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Excerpt Cat Tracks
Chapter One The cry began as a fluttering rumble, deep in the cat's throat. As she lifted her striped face to the evening breeze, her voice rose and strained to emerge as a high-pitched, yodeling scream that soared and tumbled with its own echoes through the narrow valley. Again, and yet again she screamed her imperative wail, until the echoes mingled to sound like a chorus of souls in torment. Then she paused with both large ears perked for an answer. She was perched on a broad, flat rock, well up on the rubble-strewn slope of the gorge, where her instincts told her the breeze would carry her mating call far beyond the boundaries of the territory she had claimed for nearly seven years. A huge animal, with generations of feral wildness behind her, her skull was broad, as was the thick, solid tail with its faintly marked rings. There was no patch of pure white fur on her muscular body; her coat was a muddled crazy-quilt of stripes and blotches where the tones and half-tones of black and brown and tan and creamy fur took a distinct pattern only on her face and tail. Even sitting completely exposed on open ground, she was virtually invisible. Until she moved. The first of the cat's more recent ancestors to run wild had been a medium-sized white female abandoned by an itinerant prospector. That had occurred during the early gold-rush days in the Brindabella Ranges, a dagger of rough, rugged high country that stabbed north from the Snowy Mountains to divide the watersheds of the Goodradigbee River from the far larger drainage of the Murrumbidgee. Since that time, the strain of feral cats had been strengthened by periodic infusions from stray farm cats, the cats of various prospectors and bushmen and, in later years, the animals callously abandoned by residents of Canberra, Australia's national capital. Included had been cats of all colors and breeds, but natural selection had weeded out the bright, easily seen ones, the natural prey of foxes---another introduced predator with devastating effect on native wildlife---the soaring wedge-tailed eagles or the silent night-hunters, the Powerful Owls. Long fur, a recessive genetic trait, had been lost in the mingling of breeds, so the old she-cat's fur was short in length, but solid and dense through exposure to the wet and chilling mountain winters. She was the color of survival, a moving shadow among other shadows as she prowled in a ceaseless hunt for food. A perfect killing machine, strong, powerful, quick and deadly, she was the classic example of her particular breed, a feral beast as truly wild as the great cats of Africa and Asia, having no further link, however tenuous, with domesticity. Technically, she would be classed as a feral animal---a domestic animal gone wild, reverting to a state of natural wildness. Certainly, in Australia, no cat is a "native" animal, though no one is quite certain just how the first cats got there. With early European settlers? Chinese or Asian sailors? Or, perhaps, even earlier; before any contributor to Australia's recorded history. Freed by accident or design into a land with essentially no enemies and an abundance of food, feral cats are such an integral factor in the Australian bush that no place, however remote, is free of them. And those that have been savage for many generations are as large, as fierce and as truly undomesticated as the European wildcat, the primeval ancestors of all cats. As the evening faded through shades of purple into the darkness of the valley night, the she-cat gave one final, demanding scream, but she stayed hardly long enough to appraise the dying breeze for an answer. The cooling air was flowing downward as it had risen with the warming currents of the day, and she sniffed at it restlessly, her long, supple whiskers twitching as she searched the air currents for any message they might carry. Had there been a tomcat within the sound of her mating cries, she would have known it. Like all cats, she depended more upon her ears and light-sensitive eyes for information than upon her nose, but her sense of smell was fully adequate for her needs. She stood with both ears fully cocked as the echo of her final scream drifted into silence, then gathered herself to leap smoothly from her perch and lope down through the scrub toward the tumbling waters of the river. Despite her size, she seemed a ghostly presence in the dim light, moving silent as a wraith of smoke. The point from which she
had been calling was downstream from where tiny Condor Creek splashed
headlong to join the Cotter from the west, and the old cat moved southward
past the junction as she patrolled the valley, traveling steadily upstream
toward the narrow concrete ford which humans called Vanity Crossing.
The ford and the narrow gravel forest track leading to it were the only
evidence of human intrusion into the old cat's domain, and to her the
track was the most southerly boundary of her territory. Sometimes she
crossed there herself, bounding lightly across from stone to stone on
the piles of rock which were occasionally placed to mark the lower boundary
of the ford. Only her tail, hidden from her intended prey by the bulk of her body, seemed alive. Like an independent thing, separate from the camouflaged ghostliness of the cat herself, it moved in a delicate, tight-circling motion as her heightening senses built up the tension. Her striped face blended perfectly with the dry grasses and the scattered fronds of underbrush and shadow, and when she reached her decisive launching site, she was forced to consciously restrain a tiny growl of satisfaction. A last pause---the heavy muscles of her hindquarters bunched beneath her---then one surge of those mighty flanks drove her in a flying, slashing attack. Her mobile front paws smashed down on her prey, holding it pinioned until her flashing ivory fangs could clamp tightly in her favorite death grip, a single, snapping clasp on the neck of her victim. The rodent died without even knowing he had been attacked. Ripping open the quivering small form with her fangs, the cat first licked at the entrails, using her rough, mobile tongue to remove shreds of flesh. She slashed off chunks of flesh and swallowed them in individual gulps. She ate everything, even the feet and skull. Then she carefully licked at her paws and used them to groom her face before moving on. She was hungry, a hunger
given by the growing mating urge inside her, and before the night ended
she killed four small brown rodents, three tiny frogs and one fairly
large bush rat. All but the rat died the same way, but with her hunger
satisfied, she prolonged the rat's death by tossing it aside and then
pouncing on it again and again. The mating before that had provided only two kittens, and both had fallen prey to the silent talons of a large Powerful Owl. The old cat knew the owl, but due to her tremendous size and ferocity the cat had no fear of him. She had, in fact, no real enemies; the fox who dared confront her would be foolish, and even the extremely rare dingo that wandered down from the Brindabellas to the west was no serious threat. Her range in the Cotter Valley was a good hunting ground, with plenty of native marsupials, abundant bird life, and a wide range of reptiles, frogs and small lizards. She lived well, but alone. The territorial instinct is far stronger in the feral cat than in tame house cats. The old female had defended her territory fiercely against any and all other females, including her own grown kittens, and except when her heat cycle demanded the need of a tomcat, she avoided their presence deliberately. She would allow no tomcat to settle within her territory at the best of times, and when she was with kittens she had good reason to fear the males' uneven dispositions. Next morning, as the sun warmed the rocks and outcroppings along the river, she slowed her pace, then finally abandoned travel entirely to lie sprawled on a warm boulder and let the sunshine lull her into easy slumber. She didn't sleep soundly; her ears constantly twitched and turned to catch the sounds of the bush around her, and her nose sifted and catalogued the myriad scents that were carried on the rising breeze. It was almost noon before she stretched, reaching out with each paw and shivering the heavy muscles of her shoulders and flanks. Then she strode deliberately back into the scrub along the edge of the water, moving slowly, but with total alertness as she neared the man-made track to the ford. A vagrant breeze brought her to a sudden halt, nostrils twitching at the combined odors of wood-smoke and people. But underlying it all, so faint as to seem almost a memory, was the tantalizing scent of another cat---a male. She had already turned in her tracks, automatically fleeing the smell of man, when she caught the other flavor, and her inner urgings took immediate control. Her throat quivered as the mating scream poured from it.
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