Koban Universe 1 (14 page)

They intended
to target females, not only for the smaller size of a doe in both species, but because antelope and mule deer females lost their smaller horns and antlers this close to their rutting season. Male antelopes never lost their horns, and male mule deer had a rack that lasted into deep winter.

As they
used game trails to slip quietly closer to the far side of the grove of trees, they spotted an isolated cluster of three antelope, two females and an immature buck with a small set of spiral horns. Ryan positioned himself to the side of a wider game trail, where there was a pair of thick tree trunks on each side. He could stand behind one while remaining concealed, and animals following the trail at a run would pass singly through the four-foot gap between the trees.

Kam would
circle wide out onto the savanna to belly crawl close to the three animals, with the intent to spring and chase them towards the trail. Ryan was to try to spear the smaller female as she passed the narrow point in the trail. The horns on the buck had only grown to eighteen inches, but represented more of a risk for the two novice hunters. They were confident, but not stupid and over reaching. At least that’s what their immaturity and inexperience led them to believe.

Intellectually, the almost
four-year old boy and the nine-month old ripper cub were smart enough to recognize their limits, electing to go for the smaller, safer of the prey animals. Physically, they still were outmatched, although their emotions, imaginations, and determination made the hunt entirely plausible, in their minds.

Kam made the wide arc, staying downwind of the group of antelopes, and moved through the taller teal grass of the savanna. His matching fur and small size allowed him to vanish, even to Ryan’s sharp vision. Ryan’s camouflage clothes were in mottled dark blue and deeper teal shades, blending in better with the darker leaves, shadows, and scattered sunbeams under the trees. The antelope had similar colorations, with darker teal markings shading into dark blue stripes on their sides, and lighter blue and white spots on their upper backs, which resembled stray spots of sun dappling.

There was no coordinated signal planned, but the roar of Kam’s charge out of the grass
, mere yards from the antelope, and their terrified
ululations
as they instantly leaped away in the opposite direction, sent a message that was impossible for Ryan to miss.

He
could hear two pair of hooves coming directly his way, and one set moving off to the left of those two. His wolfbat hearing told him the lighter pair of hoof beats headed his way was in the lead, although whether it was the smaller doe or the young buck he couldn’t be certain. However, they were following the game trail that appeared to offer the fastest escape route to their terrified minds. Kam was roaring deeply for all he was worth, trying to sound like a full sized ripper.

Just as the thumping pair of hooves drew close, Ryan stepped directly back away from the tree trunk
about ten feet, staying in the sound “shadow” of the approaching two antelopes. This would keep the tree between him and the antelope’s frantic eyes as they sought other threats or movements ahead of them. Cocking his right arm, he gripped his first spear with it oriented straight at the tree, to prevent the prey seeing the end of the shaft protruding out to the side of the shielding tree trunk. He waited, hands sweating with excitement, for a warning that he did know was coming.

Kam uttered a higher pitch screech, a sound
often made as a ripper pounced on its prey, to increase the terror “flavor” they craved when they frilled the animal as it was caught. It was timed to come when the lead animal was about to pass through the gap in the trees.

Ryan
instantly hurled his first spear at a point on the right side of the gap, where he anticipated the left shoulder would be of his yet unseen target when the spear arrived. As expected, the antelope that burst through the gap was hit solidly in its front left shoulder.

Even as
he’d released the throwing spear, Ryan had grasped the shorter and thicker of the two other spears, the one with a blunt cut butt. He stepped onto the trail, placed his right knee on the ground, planted the spear butt in the ground along his left side, and pivoted the sharp tip towards where the chest of the antelope would soon be.

The lead antelope
, it was the smaller female, lunged through the gap in even greater panic than before, her attention fixed on the predator it was certain, from that last screech, was about to land on her back. She was hit high in the shoulder by the thrown spear, and before she could look back to the front, ran into the short spear. The thousand pounds behind the impact easily snapped the shaft, although Ryan, his left leg ready, had already shoved hard to roll to his right as the wounded animal screamed and leaped past him.

On its heels, the young buck flashed through the
gap, and dodged away from Ryan and the still spinning splintered spear shaft.

Ryan had
rolled into a crouch with his second throwing spear pointed at the buck, in case it decided the boy was worth lowering its head and horns, and charged the new threat as it passed. Not to worry. Kam emitted a second screech as he flashed through the gap in the trees, pushing off from one trunk with his hind legs in an airborne teal blur, and the buck darted off the game trail to the right, away from Ryan and the ripper pursuit.

Kam glanced at Ryan as he passed, and seeing
his partner was safe, and two of his spears were now used, he knew their primary prey was wounded. He continued after the doe, which would now be slowing its run and leaving a blood trail. Not even a mature ripper could catch a healthy antelope in full stride if it had as much of a lead as these animals had been given. However, rippers were pride animals, and used ambush tactics when they drove prey to where their pride mates waited. It was Kam’s job now to overtake and down the injured animal, and Ryan was to follow with his spear, to deliver a swift
coup
de grâce while Kam held the doe by the throat.

Ryan was on his feet in an instant, dashing after Kam and the warbling bleat of the wounded antelope. Thickening underbrush
under the trees and the twisting game trail blocked sight of the prey, and even Kam had pulled ahead and out of sight after a hundred feet. However, the boy could scent the warm blood, and see the faint heat of the arterial drops sprayed on the leaves and ground. He spotted the first spear he’d thrown, where it had pulled loose when the dangling shaft was snagged in shrubbery.

