Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (13 page)

The stronghold of the Evil One rose behind a marshy pool at about the right distance. It might blend into the tapestry of speckled light and shade formed by the undergrowth in the background, but normally it would be easy even for someone with only moderate vision to spot it. My failure to notice it immediately was simply due to my overheated nerves, which had been expecting something wholly supernatural. However, what I saw was nothing but a time-honoured classic of deer-stalking methods: a raised hide, officially for watching so-called game, but in actual fact a sneaky place of concealment for people whose hobby is murder. A tall figure stood in this hide, watching me intently through a pair of field-glasses. Sinister shadows surrounded it, and the reflection of the field-glasses sprang out from these shadows like the eyes of a wolf glowing in the night. However, if a fleeting flash of light hadn't caught my attention I'd have overlooked the figure completely. The brief flash came from the barrel of the gun in the watcher's other hand. As far as I could tell from this distance, the gun was really something special. It didn't have a conventional wooden stock, but consisted of a metal curve all in one piece, resembling a sporting rifle only in outline, with the rather bolt-like barrel resting on this stock and gleaming dull silver. You'd need to be a champion shot to take precise aim with such a massive weapon. The alarming guardian of these meadows was rigged out in the North American version of his profession's costume, with a red and black check lumber-jacket and a matching woollen cap with earflaps. At this point he quickly put his field-glasses down in order to resume his mopping-up duties, and as I watched, wide-eyed, he pointed his gun at me again and concentrated on taking aim. As he did so I got a glimpse of the nickel-framed sunglasses he was wearing; they had mirror lenses. It wasn't likely he could miss me and hit the tree this time; his first failure to hit the target had obviously made him correct his aim. I simply couldn't imagine why he was after me. I didn't look particularly like a rabbit. However, the hunter obviously felt otherwise, and before I had a chance to introduce myself to him as a gentleman of intellect and education, he was blasting away again.

With instinctive presence of mind I took the biggest forward leap of my life, aware at the same time of the final cracking of the tree trunk behind my back. I saw flying splinters of wood whiz past me. Saints above, the bloody lunatic really meant it! The sudden flood of adrenalin into my cells made me act without thought, my mental processes reduced to those of a grasshopper. Everything I did was automatic, unplanned, purely instinctive. Where on earth could I go to escape this fierce salvo of artillery fire? There -
there
was safety! Like a revelation, a hollow tree with a crack in its trunk loomed up ahead of me, offering the ideal refuge, or anyway temporary cover. But the next bullet was already thudding into the ground only a few centimetres from my paws. It made a little crater, forcing me to swerve sharply off in the other direction, like a hare. If the marksman had been entertaining any lingering doubts about his rabbit theory my behaviour would dispose of them once and for all. In the most remote corner of my upper storey my analytical faculties stirred, despite the mortal danger I was in, and I compared human notions of hunting and our own. While my kind has specialised in the unattractive rodent tribe, man destroys everything he can get in the sights of his gun just for the hell of it, without any obvious necessity, and even prefers members of his own species. A very peculiar way to get your fun. Can it really be true, I asked myself, that nature once dropped a stitch and produced a creature whose megalomaniac inclinations will drive it to murder its own ancestral great-great-grandmother, like some incurable psychiatric case? But why? What for? To set itself up as God the Father? How else can we account for the millions and millions of animals pursued, mutilated and massacred by hunters? How else can we explain all the other monstrous things men do? But in that case nature herself is nothing but a botched monstrosity.

My train of thought came to an abrupt end when another bullet knocked a great hole in a low branch as I brushed past it in my headlong flight. Flying splinters struck my head; coarse wood dust got into my eyes and blurred my vision. Now that I was stumbling clumsily about like a clown in grotesquely large shoes, the shooting had stopped. Which could only mean that the marksman was reloading.

I saw the vague outline of a line of bushes some way off. There was a gap in it, and a bright light lured me that way. As I was still wondering whether to try going through this loophole, I heard the next shot. This time the projectile singed a small tuft of fur on my left side, and before I could immerse myself any further in the decision-making process I was sprinting for the bright gap as if someone had stuck a hot needle up my arse. The hunter just kept on firing, but I didn't care about that. The one thought in my mind was to get through the gate to light and safety.

