"Okay, Ali. I'll answer to David, then."
"We'll see. Every time I say David, I hear Ryu in my head using that fatherly tone of his. I like Val. But if you want to wake me up in a hurry, use Duvalier. That's what old Rourke used to bark in my ear when he wanted me on my feet."
They decided that for now they would stick to Missouri, keeping to the west side of the state in the hilly region east of Kansas City. Then they would cross the Missouri River somewhere north of St. Joseph, angle into Nebraska, and start hitching rides on westbound trains around Lincoln.
They switched over to night travel while still within the nebulous borderlands of Southern Command. If they were to encounter enemies, daytime was more dangerous than night, for the Grogs that lived along the Missouri Valley preferred to fight in daylight. After a long afternoon's rest, they turned up an old road at nightfall. The mule had its own ideas about nighttime travel, and took a good deal of convincing to get it in motion. It then showed a tendency to stop at every opportunity, leaving them with the task of getting it in motion all over again.
"No wonder that stable master parted with him so fast," Valentine said.
"Maybe we can tempt him with something," Duvalier suggested, pushing on the back end while Valentine hauled away at the front. "Do we have any plums left?"
"That would work, until we ran out of plums. Then he'd never move without one."
The quest seemed to be off to a mule-stalled start when Valentine finally solved the issue with what Duvalier laughingly called the "wugga-bugga dance." The mule bit Valentine, nearly clipping off his ear, as he tried to pull it by the throatlatch. With blood running down the side of his face, he ran into the woods, returning with the better part of a poplar sapling. He yelled gibberish at the mule, thrashing pack, ground, air, and mule with the noisy branches. The leaf-shaking spectacle sent the mule trotting down the road of its own accord. Any time thereafter that the mule balked, Valentine just brandished his leafy shillelagh, imprecating against it in the glottal nonsense that worked on the recalcitrant beast. The mule put itself into high gear to get away from nasty voice and noisy leaf.
"We'd better start taking turns scouting soon," Duvalier said later, after a break for a cold meal.
"Why's that?"
She pulled down a young sugar maple bough. "Stripped clean," she said. Something had torn off the leaves and bark, leaving the thin limb as naked as a rat's tail.
"Grogs?"
"Yeah. They don't digest much of it, if you've ever looked at the droppings close."
Valentine swept the woods with ears and nose and picked up only a distant owl. "Duty in the Wolves denied me the pleasure. I've never patrolled Missouri, just passed through it a few times. More east of here, though."
"Don't know if it aids their digestion, or they just put something in their stomach to fool themselves out of being hungry. Anyway, if you see stripped branches, you can tell they pass through. The evidence hangs there a lot longer than footprints. Or droppings."
"First point goes to-"
She tweaked his nose, held up to better catch the soft nighttime breeze. "Me. God knows I can't keep that mule moving."
Mule problems aside, Valentine found he enjoyed nighttime travel. With his cat's-eye vision, the color-muted landscape looked clearer than he remembered the brightest of moonlit nights. His ears worked to their best advantage, as well; the sounds of nighttime insects carried farther, though they made a good deal less noise than their daylight counterparts. The Cats bedded down after dawn with a hot meal and dozed away the heat of the day. Even the mule grew accustomed to the routine.
They cut a few trails of Wolf patrols, but these grew more and more rare as they approached the old Kansas City-St. Louis corridor. If there was a danger point on the first leg of their journey, this was it. They took turns leading the mule, with one of the pair on point a hundred yards ahead, looking and listening, and the other guiding the mule. As Valentine peered down onto the area around the old interstate that the Grogs frequented, the mule decided to bellow into the night. He swore he'd dine on a mule steak for breakfast. Either nothing heard the animal, or whatever did hear it did not want to bother to investigate the source. In any case, they crossed the corridor without seeing anything but tire tracks and footprints.
Valentine was on point when he scented them. Three Grogs, sleeping upright back to back like Buddhist statues, rested on a thickly forested knoll.
He drew his sword and waved Duvalier forward.
"Pistols or blades?" he whispered.
"Neither."
"They're snoring."
"Of course we could kill them. But ten would come looking for them. You're good; we would probably kill those, too. But then a hundred would close in from either side."
"In the Wolves-"
"Don't ever want to hear that again. You're a Cat now, and it's all about the mission. Killing a Grog patrol has nothing to do with that."
By dawn they were miles off the corridor and pushing northwest. The land began to flatten out with the beginning of the Great Plains. They supplemented their dwindling supplies with, and fed the animals on, the wild corn and beans common to the area. They set small game snares on likely ground, two or three every morning, and it was a rare day when they could not come away with at least one animal for the stew pot. Even if it was only a wild rat.
Valentine and Duvalier began to know each other's minds. They approached abandoned buildings communicating through hand gestures and learned to rely on each other more and more as the days passed. When Duvalier spent a day in the cramped agony of dysentery-she would devour meats the new Cat wouldn't even touch-Valentine gathered a shirt full of elm bark and poured boiling water over the strips, then picked out the floating parts once it had cooled. He made her drink the infusion three times over the course of a day, and the symptoms subsided.
They released the mule and horses at the Missouri River. Valentine gave the mule its freedom with a kind of sadness; he would miss their combative companion. Like parents with a rebellious child, dealing with the bloody-minded beast together cemented the relationship between the two Cats. They left the beasts grazing in a grassy field thick with white clover-heads, shouldered their newly heavy packs, and crossed into the Gulag.