The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ she reassured him.

  He snorted.

  She tried another tack. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we can’t take you away from Old Smoky. You belong together. Without each other you’d wither away. I’ve never believed a human being could really love a cat, nor a cat a human being. All I’ve known from the upright ones is cruelty and coldness. Yet seeing you together, you look… well, comfortable.’

  Pengelly knew exactly what she was up to. He winked and gave in.

  ‘Aye, well, you could be right there. Two old beggars we are: so gray and grizzled and cranky that no female’ll have us and we have to cherish each other. Still—’ he brightened ‘—might get me leg over an old calico one day, who knows?’

  ‘Dream on, sailor.’

  *

  The last of the light was draining out of the western sky as two cats, one fine-lined but with a rather distended belly, the other large and furry, with a huge plume of tail, trotted purposefully across the gleaming pebbles of an empty strand. The ebbing tide had left behind it sandbanks etched with a complex pattern of ripples curiously reminiscent of a mackerel’s skin. Under the eaves of the shrubs that overhung the riverbank, all was silent but for the furtive scrabbling of some waterside rodent going about its business in the twilight.

  ‘Shouldn’t we – ?’

  Sealink listened for a moment, dismissed the suggestion.

  ‘No need, hon. Plenty of food where we’re going,’ she promised.

  Woods rose steeply up the cleft of the river valley. Sallows drooped leafless and pale to the water, their slender boughs rustling in the icy breeze. Sealink led Pertelot up terraces of dripping evergreens and ancient oaks whose gnarled roots twisted among boulders of granite, outlines blurred with moss and liverwort. Hart’s-tongue fern sprang up between the rocks, pale green blades a startling contrast to the shadows. The two cats plowed through drifts of curled brown leaves and empty acom cups – of the squirrels who had emptied them there was no sign – and out onto the top of a hill.

  Below, the river snaked and glinted. A narrow creek wound off to the right; beyond it the main watercourse widened and split, both forks fading from view in the dusk. A waning moon crested the far hills even as the sun dipped behind them so that for an eerie moment both bodies seemed to hang in some celestial balance; then the sun sank in graceful defeat into the sea, and in its place the first of the evening stars became visible.

  ‘Look how high we are!’ gasped Pertelot.

  To start with, she had been enjoying herself. Now she was exhausted and out of breath, and the kittens were dragging at her, and she meant Let’s stop and look. But it wasn’t much help. Sealink didn’t stop, and by the time Pertelot could breathe steadily again, the calico was already halfway down the hill, an indistinct shadow among the furze.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’

  Two miles later they had crossed the creek via stepping-stones that terrified her, scrambled up a steep bank covered with ivy and thorn, and climbed a rocky outcrop, only to drop down almost as steeply on the other side. They had dodged a farmworker on its way home with its dog. The dog, catching their scent, had strained at its leash, barking eagerly. They had watched a great white owl fly soundlessly overhead, then stoop and vanish from sight. When, a second later, a thin high shriek had announced the sudden end of some small life, Sealink had carried on with barely a pause. They had crossed hard tracks that smelled of diesel fumes and the excrement of some large animal. They had ducked through every hedge, run down every ditch, and surmounted every wooded hill on the way.

  ‘I’m sorry. Please stop. I just can’t go any farther.’

  Sealink, who, cramped by the shipboard life, had been rather relishing the chance to stretch her legs, stared down puzzledly.

  ‘Sorry, hon,’ she said after a moment. ‘I guess you ain’t used to this. Stay here. I’ll go fetch us some dinner.’

  And she disappeared into the darkness.

  Pertelot found herself a niche in the tangled roots of an ash, and from there listened to the life of the woods at night. It was a strange place for a cage-bred cat. Twigs rustled in the breeze. A beetle trudged through dead leaves. A disturbance of air brought information about the slow beat of great wings in flight. Seconds later the barn owl ghosted overhead and came to rest in the uppermost branches of a far tree, a mouse protruding from either side of its cruel beak. She knew when it began to eat. She could hear quite clearly the rip of tendon and warm, rich flesh. These events seemed to make her alert to the quick heartbeat of small creatures near her. They were awake and aware of her.

