The Wildings

by Nilanjana Roy

  The kitten took in the mongoose. Everything about the creature terrified him; the patches of blood on Kirri’s fur near her mouth, the wicked claws, the body that was all muscle, no fat. But he straightened his whiskers and said: “You had one kill today, Madame Mongoose. I had three, and one of them was my first. I beg pardon if what I said was wrong, but I just wanted to know what a true hunter’s mind looked like.”

  The mongoose stood down, and said: “So you want to know what a hunter’s mind is like, kitten? Come. Come inside, little one.” She fixed her stare on the kitten, and Southpaw found himself looking back into her intense black eyes.

  The first impression was of hardness and sharpness, like standing in the middle of an obsidian plain; the mind of the mongoose was smooth and opaque, like black glass, and the kitten felt as though hidden claws combed his fur very, very lightly, as the mongoose let him link.

  Kirri’s memories were carefully organized. The kitten found himself looking at receding images of snakes, and rats, and smaller prey—first, images of the living, caught in mid-battle, then of the dead, often bloodied and snarling. Another set of memories filed away battle plans: how to twist in mid-air, how to stalk one’s prey from behind, how to dance with a cobra.

  “Southpaw, that’s enough.”

  He ignored Miao’s voice, and moved a step forwards, fascinated. There was something in the centre of the plain that the kitten was being drawn towards.

  “Come,” said a voice softly in his head, and the kitten looked deeper into Kirri’s black eyes. “Come closer, little one. See what you want to see.”

  “Get back, Southpaw!”

  Southpaw sensed the predator’s arrowhead mind, the single-minded focus on making a clean, good kill. The link between them was strong; he wanted to move closer, to see more.

  The image began to flicker into shape, its outlines coming together now. It blurred, then sharpened. Southpaw was looking at his own face, the black whiskers trembling, the brown eyes large and filling with terror as he began to understand.

  A sharp pain in his flank made him howl. He leapt backwards, and felt the mongoose’s teeth—so close, too damn close!—snap shut on his ear. Southpaw yelped and backed away. A paw slashed at his neck, but the curved claws just missed him; and then Miao was there, calmly smacking at the mongoose’s belly. For a second, there was a blur of brown fur and white fur—and then there was nothing.

  Miao blinked. Southpaw blinked. Kirri had vanished, melting away into the whispering grasses.

  “That was close,” said Miao. “And now you know never to trust a predator. Sorry about nipping you, but you were leaning right into her mouth like a wet-behind-the-ears kitten who knows nothing whatsoever about hunting.”

  Southpaw was abashed, even as he tried to ignore the stinging pain where Kirri had ripped his ear. “It’s just that—,” he said weakly, “she was so fascinating.”

  “Most mongooses are,” said Miao. “You want to be careful of the fascinating ones, young Southpaw, they’re dangerous. And now home. It’s time for you to rest.”

  Over their heads, an owl circled and hooted. It was wondering whether they would make good prey, but while the small kitten was a possible target, the larger cat was forbidding, and it didn’t want to risk any of its plumage.

  The rats and mice in the empty lot sniffed at the remnants of blood and fur that indicated the loss of three of their number, and the message spread along the runways to be more cautious: Nizamuddin had a new, young, eager hunter. And then the long, soft, purple grasses settled back into silence, disturbed only by small scurryings. If Kirri was there, she made no further kills, and nothing else disturbed the peace of Nizamuddin for the rest of the night.

  “CAN’T YOU TURN DOWN the volume or something?” begged Southpaw. Mara sniffed. On his last two visits, she had connected much better with him. They had had a lot of fun playing pat-the-ball and chase-your-tail but on this visit, he seemed to have regressed and was acting like a Great Big Bossy Bully.

  “Mara, that hurt!” said Southpaw. He had folded his ears flat across his skull and was huffing crossly at her. “And besides, I’m not a bully. I’m only trying to teach you how to hunt.”

  “I don’t want to hunt! I hate hunting! Southpaw go away.” “Yowwrr!”

  “Sorry!”

