The creature was poised to spring, on a spur of wet, gray rock a dozen feet above him.
“By the” he began. His hand fumbled for the butt of the commemoration Le Mat in his belt, but Doc knew in his heart that he was going to be too slow.
Way, way too slow.
The animal screamed as it leaped, a throat-tearing cry of crimson hatred and hunger.
It hadn’t eaten for three days. In fact, the tiny, injured bat that had provided its last meal had upset it, given it a tearing illness that raced through its body, making breathing difficult, distorting its sight so that it missed three separate kills of deer within the hour, that very morning, before the storm had hit.
Now the cougar knew it was seriously sick.
A band of pain pulsed across the wedge of cranial bone above the eyes, and it had a feverish desire to move. The storm had left water everywhere, further enraging the mutie animal. The sore on its lips where the dying bat had nipped it with its needle teeth was throbbing with a sucking agony.
It wouldn’t go near the puddles, despite a raging thirst. Clots of thick greenish-white foam dangled in ropes from its tender, aching jaws.
It had heard the sound of hooves moving along the overgrown blacktop, where it waited, crouching patiently among a glade of stunted lodgepole pines. There had been food passing along the track earlier, but it had been sealed in noisy, shiny boxes, impossible to enter.
The cougar measured a good twelve feet from its nose to the root of its yard-long tail, and stood nearly four feet tall at the shoulder.
As it leaped down at the snow-haired human on the dappled gray-white horse, it was consumed with a blind lust to rend, crush and kill.
Its normal caution and hunting cunning were long gone, abandoned in the orange mist of the virulent strain of rabies that was destroying it.
As it jumped, its thrusting rear paws slipped in the mud that coated the rock, throwing it slightly off its aim, which momentarily saved the life of Dr. Theophilus Tanner, of South Strafford, Vermont.
The cougar had aimed its spring at the throat of the man, but it fell short, its honed claws raking across the chest of the gelding, its weight knocking the horse sidewayssideways toward the drop into the ravine on the right of the trail.
Doc clung to the horse’s neck as the animal, spooked out of its skull, reared and kicked out, whinnying in terror at the apparition from hell.
Mildred was riding second, behind the string of pack animals, with Judas on a lead rein just behind her. The mule was so vicious that it would have been madness to try to attach it to the other three horses.
J.B. was third, with the rest of the party strung out behind him. The Navaho had chosen to ride as a rearguard, all nine of them together.
Only Mildred, on the crown of the bend in the track, saw what had happened.
What was happening.
The enormous buff-colored animal, its heaving flanks streaked with gray-orange mud, its jaws flecked with foam, eyes staring blindly, landed awkwardly in the rutted highway. It spun and snapped for a moment at its own hind legs, then powered up from a crouch, snarling, straight at the belly of Doc’s own mount.
The dainty little bay mare that Mildred rode was also spooked by the attack of the raging carnivore. She took a dozen rapid, pecking steps backward, making Judas bare its teeth at her. The mule then kicked out behind it at J.B.’s gelding, starting a chain reaction of utter confusion, with those farther down the line having no idea what was going on up at the front.
Doc had his sword stick jammed into his own saddlebag, and he made a desperate grab for it. But the cougar was beneath him, disemboweling his horse with a single raking blow, opening it from chest to groin, spilling the doomed animal’s intestines in greasy loops into the mud.
The three pack animals had totally lost all control, rearing and screaming and edging one another toward the sheer drop over the cliff.
Mildred drew her pistol, gripping the ZKR 551 in her right hand, struggling to control her terrified mare with her left hand. But she was no great horsewoman and found it impossible to take a shot at the mutie creature. The only chance of using her skill as a shootist was to slip from the saddle of her mount, but it was rearing and kicking so wildly that it was hopeless.
It was a scene of wild chaos, in which things still seemed to be happening with a fearsome slow motion.
As Mildred watched, Doc’s horse started to fall sideways, dying from the ferocious attack. The cougar had slithered away a few yards, sliding on its stomach through the slimy mud, its eyes locked on the white-haired old man. And one of the pack animals was teetering on the brink of the cliff, hooves scrabbling for grip.
Despite the odds, Mildred fired twice, feeling the .38 buck in her hand, but she had no idea where the bullets went. All she knew for certain was that neither of them struck the crouching cougar.
Then Ryan arrived, a wild, whooping figure. His big gray stallion brushed past Mildred, the SIG-Sauer drawn in his right hand, his heels kicking into the flanks of his horse to urge it on.
“Jump, Doc!” he yelled. “Jump now!”
The last of the string of pack animals was going over, head thrown back, spine arched like a bent bow, its weight dragging the other two after it. The tautened line attached to Doc’s saddle began to pull at his dying gelding.
“Jump!” Ryan screamed, fighting against his own animal’s terror, trying to draw a bead on the snarling cougar that was flattened against the streaming rocks, less than ten paces away from him.
Doc half leaped and half tumbled from the saddle, managing to snatch at the lion’s-head hilt of the sword stick as he toppled off, on the side away from the ravine.
On the same side as the rabid carnivore.
Mildred could only watch helplessly, aware of the mule behind her, braying at the top of its lungs. And J.B. and the others jostling together to try to find out what was happening around the gooseneck bend in the trail.
Ryan fired twice, the heavy handblaster booming out above the bedlam of sound. Both rounds missed by a yard or more. Normally that alone would have deterred a cougar, but this one was different, too far gone along the road of diseased madness to be checked in its purpose.
Its corded muscles tensed as it readied itself to drive in at the helpless figure of Doc, rolling in a disorganized tangle of arms and legs in the dirt.
Ryan knew in that instant that he was going to be too late to save his old friend. One blow from either of the cougar’s front paws would be enough to take Doc’s skull off his shoulders.
Mildred saw the damnedest thing she’d ever seen in her life.
The mountain lion was in midair, when Ryan threw himself from the high saddle, straight at the animal, swinging the heavy blaster at the cougar’s head.
There was the satisfying clunk as the barrel of the P-226 smashed into the creature’s jaw, splintering one of its front teeth, knocking it off balance, so that it rolled sideways in a spitting bundle of blind fury. Blood trickled from its open mouth, mixing with the sticky froth.
Ryan came up into a combat crouch, the double-action blaster steady in his hand, drilling toward the mutie animal.
Doc was scrabbling on hands and knees, trying to locate the butt of his Le Mat.
“Bastard,” Ryan hissed.
The cougar’s brain had vanished into a whirling madness. It knew that it had leaped at the helpless two-legs, and should by now be savoring the hot salt taste of spilled blood, feeling bones crunch and crack with their delicious inner sweetness.
But something had gone wrong.
Now it crouched again, only the tip of its tail twitching, conscious of a new pain in its mouth, breathing thickly, swallowing with difficulty.
The thirst redoubled.
And there was another of the stinking humans, kneeling submissively before it, ready to receive the swift benison of its wrath.
Ryan squeezed the SIG-Sauer’s trigger, aiming carefully at the center of the animal’s face, drilling the bullet through its clogged nostrils, past the soft tissue, into the boiling chamber of its brain.
For the cougar there was a devastating impact that rocked its head on its heavily muscled neck. Darkness descended over its eyes, and there was a strange chill feeling at the rear of its angular skull.
“Again,” J.B. called from somewhere behind Ryan. “One more.”
The mortally wounded cougar had somehow struggled up to its feet, standing unsteadily, growling deep in its throat. Blood and brain tissue were trickling from the shattered back of its head, and more bright arterial blood dripped steadily into the dull watery mud below it.