He snatched it up on the run, and glanced at the bloodied tip.
There was hair and a bit of flesh caught in the barbs he’d cut along the sides of the long point. The end of the tip had broken, and the barbs were not large enough to prevent the shaft from pulling out so easily. He analyzed this in an instant as he ran, thinking of how he’d modify his spear tips when he hunted the next time.

Suddenly, his nose told him his eyes had missed something when he
looked at the spear tip. The scent had almost vanished. He turned back and saw where the antelope, without the drag of the long spear shaft in its left shoulder had leaped over a low bush where the trail had bent slightly. It was trying to slow Kam’s pursuit by forcing its own bigger body through the brush, away from the relatively clear game trail.

Ryan leaped over the three-foot shrub, holding both spears high in his right hand above the foliage, and followed the trail
recently broken through the low bushes by the antelope and Kam. He heard a high pitch pouncing scream again from Kam, slightly off to his right front, accompanied by the prey’s own increased squalling. Kam had caught the antelope.

Ryan angled towards the sounds, and found that the trees were thinning
out, and the shrubbery was thinner and lower, probably due to frequent browsing. They had reached one of the meandering edges of the tree grove, and the savanna lay ahead. The antelope was down in tall grass, but struggling in Kam’s grip.

The hundred-pound cat could only hold the thousand pound animal down because it was exhausted, bleeding, and had a
foot of broken spear shaft protruding from its left chest. Claws grasping the shoulder and neck, his jaw locked on the windpipe under the head, Kam was discovering that subduing the larger animal wasn’t as easy as he’d expected. His jaws and fangs, although powerful for his size, were not large enough to close off the windpipe completely. Kam, if he was alone, would find it a waiting game as the prey slowly bled to death, or kicked its way free.

Ryan rushed through the grass, and just before he reached the pair struggling on the ground, he dropped his dulled spear, raised the unused one
high over his head with both hands, and leaped three feet into the air above the kicking hooves. His study of the anatomy of Koban animals, a subject permitted by the house AI, guided his spear’s downward plunge. The slender point, with his full weight and both arm thrusts behind it, pierced the lower chest between the front legs, and passed between a pair of ribs to enter the heart. It was over in seconds. They had their first joint hunting kill.

They both relaxed to catch their breath, while Kam continued to frill the antelope as its mind faded. The young ripper had been relishing the fear of the terrified animal, “tasting” for the first time what older rippers had conve
yed to him. The sensation of a dying animal, and its fear of the predator that had conquered it, was nearly as thrilling to the cats as eating the prey. Nearly.

Kam didn’t
regret the spear thrust that mercifully ended the struggle sooner, but he still liked the pleasure of the power and dominance he’d felt earlier as the wounded animal collapsed beneath his pounce.

Ryan had sensed some of that
terror and pain when his perspiring hands slipped down the shaft to touch the antelope, but he quickly pulled back to avoid sensing the animal’s final dying thoughts and images. Humans had not evolved to crave this particular predator’s reward, which only the rippers and other members of Koban’s cat families wanted to sense.

Humans were indeed predators, and he certainly intended to eat some of this kill
he was proud of making, but he didn’t care to experience the prey’s final pain and fear.

Rippers believed it was
their sensing of the prey’s thoughts, which made them sensitive to never wasting the meat of a kill. They never killed for pleasure, even though they took pleasure in the process.

Some non-Kobani humans
were
prone to kill for pleasure, and were often willing to waste meat from a kill, such as the organs that many humans didn’t like very much. Those humans with Mind Tap didn’t kill wantonly, but most avoided sensing the moment of death of what they killed.

The Kobani
philosophy was strange to the rippers, yet it still produced swift merciful kills on hunts, little meat wastage since they collected the organs as gifts, for wild ripper prides, or to share with wolfbat scouts. Seldom did a full Kobani engage in non-food related killing, with the exception of self-defense, or when fighting the merciless Krall. In that special case, the rippers accepted and shared human intolerance of the genocidal and vastly wasteful aliens.

After a brief respite, Kam tore into the carcass to sample the
warm heart, tearing with his jaws and claws around the final spear wound, growing bloody in the task. He distained Ryan’s offer to cut the animal open with his knife. Instead, the boy started the unsavory task of field dressing the large antelope. He’d see this done on a smaller scale, from his secret hiding place in the barn loft at their homestead, when his mother or father dressed out a gazelle for family consumption. However, those were much smaller animals, perhaps less than a quarter the size of this one.

Later, with Kam’s help to tug at the hide and remove most of it from the carcass, the meat was exposed for s
ectioning. Ryan had tried to use a vine passed over a tree limb, to lift the carcass by the hind legs, to make the work easier, but the ropey material wasn’t strong enough. They also didn’t have the combined mass to pull the weight off the ground anyway. Ryan trimmed the hide into large pieces, and wrapped it around some of the deboned meat. Some had bones still in the large pieces that he’d clumsily sectioned. When finished cutting away all they could hope to take with them, they scattered pieces into the pack of eight wild Jenkins “dogs,” which had followed their ears and noses to the sounds and smell of the kill.

The skinny
dog-sized, normally cowardly animals, named after the first unfortunate man a large pack had turned into prey, kept well clear of the ripper cub. After a few swats from a spear shaft, and a painful jab of the point into a butt, they also stayed well back from the boy. There were dozens of feathered reptile scavenger “birds” circling overhead, awaiting their turn at any remains. Nothing would be left to rot, although for the two hunters, any meat not taken home to their “den” was felt as their loss.