  She started to salivate. Meanwhile, from down the slope came muffled thumps and crashes, the sounds of a great deal of energy being expended to little gain.

  ‘Hang on in there, hon.’

  Pertelot dozed. Her ears and whiskers were alive to her surroundings even as she slept. The kittens moved comfortably inside her. She dreamed of Ragnar Gustaffson, tall and proud. His long, handsome face, the warmth of his breath on her muzzle, the weight of his body upon hers…

  Her eyes snapped open. Another animal’s breath steaming in the air in front of her!

  It was Sealink, empty-pawed.

  *

  The next morning they were still hungry. In the wooded strip bordering the river on the opposite side they sat for a while and let the pale sun warm their fur. In that indeterminate season between winter and spring, the earth was still bound by frost. Leaf and bud were locked inside branch and stem. Little animals curled tight into well-chosen burrows, planning their brief, hazardous forays above ground. Nothing stirred. Even the wind had died away. It seemed as though the world were waiting.

  By midday, they were making their way through fields of reddish earth. Puckered old berries hung on the hawthorns. Gray clouds had filled the sky. Gulls wheeled over the icy furrows. Pertelot’s stomach growled. The Guillemot had started to seem like a lost home to her, full of the smells of food. How they had laughed at the crab and its antics! How she had enjoyed eating it! When she looked back, the boat was already like some warm, bright room, seen very small and far away.

  At evening they reached a town of dark gray stone.

  ‘We’ll eat now, babe,’ promised Sealink, looking happily at the traffic and people and glowing shop windows. ‘Will we eat!’

  But they didn’t.

  The dustbins had been emptied that morning. They found a fish and chip shop and hung around it for what seemed like hours. But it never opened. Pursued by its smell, they dodged around corners, down narrow alleys, and across an expanse of waste ground that led down through a children’s playground to a stagnant pool scummed with pondweed and candy wrappers.

  There, Sealink trawled disconsolately through the waste bins lining the path.

  Nothing.

  All that was left was the murky water. This she studied without much hope, while the Mau watched exhaustedly from a broken bench.

  ‘Hey!’ said Sealink suddenly.

  She dipped a paw into the water. She licked it thoughtfully. She dipped it again. Little muddy spirals spun to the surface. Sealink inspected her foreleg carefully. Shiny matter rolled off her fur, clusters of translucent globules each centered on a single black speck. This she tasted warily, then licked her black lips.

  ‘Well, it’s sure got a weird texture, hon; but you can get used to it. Tastes just fine.’

  Pertelot was done for. All her pleasure in the outdoors had gone. Her faith in Sealink was at a low ebb. She made her way to the edge and stared at the jellied mass floating on the water.

  I can’t eat that, she thought.

  Then she looked sideways at Sealink, who was stuffing it down.

  She thought, I don’t care what I eat.

  And, bending her head to the inevitable, she started to push it about timidly with her paws.

  About this time, the calico, having fished out the inshore water, leaned farther out, and promptly fell in.

  There was a wail of horror. Then the
pond turned into a maelstrom of froth and weed, and she exploded out onto the bank, so wet that an observer would have been hard-pressed to determine exactly what species she belonged to. She shook herself with an energy born of fury, disgust, and embarrassment. Strings of spawn flew from her fur up onto the grass, where Pertelot gobbled them down.

  One frog colony would be sadly depleted this spring.

  *

  Three days later, they had eaten very little else. More by luck than judgment, Sealink had flushed a bank vole that ran straight into the Mau’s waiting paws. Half a vole was better than none, but they were soon hungry again. Earthworms, they found, were edible, if not delicious. But the patience it took to stand over their casts in the cow pasture, while fat wood pigeons flew contemptuously above, turned out to be more than Sealink could manage.

  They tried eating beetles. But beetles are a lot of effort for what you get, and by the time they started the climb into the barren uplands bordering the moor, the Mau’s ribs stood out like staves. Her pregnant belly was a swollen sac that seemed to bear no relation to the body that carried it. Sealink’s fur disguised her condition more successfully. But her boundless energy was flagging, and her humor with it.

