DOC’S FIRST SENSATION was one of impending sickness. Overcome by nausea, before he was even properly awake again, he rolled onto his hands and knees, kicked away the entangling sleeping bag and puked, splattering into the dirt. His heaving stomach brought up the remnants of his supper, floating in a sea of yellow bile. The taste of his own vomit made him retch and moan again, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut.
It was a good twenty seconds before Doc remembered what had happened before he’d slipped into unconsciousness, the roaring leap of the monstrous cougar and the explosion of the blaster still ringing in his ears.
Now he was aware of noises, raging around him splashing water, growling, the shrill whinny of a mule that he recognized as Judas. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked toward the pool.
Judas was standing, back pressed against the tree, the tethering rope as taut as an iron bar. The mule’s head was back, eyes rolling white in the moonlight, facing the mutie predator that was moving at the edge of the dark pool that lay under the shadows at the head of the box canyon.
The cougar was still very much alive, snarling, standing hock-deep in the water, its gigantic head turning from side to side, seeming to be watching both the mule and the recovering man.
Doc looked around for his blaster, but he recalled it being knocked from his hand and it had disappeared into the bushes around his campsite.
The sword stick was still at his side, and he reached for it and stood, feeling his legs shaking as though he were suffering from typhoid.
The steel slid from its ebony sheath, and Doc had a brief moment of confidence. Then he looked down at the slender strip of metal, across at the half ton of ferocity a few yards away from him. His confidence ebbed away.
” Morituri te Now what the devil was it that the gladiators used to say as they faced their ghastly ending in the sand and blood of the Roman arena? I fear that this encounter has turned my brain to a puddled gruel.” Doc sighed. ” Salutamus ? Was that the word? It was a deep regret of my parents that I had small Latin and less Greek.”
He walked cautiously toward the pacing cougar, peering at it, where it lurked in the dark shadows of the pool, seeing, for the first time, that the trusty Le Mat hadn’t missed its target after all.
The thing was badly wounded.
What he’d initially thought were probably just streaked patterns of black mud on its golden pelt were slobbered patches of blood.
The 18-gauge shell from the gold-engraved commemorative blaster had struck the cougar between chest and head, the pellets starring out in a devastating pattern. Some had driven into the muscles across the upper ribs, some lacerating the mutie animal’s throat. But the bulk of them had ripped directly into the giant cat’s jaws.
The lower part of its mouth had been destroyed, leaving its tongue to flop obscenely onto its bloodied chest. One paw had also been hit and dangled from the shoulder, more blood dripping softly into the pool.
Despite its horrific injuries, the cougar was a country mile from being dead. It kept up a low snarling, limping back and forth in the shallows, its eyes watching both the tethered mule and the unsteady figure of the man.
“What now?” Doc said, advancing slowly, the sword blade ahead of him.
The mutie cat threw back its head and gave out a dreadful, strangled, choking roar of rage and pain. A spray of misty blood pattered in the water. It pushed Judas into a state of total panic, the mule jerking at the rope again and again, then starting to saw at the cord with its uneven teeth.
“It’s all right, Judas, my dear old friend,” Doc said, amazed at how shaky his voice had become.
The cougar decided the course of action, trying to leap at him, its shattered paw letting it down so that it toppled helplessly over into the water in a great welter of silvery spray. It emerged, shaking its massive head, picking its way through the mud toward the waiting man.