Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 20

Feast

He lay sated.

Relieved.

The cub had come, playful, pushing its tiny paws between the bars of his lair.

All black, the same midnight color he had seen in some adults and fellow performers of his kind.

It was tiny, the cub, and for a moment his hunger was so sharp he had considered…

But it danced away before he could think any more about his hunger, his huge, black hole of hunger, gnawing at every thought and every instant like nothing he had felt before.

Where were the kind ones? Who brought food and water and reward?

Where were the two-legs he relied upon for everything?

Two-legs there were here. He had seen them shoveling food into the other cages, the aroma massaging his huge nostrils like his mother’s tongue, creating a sense of want and fulfillment at the same time that he had not felt since his cub days.

Mother. She would feed him. Where was she, the constant presence, warm and purring as loud as a two-leg’s machine?

But now he was not hungry. He heard an echo of his mother’s purr within himself.

The cub he had spared, that he had been too hunger-dulled to threaten, had come back. Dragging meat! Food. Fresh.

It had struggled to push the trophy between the metal poles of his container with its tiny forefeet. Then it had sat and watched him eat. Asking nothing for itself. A very well-behaved cub! No pulling and fighting with it, small as it was.

He had eaten and eaten, and then gnawed bare bone. Eaten a great deal for a single sitting, as he had heard the Forepaws had done in the Far Place before meeting the two-legs. Feasting. You did not understand a feast until you had known want. Until you had known hunger gnawing at your innards like a predator, like a tiger or a lion at its meal.

But he didn’t need to think of more meals yet. Now he was full. Sated. Lazy.

He dozed, his eyes shut, his purr an echo of his mother’s crooning.

When the sharp bite nipped his shoulder again, his muscle twitched, that’s all.

A fly. An irritating fly when life was so good.

Odd that the cub had come into his territory after he had eaten and was feeling drowsy. A brave cub. To enter his lair and wrest the naked bone away, through the tall shafts of iron grass.

A brave, strong cub. Where had it come from? He had heard no mewling of young here, just the snarls and cries of the old and forsaken….

He felt himself slump over on his side. On the side where he had been bitten. Again. Perhaps he would wake up with the two-legs he knew and trusted. Perhaps the food would come often from now on, as before, and this last vision was just the uneasy milk-dream of a besotted cub. A small spotted cub. No. Black. Solid black. Of the kind they call panther. White teeth, red tongue like fresh meat, heart of lion.

If he saw the cub again, he would share some of his meat with it. His head felt as big as an elephant’s. He tried to prick his ears, but they lay limp, dulled by the buzzing of a thousand tsetse flies.

* * *

The smell is odd. There is none.

No. There are traces of odor, but faint, like the scent the two-legs leave.

His head lifts. He now lies on grass.

No.

He lies on the short grass the two-legs line their lairs with.

It smells like the water in the pool in his home lair, pungent, sharp, not of blood and bone, but of nothingness. That smell had been all around his home lair, and his slowed heart begins to pound faster in the happy excitement of recognizing the familiar.

He is in his home lair again! Inside the two-legs’ lair, as he had been allowed now and again. For flashes from their machines, when they praised him like purrs. Good boy. Handsome boy. Osiris. Yes.

He pushes himself upright on buckling paws. Gets to his legs, wobbles like a cub. Good cub. He is still full.

He had heard of the old days. Feast and famine, the elders called it. Wild days of hunt and hunger, one first, the other second. Always hunt or hunger. He had not known hunger until these last hours, these last three sunfalls and sunbeams.

Now it is dark.

No, not quite dark.

It is a dark filled with the balls of the two-legs’ light. Warm when you sleep under it. Cool as sky-brights when it is far away.

He moves a step or two, feeling his pads sink into the shaven grass. He brushes a rock. One of the two-legs’ rocks that sits on legs.

It shudders and shakes, as if oncoming hooves are thundering. He has heard hooves here. Like the great tall beasts in iron shoes he has seen from time to time, who also play for the two-legs.

The four-legged rock tumbles onto its side, as he had done not long ago, dropping some things that tinkle like stones and shatter.

He sees a long low shape in the night, much like his mother to his cub eyes. He goes to rub against it for warmth and purr and recognition. But it is cold and still, though somewhat soft. He stretches and feels a need to sharpen his dulled claws. Rip, rip, rip. They sink in as they have never done before, catching in the mother shape, making a sharp, shearing sound that both frightens and pleases him. Now there is a smell. Raw meat. Tangy juice.

He leaps back, his claws snagging as they never have before. The mother shape wobbles, then falls over on its side with a loud thud.

He leaps away, free, and skitters across the short grass, his amazingly long and sharp claws digging into polished wood, sending rags flying as he courses through the darkness shuddering into rocks and hummocks and toys, perhaps, like the huge smooth balls he has learned to perch on.

Noises follow this progress as they do in the dark lair lit by falling stars to which he is brought almost every night to perform his rituals that bring food.

Hunting, he calls it. He performs the rituals, and the food follows and he is full and happy and gets to sleep afterward for long, lazy hours.

He knows the rhythm of that life and those places, but all here is jangled and misplaced. He is clumsy and hurling into unseen, unsuspected barriers, all vaguely familiar, but all specifically strange.

His heart is pounding, as is his head. He is glad he has eaten, because the Hunger that was with him earlier was like a ravening ghost of himself and he could not say that he would be friend to any two-leg no matter how familiar because the Hunger said Eat, and the two-leg was to be Eaten. That is a terrible thought. Thank the Mother-cub that came to feed him. He is not driven by the alien Hunger. He is himself, though lost and confused and afraid.

A noise.

The startled sound of a two-leg.

A bright light sunshine all around him so he can see nothing through his narrowest slits of vision.

A two-leg, roaring with surprise or anger.

Osiris knows he is in the wrong place. He must return to where he is supposed to be.

He runs past the two-leg.

For a moment he scents flesh and running blood beneath it and his fangs and tongue yearn, as they had for so many unsatisfied hours. But he is fresh-free now. Good boy. Handsome boy. He runs past the flailing figure, butts it in passing, feels it overturn like the mother shape.

He senses for a moment that the Hunger is with him again, and says stop. Sniff. Lick. Bite.

But he is full. Good boy.

He runs until he is in the dark again, and feels safe.

Nothing smells like his home lair. Now that the Hunger is quieter he feels another yearning. Home lair. He wants to be in home lair. He is a good boy.