He had to go. He could not refuse this. The hunger and restlessness would be unendurable.
He turned and bent to kiss Laura again, fearing to hurt her as he held her face gently, very gently, with his paws.
"Wait for me by the fire. Stay warm, and I promise you, I won,t be long."
He began to run as soon as he left the orbit of light surrounding the house. Swiftly, he entered the living whispering forest, running on all fours at such speed he scarce saw anything around him, the scent of the cats pulling him like a vibrant cord.
The coast winds died in the deep redwoods, and the rain was a mist against his eyes.
As he drew near the sleeping cat, he moved upwards into the lower branches of the trees, easily traveling as fast as he had on all fours, gaining on the lair of the cat, as the cat, catching his scent perhaps, woke and rattled the undergrowth around it, alerting the cubs whose low growls and hisses he could hear.
He knew instinctively what the cat would do. It was crouching low, fully expecting him to pass near to it, when it would spring with the full power of its hind legs and seek to overtake him from behind. It would sink its teeth into his spine if it could, disabling him immediately, and then tear out his throat. He saw this, saw it as if the scent carried the modus operandi.
Ah, poor brave and senseless animal that it would become the prey of a man beast who could outwit it and outfight it; his hunger, his rage for it, only grew.
As he neared the lair now the cubs, great sixty- to seventy-pound cats themselves, bolted from the wet foliage; the mother cat crouched, ready to spring. It was powerful, this tawny creature, perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds, and it sensed it was in danger. Did it know by his scent what he was?
If you do, you know more than I may ever know, he thought.
He let out a huge roar to give it fair warning, and then leapt from one tree to another before it, enticing it to pounce.
It took the bait, and as fast as it sprang for him, he whipped around and descended on it, his arm going around it as he sank his fangs into the tough layer of muscle covering its neck.
Never had he felt a creature this powerful, this big, this filled with the brute drive to survive. In a frenzy of snarling sounds, they went down together, his face pressed to its thick, odiferous fur, scrambling and struggling in the thorny vines and crashing wet leaves. Again and again, Reuben sank his fangs, wounding, maddening the animal, and then shredding the thick resistant layer of living meat with all the strength he had in his jaws.
The cat would not give up. Its long powerful body convulsed, its hind legs kicking. It gave a deep whining and furious cry. Only as he came round on top of it, forcing its head back with his left claw, was he able to kill it, piercing the softer underside of its neck, fangs closing deep on its spine.
The flesh and the blood were his now. But the cubs had come. They had surrounded him and they moved in. Firmly holding the carcass of the mother in his teeth, he sprang up the thick bark of an old redwood, easily climbing higher than the cats could climb. It felt good to his aching jaws to carry the kill ever upwards, the cat,s heavy body bouncing against his chest.
He settled high above against a thick lattice of branches and rough splintery leaves. Creatures of the heights fled from him. The upper reaches rustled and sang with the swift retreat of winged things.
He feasted on the salty meat of the cat slowly, devouring great pieces of dripping flesh.
For a long moment, after he was satisfied, he watched the angry, menacing cubs below, their yellow eyes flashing and glinting in the dark. He heard their low growls.
He shifted the thick body of the mother against his left arm so that he could feast on her belly, and rip into the soft juicy tissue inside.
He was in a kind of delirium again, because he was able to eat until his hunger was gone. Simply gone. He lay back against the crunching branches and half shut his eyes. The rain was a soft sweet veil of silver around him. As he glanced upwards the heavens opened as if for a laser beam, and he saw the moon, the full moon, the meaningless and irrelevant full moon in all its blessed glory, floating in a wreath of clouds, against the distant stars.
A deep love of all he saw settled over him - love for the splendor of the moon and the sparkling fragments of light that drifted beyond it - for the enfolding forest that sheltered him so completely, for the rain that carried the dazzling light of the skies to this shimmering bower in which he lay.
A flame burned in him, a faith that a comprehending Power existed, animating all this that it had created, and sustaining it with a love beyond anything that he, Reuben, could imagine. He prayed for this to be so. He wondered if, somehow, the whole forest was not praying for this, and it seemed to him then that all the biological world was alive with prayer, with reaching, with hope. What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?
He felt no pity for the cats circling restively below in the darkness. He had thought of pity, yes, but he did not feel it; he seemed deeply part of a world where such an emotion made little or no sense. After all, what would the cats have thought of pity? The cats would have torn him apart if they could. The mother would have feasted on him at any opportunity. The mother had brought the long happy life of Galton,s cherished dog to a violent close. How easy a prey to her Reuben must have seemed.
The horror was that he was worse than anything known in the realm of the cat, wasn,t he? Even the bear could not have outfought him, he figured. But then he would have to see about that, wouldn,t he, and the thrill of the possibility made him laugh.
How wrong people were about the werewolf, imagining him to devolve into a mindless frenzy. The werewolf was not a wolf, no, nor a man, but an obscene combination of the two, exponentially more powerful than either one.
But right now, it did not matter. The language of thought was ... just the language of thought. Who could trust language? Words like "monster," "horror," "obscene." The words he,d written so recently to Billie, what were these words but weightless tissuelike membranes too weak to support the essence of any fragrant or pulsing thing.
Big cat, dead cat, cat who killed the warm and loving thing that was Galton,s dog. Dead. I loved every second of it!
He was half dreaming. He lapped at the great gash in the cat,s stomach, and sucked up the blood as if it were syrup. "Good-bye, sister cat," he whispered, nuzzling its grinning mouth, running his tongue along its dead teeth. "Good-bye, sister cat; you fought well."
And then he let go of her, his trophy, and she went down, down, down through the net of branches and fell to the soft hungry earth amongst her brood.