  By mutual consent, the kittens took a washing break. Southpaw washed his flanks and the tip of his tail, wondering what to do with Mara. His playmate was being stubborn today, and he had no idea why she was sending so fiercely—it was painful being at the receiving end, like being spanked inside his head.

  Mara washed her whiskers three times over as she tried to focus on keeping her thoughts private. She didn’t really think Southpaw was a bully, well not lately anyway—he had been very patient when she chased his tail by mistake instead of hers, for instance—but she just didn’t get why he was so excited about this hunting business he’d been on the other night.

  And every time her thoughts spilled out of her head into the public cat domain, she got crosser and crosser. It wasn’t as though she was doing it on purpose, it’s just that she had to work very hard to keep her thoughts in the private zone, and when she got upset, that became even harder, like trying to prevent spilled water from spreading. And why would I want to learn to kill a mouse anyway when everyone knows that food comes to you in pretty pink plastic bowls …

  “Mara, you’re doing it again! Please stop, it makes my head hurt!”

  “Sorry!!!”

  The kittens stared at each other. Mara’s whiskers were drooping. “I’m sorry, Southpaw,” she said. “I just don’t get this hunting business, and it seems to be really hard today to switch off my thoughts. But I don’t understand why you’re so excited about it—what’s the big deal?”

  Southpaw huffed with impatience, but Mara was looking up at him with so much genuine curiosity that he stopped, thought about it and made an attempt to explain.

  “… and then the mouse went to the right, but I’d already blocked its exit, and Miao had the left flank covered, so it was easy,” said Southpaw.

  Mara patted her bundle of threads back and forth across the floor. She was trying to pull out just one, but every time she tugged at it, another would come out alongside.

  “… ”

  Perhaps if she got her claw under the thread while holding the other threads down with her paw?

  “… ”

  Ah. The other threads were now firmly stuck to her left paw, so she had to use her right paw to pick them off—and curses, the single thread went back into the bunch.

  “… MARA!”

  She leapt in the air, startled; the air crackled with the annoyance Southpaw’s whiskers were transmitting.

  “I’m so sorry, Southpaw,” she said.

  “You weren’t listening to a word I said, were you?”

  Mara rubbed her flanks along Southpaw’s, but the older kitten turned away. She head-butted him, but he refused to butt back. And when she nipped him, he laid his ears flat, hunched his shoulders menacingly, and growled at her until she took a step back.

  Mara sighed. She didn’t quite understand it, but something about playing with the threads had turned down the volume of her thoughts, and she didn’t have to work as hard to separate the private and public ones. But she was bored, and she wanted to play with Southpaw; she didn’t want to know about this “hunting” business.

  Southpaw was genuinely upset. The events of the previous night were still fresh in his brain, but when he’d told Mara about his kills—three! On a first hunt!—she’d just yawned and played with the end of her tail.

  Mara was watching him, her eyes big and slightly dreamy.

  “I see,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Southpaw, I didn’t realize this meant so much to you.”

  Southpaw glared at her. “Mara,” he said. “Could you please stop reading my thoughts? It’s really rude, especially since I can’t read yours.”

  “The thing is,” Mara said, �
�I don’t have to hunt, because I’m never going to that nasty place you call outside. I like it in here; all my things are here, my threads and my ball and the toy mice. My Bigfeet give me as much food as I want, so why should I learn to hunt? It sounds awful to me. You’ve got yourself a bunch of scars, you can’t lie down where Katar smacked you, and what about the mouse?” Southpaw blinked. Sometimes, he wondered whether Mara was a cat at all. She looked like one, and she smelled like one, but she didn’t think like one.

  “The mouse?” he said. “What about the mouse?”

  “Do you think the poor things like being hunted? Don’t you think it scares them? How would you like it if you were going about your business and some cat pounced on you?”

  Southpaw had to wash his fur three times before he could trust his whiskers not to quiver with indignation.

  “Mara,” he said, “we are hunted, all cats are—only by dogs and Bigfeet, not mice. And we hunt mice because that’s the way things are—mice are prey, we’re predators, and how else do you expect us to eat?”

  “What’s wrong with cat food?” asked Mara sulkily.