  Up here, among the close sheep-bitten turf and icy winds that scoured the land, making it inhospitable to tree and leaf, game was even harder to come by. The only relief to the dull expanse of furze, thistle, and fescue were the raised profiles of quoits and sarsen stones. Pitted with age and the corrosive action of rain on granite, they stood proud against the weather. Sheep sheltered in their lee. Sealink regarded the sheep with a cunning, acquisitive glint, but they were clearly out of her league. Crows soared like black rags against the sky. There were magpies, too, but none of them answered to the name of One for Sorrow, and they had no interest in a pair of wandering Felidae.

  They crawled beneath fences of barbed wire festooned with wool, climbed over low drystone walls, and moved ever northward with the sun as their guide.

  On the edge of the moor they encountered their first wild road.

  It buzzed and hummed; but when Sealink stuck her head inside, there was nothing moving on it, and no sense that anything had used it for a while – as she explained to a bewildered Pertelot.

  ‘There was no sense of destination to it. None at all. It was just as if it ended in midair… Real odd, babe. Not many cats passing this way at the best of times, I know; but it was eerie in there.’ She shivered. ‘Shame, really, hon. I know you don’t like to use the things, but we could sure do with some help, you know?’

  That night, however, their luck changed, or so it seemed.

  As the last of the light went out of the sky, Sealink glimpsed a pair of lighted windows in the distance. A farm or cottage? Humans meant food, and perhaps shelter: an outbuilding where they could sleep out of the biting cold. The two cats cut quickly across the upland valley, over sodden mats of sphagnum and sedge that soaked their paws and bellies, skirting pools of stagnant water that lay between clumps of bilberry, bog myrtle, and cotton grass, their breath steaming in the night air.

  The farmyard was deserted.

  They dodged warily beneath the wheels of a tractor, slipped around a rusting trailer, a tangle of hurdles and buckets and fraying orange twine, and crouched behind a stack of bales, scanning the scene cautiously.

  A powerful cocktail of smells had been prepared for them: machine oil, chemicals, various species of livestock and then-waste products, other cats…

  ‘Stay here, hon,’ Sealink breathed.

  She dropped into her New Orleans street-fighter’s shuffle – a curious, sideways gait designed to present the largest possible profile to any opponent – and crossed the yard.

  Everything in the barn was ingrained with the scent marks of the local tom. But he seemed to be out patrolling his boundaries, and nothing stirred but some chickens who clucked and ruffled their feathers at her as she passed.

  She regarded them ruefully. Too big.

  On the far side of the yard, though, her nose helped her to the discovery of the day: a large ceramic dish full of great chunks of meat in gravy. The area around the bowl smelled rank and strange, but food was food, even if it was a little crusted on top. Without conscious thought, Sealink buried her face in it and began choking it down.

  This process – which bore more similarity to inhaling than to eating – filled the night with noise. Pertelot drooled behind the hay bales for a minute or two, then let the biological imperative take charge. She had to feed herself and her unborn kittens, quickly, now, before Sealink ate the lot.

  Even as she made this decision, pandemonium broke loose. An explosion of thuds and grunts. A sound like a ceramic bowl rolling across concrete. Snarls, shrieks, hisses, and howls that bounced from wall to wall of the farmyard and echoed off into the night.

  The Mau poked her head out and had a quick look around.

  Where Sealink had been, there was a blur: a ball of fury-colored black and white and orange. When this broke apart for a second, it resolved itself into a calico cat – back arched and every filament of fur on end, its lips drawn back in malignant defiance – enough to put any normal creature to flight – and a frenzied piebald collie dog three times her size, his scarred old face ruched with hatred and territorial madness.

  ‘My food! My food! My food!’

  ‘Come near me again, asshole, and I’ll rip your face off!’

  ‘My food! My food! My food!’

  ‘Oh, grow up, jerk!’