When I finally disappeared into the bushes and came out again the other side, I found myself taking a crash course in a kind of reality to which I had previously been a stranger. That is, of course I'd seen such idiocies of
Homo sapiens
in literally concrete form, but not personally, only as what I took to be part of a particular horror film which appeared on the small screen with monotonous regularity. As my eyes gradually cleared again, they saw a spanking clean six-lane motorway, and on it a river of metal without any distinct beginning or end, engaged in pointless, compulsive movement. So I'd thought myself in Arcadia only a few minutes ago? Sadly, I had to admit that the Garden of Eden had all the cheery ambience of a rifle range, and if you wanted to escape there were dangerous metal monsters just waiting to flatten any deserter. A trap if ever I saw one.

I got up on my hind legs, leaned on the barrier beside the hard shoulder, and watched the river thundering past for a moment. Obviously the people who built this thing had never for a moment envisaged any kind of living creature but motorists existing in their wonderful landscape. How a person on four legs was to cross this infernal road where vehicles were shooting to and fro the whole time without being turned into pinkish entrails pâté was a mystery, and suggested that the builders had included mass murder in their calculations. I wondered where all those cars were going - or were they on their way back from somewhere? I thought of a stupid human saying: 'There's always something going on wherever we aren't.' Humans seemed to act on that precept, forever chasing happiness like hyper-mobile Sisyphuses and never getting within touching distance, rather as if they were setting out to cross the rainbow.

The next bullet hit the barrier and exploded with a terrifying screech. So the bushes behind me didn't obstruct the marksman's view, as I'd hoped; on the contrary, they were an ideal canvas on which the sun showed me in silhouette. Startled into movement by the shock, I ran into the road without thinking and raced across. I hadn't really expected the monsters roaring by to stop and wave me on in a friendly manner, but I had a vague memory of hearing, more than once, that even the most macho road-hog will step on the brakes, purely as a reflex action, when he sees something unexpected in his way. Lies, all lies! A lorry thundered towards me at full speed, and before I knew it all its hundreds of tons were passing over me like a derailed goods train. Pressed flat as a pancake against the asphalt, I didn't move, only a hair's breadth away from total derangement. When the colossus had thundered on, I tried a frantic sprint for the central reservation of the motorway, but I hadn't anticipated the nippy sports car which was just overtaking the lorry. The sight of this monster on wheels burned itself on my retina just as the sight of the furious bull is burnt on the eye of the incautious torero. It was an amazing machine, red as blood, paintwork gleaming, full of unbridled power and shaped like a steel dinosaur's egg. And as I stood there, rooted to the spot in awe and horror and staring at my executioner, I suddenly knew with total certainty that this masterpiece of engineering was Lucifer in person, bent on annihilating God's creation in the most brutal manner possible. I held my breath, aware that I was about to meet my Maker in order to ask him the reasons for such destructive-ness in person.

But God obviously makes exceptions, at least where I'm concerned. Someone or something struck me, and I actually felt the impact going right through my body, flinging me forwards to the edge of the central reservation. Before I could give the red scourge a farewell glance it had disappeared again in search of new victims. I was beginning to feel numb, and I'm not too sure how I managed to cross the other half of the motorway. However, one last record-breaking leap took me over the barrier on the far side.

Even while I was still in the air, a strange sensation that I was moving in slow motion came over me. I felt a bubble of euphoria burst inside me, setting off shudders of thankfulness in spite of my physical aches and pains. I'd cocked a snook at malevolent Fate yet again. Things could only improve from now on. But when I looked down in free flight, so as to coordinate my landing the other side of the barrier, I was sorry to see that it was still going to be uphill work, only uphill work going downhill, as it were, because who'd have guessed that the metal barrier beside the road had a steep slope beyond it, almost a precipice, going at least fifteen metres down? It looked as if it were padded with foliage, but there were numbers of young evergreens waiting for me like a fakir's bed of nails. In a tight corner like this no doubt James Bond would have plucked a parachute from his shoe, but yours truly had to make do with a hoarse yell for help and put his faith, such as it is, in what's said to be the most flexible set of bones and muscles in the world. My euphoria changed to sheer panic while I was still in flight, well before I came down in the vale of woe beneath me.