  Southpaw had had enough. He stood up, his tail twitching, his flanks heaving, his ears flat to his scalp. “You are such a spoiled brat, Mara,” he said. “Your mother was probably one of us, you know. I’ll bet she killed her fair share of rats and mice to feed you, and she probably lived out in the park with dead leaves for a pillow, the hedge for a home, and she loved it, just as we all do. She wouldn’t have traded her freedom to be a precious inside cat, living off Bigfeet—no self-respecting cat would!”

  “You just don’t like Bigfeet! You can’t admit that they can be nice to cats! And maybe not all cats like being outside. Maybe some of us prefer being in houses.”

  “The only ones who want to be in houses and never go outside become weird, Mara. You want to become like the monsters in the Shuttered House?”

  “That’s so unfair!” Mara mewed indignantly, her tiny tail swishing back and forth as she bristled at Southpaw. “I would never pull out your whiskers or be horrid to strangers!”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But they went peculiar after being locked up for years, Mara. And if all you want to do is live inside, why be a cat at all? If this is what you want to do—bat around stupid toys, pretend that you have no normal instincts, refuse to step out of this Bigfeet trap and meet all of us—then what kind of cat are you?”

  Mara was so upset that she was scratching the upholstery on the chair to bits. “I Hate You Southpaw Go Away I Hate You!”

  “Stop doing that! I’m leaving anyway, you don’t have to yell at me, you green-eyed freak!”

  “You’re the one who’s yelling, I bet they can hear your mews three doors away! Leave, then, go off and hunt some poor mouse who never asked to be killed and see if that makes you feel better! You’re the one who’s a freak, a savage, murderous, horrid furry freak! And if we were all meant to have hunting instincts, how come I don’t want to kill anything, ever?”

  It was at that moment that a large Atlas moth fluttered in through the window, a striking target with its red wings and white triangular pennant markings.

  There was a swift rush of movement, and before Southpaw could do more than raise a paw, the moth had been plucked out of the air by a leaping orange kitten, its wings hanging heavily down from either side of her mouth.

  For a moment the two kittens stared at each other. Mara’s face was ferocious, and when she dropped the moth and Southpaw moved towards it, she issued a small but definite mew of warning.

  “Congratulations,” said Southpaw. “Your very first kill. Well done, young Mara.”

  Mara looked down at the moth. Frantically, she patted it, careful to pull her claws in, but the moth stayed there on the ground, its wings slack, lifeless.

  “I didn’t mean to kill it,” she said. “I really didn’t, I don’t know what came over me.”

  Southpaw head-butted her affectionately.

  “It was a great kill, Mara,” he said. “Just brilliant for a first-timer. That leap! That grip! I’ll bet it didn’t feel anything, it was a really clean kill, you know.”

  Mara’s tail drooped and her ears and whiskers went down.

  “But it did, Southpaw,” she whispered. “It said, oh please don’t, and I killed it anyway.”

  Southpaw looked into her eyes and saw that she was telling the truth. He didn’t know what to say, what message his whiskers should carry.

  “Mara,” he said. “The thing is, we don’t talk to our prey. Or at any rate, we don’t listen to our prey. It’s just not done. And we follow instincts. We’re cats; hunting is in our bones and claws, little one.”

  Mara put her head down on the floor and mewed sadly. She nudged the moth once with her mouth, willing it to come back to life. “I’m a bad kitten. I didn’t mean to kill you, I’m so sorry,” she sent forlornly.

  And that was all Southpaw could get out of her for the rest of the evening. Her Bigfeet had gone out, so there was nothing to distract Mara, unfortunately. In the end, he calmed her down by washing her from the top of her small head to the tip of her tail until she fell asleep, her whiskers still on the down-droop. He stayed so late that he had to run the gauntlet of the neighbour’s dogs. The Dalmatian and the Labrador were just coming back from their evening walk, but he managed to nip deftly out of their way, running down the banisters and swinging just in time into the branches of the laburnum tree outside.

  As he headed home, he thought about Mara; he had never met a cat as odd and as difficult as her.

