items, clothing, bedding, canvas sheeting, tents and the thousand and one things needed for the coming trek north.

  Unlike most of his companions on these foraging expeditions, Milo had been in or at least through some of the towns and cities they now were plundering in the long ago, and he found the now-deserted and lifeless surroundings extremely eerie, with the streets and roads lined with rusting, abandoned cars and trucks, littered with assorted trash, the only moving things now the occasional serpent or scuttling lizard or tumbleweed. Only rarely did they chance across any sign of humans still living in the towns and cities, and these scattered folk were as chary as hunted deer, never showing themselves, disappearing into the decaying, uncared-for buildings without a trace. Milo suspected that these few survivors had bad memories from the recent past of men riding motorcycles, jeeps and pickups.

  Every city, town, village, hamlet and crossroads settlement seemed to have its full share of human skulls and bones and, within the buildings—especially in those closed places that the coyotes, feral dog packs and other scavengers had not been able to penetrate—whole, though desiccated, bodies of men, women and children of every age. Although he and Krueger had come to the tentative conclusion that those humans who lived on in health while their families, friends and neighbors had died around them in their millions must be possessed by some rare, natural and possibly hereditary immunity to the plagues, he nonetheless tried to keep his crews from too-near proximity to the dried-out and hideous corpses, figuring they were better safe than sorry in so deadly serious a matter.

  However, the only two deaths sustained by the foragers were from causes other than plague. The first to die was a sixteen-year-old boy who forced open a sliding door on the fifteenth floor of a hotel and was found after some searching by the rest of the party dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft; he had not, obviously, known what an elevator was. The other unfortunate was a man, one of Krueger's farmers and of enough age to have conceivably known better, who had disregarded Milo's injunction to leave alone the cases of aged, decomposing dynamite they had found in a shed. He had been vaporized, along with the shed, in the resultant explosion.

  With the explosives that had been stored properly and were still in safe, reliable, usable condition, Milo, Krueger and certain of the older men experienced with dynamite or TNT had chosen spots carefully and then had blown down sizable chunks of rock to completely block stretches of both Route 80 and Route 50, the two routes the former slaves recalled as having been used by biker gangs. They might not be stopped, but they certainly would be considerably slowed down, the two leaders figured, which would, they hoped, give the former farmerfolk more of what was becoming a rare and precious commodity—time.

  It had become clear that were they to forsake the trucks entirely, they were going to need more horses or mules, so Milo had gathered his group of horse-hunters and ridden out in search of feral herds. Luck had ridden with them. They had found a smallish herd on the second day, and a week's hard, dangerous work had netted them a herd of some two dozen captive equines, including six that showed the conformation and size of heavy draft-horse breeding.

  When they had brought back their catch and turned the beasts over to the breaker-trainers, they had rested for a day, then ridden back out, this time to the southeast. They were gone for two weeks and returned—dog dirty, hungry, thirsty and exhausted—without a single horse . . . but with five towering, long-legged dromedaries. They had found the outre animals wandering about an arid area and managed to trap them in a small, convenient box canyon. After a few of the men had been bitten by the savage beasts, there was a strong sentiment to kill one for meat and turn the others free to live or die on their own, but Milo had insisted that they be roped and led back to the farming areas, stressing his experiences in certain parts of Africa, where such as these had often demonstrated the ability to draw or bear stupendous loads on little food and less water.

  Paul Krueger had not been too certain of the wisdom of trying to use the camels, remarking, "There's never been a really tame one, you know—not even those born in captivity are ever safe to be around all the time. And we don't have any harness that we can easily adapt to them or time left to make separate sets, even if we had the hands and the material left to make them."

  Milo shrugged. "Well, why not try them as pack animals, Paul? We can always turn them loose or slaughter them for food if they don't work out for us. As I recall, the Sudanese could pack loads of a quarter of a ton on each camel, and in our present straits, five animals that can, between them, carry a ton and a quarter aren't to be sneezed at or lightly dismissed."

  "Who's going to drive the vicious fuckers?" Krueger had then dem
anded. "Not me! I've got a care to keep my hide in one piece."

  "No need to drive them." Milo shook his head. "Just hitch their headstalls to the tails of as many carts."

  Krueger grudgingly consented to the inclusion of the camels and was later to thank Providence that he had so done.

  Chapter V

  Chief Gus Scott brought all of his folk to the lavish feast prepared and proffered by the Horseclansfolk, but he brought them in relays, so that the herds remained guarded and the necessary camp work got done, despite everything, which signs of organizational abilities and natural leadership qualities served to increase Milo's admiration for the man.

  That a few boys and girls of marriageable age of both the Horseclans and the Scott tribe seemed to find the company of one another extremely fascinating pleased Milo no end, for he was become determined that when he and his moved on southwest the Scotts would move with them, winter with them and, he hoped, emerge with the spring thaws as another clan of the Kindred.

  Jules LeBonne did come to the feast, but brought with him only his personal bodyguards, perhaps a dozen of them, all as filthy as their chief, all as heavily armed and all almost as arrogant. That LeBonne and all his henchmen were contemptuous of their hosts and of Chief Scott was obvious from the outset. Only by keeping an exceedingly tight rein on his own people was Milo able to prevent open combat which must surely have resulted in the quick deaths of all thirteen of the French-speaking guests; he was later to regret that he had not countenanced their killing then and there, for it would have saved later death and suffering.

  Deliberately waiting until LeBonne and most of his entourage were become impossibly befuddled with alcohol and hemp, Milo broached his proposal to Gus Scott bluntly, saying, "Chief Gus, my folk and I have no axes to grind, no blood to avenge, insofar as concerns those folks in that fort, so I want your leave to ride into their settlement and try to arrange a passage across the ford they command for my clans and herds. Winter could come down on us anytime now, and I don't want to be caught by it out on these open expanses, or, even worse, in some mountain pass on my way up to the high plains. Am I successful, it just might help you and your aims; do I fail, it certainly won't hurt you and them and it will mean that I and my clans will then have a reason to join our arms with yours in defeating those people and thus opening the ford for our use."