It wasn't surprising that I landed on all four paws as usual, but on this occasion I had a good deal of trouble in spite of our miraculous natural gift. I couldn't get even the slightest foothold on the ground, which sloped so steeply that it was like a terrifying slide. I turned a somersault the moment I touched the ground and then rolled on down that murderous incline, screeching and uttering delirious prayers. As I went down I collided with several young fir trees, which couldn't be expected to refrain from pushing their sharp needles and branches into my coat, like sloshed medieval soldiers armed with sharp spears making someone run the gauntlet. Ecologists don't tell you a lot about this sort of sadism on Mother Nature's part: such was my last thought before I finally came to rest in a bed of bracken, pricked and stung like an inexpert beekeeper. Not only did I exercise the playing-dead reflex, I decided it was the only proper life-style. Good heavens, did all forest-dwelling creatures have such an exciting time every day of their lives? Compared to these stirring events, my entire existence to date had been nothing but deep sleep. Not for the first time since my rash flight, I wondered whether the Almighty really had to come down quite so heavily on my aversion to certain amputations. Mightn't he let something nice happen to me for a change, even if it was only five minutes' rest ...?

He did, and in a more spectacular way than I could have hoped for in my wildest dreams.

Her voice was the bewitching hymn of unfathomable temptation addressed by Venus to her devoted servants. Oh, if only I could express that sweet complaint in words, if only I could convey the electrifying sensations that overcame me as I listened to her beguiling song! I was lying in the soft bed of bracken, all four legs outstretched, like a stuffed replica of myself, whimpering softly on account of my fearsome injuries, when the Eve of my desires raised her yearning voice. From the very first I knew that this particular call could not be made by a member of my own species, and yet there was something familiar linking it to the love-songs of our own queens, an unmistakable similarity of melody and tone. The difference lay in the dark depths of the singer's lament, interrupted now and then by an awesome hiss; it seemed to come from a world full of promise and yet still virgin. There was something mystical and wild about that voice, and something very, very demanding.

Instantly the throbbing pain in my limbs seemed about as important as the flatulence of a worm in Kathmandu. I jumped to my feet and looked hopefully around. However, the jungle of bracken grew above my head and obstructed my view, so I prowled away with the requisite caution in the direction from which I thought the voice was coming. On this side of the motorway the forest was rather different from the moist area on the other side; its varied flora consisted largely of oaks and hornbeams. These trees were stalwart ancients whose branches had been allowed to grow unimpeded over the centuries. The love-call of my phantom diva echoed on and on in this labyrinth, which was relatively dark because of the rampant growth of the trees, and for a moment I thought it was just elves playing a trick of sound on me. Perhaps elves really did live in the forest, as the old wives' tales claim. But then two fronds of bracken parted like the curtains in a theatre, and I saw the most desirable female form ever brought forth by the feline creation.

She lay semi-recumbent on a heap of leaves, like a royal sovereign giving audience, and as chance would have it the trees grew in a ring around the spot, forming a natural pavilion. A single ray of sun penetrated a gap in the leaf canopy that was its roof and fell on my forest queen like a spotlight directed on the star of the show, making her resemble an optical illusion with a bright aura. However, I was brought back to earth by realising that this was my first-ever meeting with a member of the species most closely related to us, the European
Felis silvestris
.(
8
) We of the domesticated kind speak of them respectfully as the Wild Ones. These forest-dwelling Felidae surely have to bear the heaviest cross of us all, and there are very strange rumours about them. Their extraordinarily secretive life-style, which makes it difficult even for scientists to keep them under observation, accounts for the name of 'grey ghosts' that country folk often give them.