  “But the speed at which she made her kill,” he said to himself. “That was something to see, that really was.” Perhaps there was hope for Nizamuddin’s most unusual kitten yet, thought Southpaw.

  “What if you don’t want to kill anything, ever?” asked Mara. She had been able to talk about nothing but the killing of the moth with Beraal, when the queen came by her house.

  “But you do,” said Beraal firmly. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just your instincts at work, and that will happen whenever you meet prey.”

  The kitten struggled to explain what she meant. “I didn’t like killing the moth,” she said. “It spoke to me, and it didn’t want to be killed at all.”

  Beraal stretched her paws out and let her claws shoot out, sharp, curved, potentially lethal. “See these, Mara?” she said. “Run your tongue over your teeth. Look at your claws. We’re meant to be killers; it’s what we do. You don’t have to hunt more than once in a blue moon, because your Bigfeet feed you. But it’s useful to know how—just in case you find yourself outside, or if you’re attacked by a bigger cat, or an owl, or a cheel.” She was as puzzled as Southpaw had been by Mara’s attitude. Most cats wanted to know the how of killing, not the why; and the how was complicated enough. The world was divided into predators, prey and Bigfeet, and what made it hard was that all three could change places at any time.

  “But the moth said—,” Mara began.

  Beraal yawned and stretched, cutting Mara off. “The point of being a predator is that you’re not supposed to listen,” said the older cat. “If I listened to every plea for mercy, I’d never eat again in my life, or I’d become one of those wretched creatures you see who survive by picking through the Bigfeet garbage heaps. That’s a rat’s life, not a cat’s life. Now shall we practise sending to the cats on the Nizamuddin link? We’ve done enough work on moderating the volume of your sendings, but we haven’t broadcasted directly to the clan for a while, have we?”

  The kitten huffed, her tail curved around her paws. “I don’t want to,” she said.

  Beraal held her ground. “You know, you’ll have to talk to the rest of us one of these days, Mara. You may live inside with the Bigfeet, but you’re the Sender, and—”

  The kitten was meeping, quietly at first and then in rising wails. “I don’t want to link!” she said. “The Nizamuddin cats don’t like me, except for Southpaw, and even he thinks I’m strange, I can hear his thoughts sometimes
! The only reason you come to see me is because I’m the Sender, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my sendings, and I don’t want to talk to any of you at all!”

  Beraal stropped her claws in confusion, at the side of the staircase, staring at the kitten.

  “The moth spoke!” Mara wailed. “And I didn’t want to kill it but I did,—and I don’t want to be the Sender and I really like living with Bigfeet—and—and—!”

  The orange kitten fled up the staircase and back into the house. From inside her bedroom, eventually, Beraal heard the soft, muffled sounds of a kitten crying into a pile of blankets. She sat outside for a while, as a watery sun did its best to warm the afternoon, and she tried to link to Mara, but the kitten stayed determinedly out of reach. The queen drowsed for some time, and then she padded down the stairs and left to explore the park. She understood some of Mara’s confusion about being the Sender, but now was not the right time to try and console the kitten.

  It took some time, but Mara cheered up when the Bigfeet brought her a ball of wool. Patting it and chasing it around the floor was calming. She waited for Southpaw, but there was no sign of him, and Mara assumed that he was off with Miao or Katar, or one of the other cats. When her Bigfeet left, the kitten hesitated, wondering whether she should have another catnap. But she was well rested. Mara sat on the carpet, unfringing its knots absently, and then she stretched. “Time to visit the tigers,” she said to herself. She had put it off for almost a full moon, and perhaps going to the zoo would undroop her whiskers.

  She climbed a stepladder going all the way up to the top of the kitchen cupboards. Once up there, she settled in behind a jumbled heap of baskets and abandoned cardboard cartons. Mara didn’t want her Bigfeet scooping her up, even for a cuddle, while she was out at the zoo.

  WHEN OZZY SAW A TINY ORANGE BLOB shimmer into the shape of a kitten over the small artificial pond in their enclosure, all of his great white whiskers stood up in glad greeting. It was only when he saw Mara that he realized how much he had missed the kitten; she made him laugh, and on her visits, he could briefly forget the bars that kept him penned.