The Memories of Milo Morai

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Still and unmoving as two statues, the men sat, waiting for one of the browsing, slowly shifting herbivores to wander within range of the short, powerful bows with which they were armed. The spring was now far enough advanced for the beasts to have begun to fatten, and so, even after they had been dressed out, two of them should provide food for all of the party for which the men were hunting this day. Slouched forward over the necks of their grazing horses, in constant telepathic contact with their mounts and with each other, the two ignored the flies that crawled upon them, the sweat that poured from them under the hot sun and the reek of the fresh deer dung with which they had liberally smeared their hands and faces to cover the smell of predatory man from their prey.

The herd they stalked was mixed—shaggy, feral cattle, shaggier bison, an assortment of deer and an even wider-ranging assortment of antelope, a few gazelles, a few wild horses and burros, even the occasional wild goat or two. The progenitors of the animals making up the herd had been natives of widely separated habitats on four continents, and a few hundred years before that spring day on the prairie of North America, no one of the billions of humans then living would ever have seen a like herd on any of those four. But those billions of humans died long ago, precious few of them living long enough to breed and leave descendants, and the species of mankind now was the rarest of creatures upon the grassy lands, moving only in small, scattered bands with his domestic herds among the tumbled, overgrown ruins of his brief hegemony, gathering and hunting for the bulk of his food, taking only milk and blood and fiber from his precious herds save in the direst of emergencies.

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