  Pertelot watched, rooted to the spot, as they went at each other again in the mist of saliva, obscenity, and murder.

  Then a door opened and a human being ran out, shouting. Cat and dog broke apart. Sealink streaked across the yard; and the dog, yowling and yammering in triumph, turned his attention to the Mau. She stiffened. Adrenaline poured through her. Without a second’s thought she took to her heels. Muscles bunching and stretching, legs working like pistons, she sprinted after Sealink, who called, ‘Run, hon! Run!’ and caught her up and overtook her.

  ‘My yard! My yard!’ railed the dog.

  Its gnarled paws thudded into the ground.

  When Pertelot turned, she saw Sealink slowing visibly, her eyes wide and blood pouring from a wound on her hind leg.

  ‘Sealink!’

  With a curious grunt of despair, the calico toppled over, legs outstretched toward her attacker, claws extended to rake in a last-ditch defense. The collie made little, jabbing, bouncing runs at her, already howling with victory.

  The Mau stared, appalled.

  Rage flooded through her.

  She had no choice. She ran back, stood over the fallen calico, and prepared to face off the ancient enemy.

  Something odd happened.

  The world shimmered for a moment, and suddenly she was someone else.

  This other her was big and old and had no fear. Charged with all the experience of the hunter and the hunted, the wild and the tame, she tested the electric air. All the long, intense years of Felidae washed through her system like a great wave. She smelled prey. Her head buzzed and rang with it. Her fangs bared themselves. Her body swelled with muscle. She looked down upon the dog as if from a great height.

  Canidae! she thought with contempt.

  A million generations of bad blood filled the space between them. Behind the dog, she saw the landscape stretch and blur. Moor and farmland were replaced by swathes of savannah – burned land, drought land, scrubland – then forest canopies in a green jaguar daze, and at last the great deserts themselves.

  She saw the wavering air, the breaking dunes, the line of palms. She smelled the distant water and the sweet blood of the doves!

  ‘Canidae!’ she heard herself hiss.

  The dog stopped in its tracks.

  Where once had been a pair of thieving mogs, there now loomed a great, snarling animal the color of sand. Black stripes ran from its eyes across its wide head. Long, tufted ears were raised aggressively. Its breath was hot and its te
eth cold. It spoke a language he had never heard. In the face of such an apparition he could only quiver. His tail, of its own accord, it seemed, drooped suddenly. His ears flattened. Belly low to the soaking ground, he found himself whining in submission.

  Hind and forefeet almost overlapping in his eagerness to escape, he turned and fled.

  The caracal watched him go.

  Canidae! she thought.

  Then she took the injured calico between her jaws, lifting it as gently as she might a kitten, and at a stately pace padded into the darkness.

  Around her, a highway shimmered briefly in the air. Then she was gone.

  A few minutes later, an observer crossing the uplands that night might have seen the incongruous sight of a heavily pregnant, but otherwise tiny, domestic cat, ribs showing clearly through its slick fur, muscles trembling with the effort, lugging the weight of a far larger cat up into the safe recesses of an isolated granite tor.

  *

  Sealink’s leg was slow to heal.

  Teeth had met at the bone from either side. She had lost a considerable amount of blood. Between them, they licked the wound clean and its surface healed over within a day; but this only caused the leg to swell with infection, so Pertelot had to nip the skin with needle-sharp teeth to allow it to drain.

  They slept for long periods of time. Neither of them spoke of the Mau’s transformation. How much had Sealink understood through her mist of pain? Pertelot, confused and terrified by the whole affair, found herself reluctant to ask. Many of the night’s events would remain blurred.

  After she had left the highway, it appeared that she had dragged the calico into a cave in the granite bedding planes. There she had found a great jumble of sticks and twigs, arranged in a loose nest and cemented with a mixture of earth and turf, tufts of sheep’s wool, and scraps of fur. Tiny bones jutted through the fining, delicate and white as shells. It smelled musty and unvisited, but it provided effective shelter from the elements, and some of the turf was still green. Both cats were able to fit neatly within its confines, curled one around the other.