But she feared her feline peers; she feared the vehemence of the clowder leaders, their fierce circling and hissing and striking out. She wouldn't challenge that hierarchy of big, mean cats. Not many cats ran in a clowder like a pack of dogs, but feral cats often lived together in such a clan-the pack leader had told her that-for strength within their own territory and for protection. He said her own group ran in a clowder because of who they were, because they were not like other ferals.
The dog had found that out. Found out that she was not simply another frightened kitty.
The woman had been on the hill when she rode that dog; the woman must have laughed. The clowder cats didn't like the woman, but the kit liked to slip close to her, unseen. She liked to see the woman take pleasure in the fog and in the dawn. The woman loved the hill and loved the sky and the sea, and so did the kit love those things. Nor did she think it strange to have such thoughts, any more than it was strange to be always hungry. Her thoughts were part of her, her hunger was part of her-hunger was a beast's natural condition. What else was there but this wary and hungry existence-and then her private thoughts to warm her?
Yet there was something else. There was more in life than hunger and fear and cold-more, even, than her own excited musings. But what that something was, she hadn't worked out. She knew only that somewhere food was plentiful and delicious and that one could be warm and there were soft beds to sleep on-the kind of sleep where a cat needn't doze with one eye open, jerked awake by the slightest sound.
Finishing the crumbs, and finding no homely wisdom scattered among them through the dirt, she crept out of the grass into the gusting wind and leaped atop a boulder, stood up bold in the blow, surveying the hill that tossed and rippled around her. Grass lashed and ran in silver waves, and beyond it the sea crashed and surged like a gigantic and sensuous animal spitting its foam white against the sky.
With her mottled black-and-brown coloring, her blazing yellow eyes, and the long hair sticking out of her ears in two amazing tufts, the young cat resembled a small bobcat more than a domestic feline. Her thin body seemed too long for a normal cat, and she was far more swift and agile.
She hadn't a bobcat's tail, though, but a long, fluffy plume, an appendage of amazing length lashing as importantly as a flag of national significance; and though her coat was dense and short, she had longhaired pantaloons like furry chaps, her fluffy parts so bushy that one had to wonder if God, in some temporary absentmindedness, had fashioned this cat from leftover and mismatched parts.
Perhaps God had been in a joking mood when he made her? He seemed, as well, to have filled her with more imaginings than any proper cat could contain. The very look in her round yellow eyes and the set of her little thin face implied teeming and impatient dreams, wild and untamable visions.
This cat had no name. She had made for herself a dozen names as ephemeral as the wildflowers that came and went across the hillside. But if she had a real, forever, and secret name that belonged to her like her own paws and tail, she didn't know what it was.
Standing in the wind atop the boulder, she speculated about the mice that burrowed beneath the stone, that she could never catch, and about the songs the wind whispered and the habits of the cottontail rabbits she had scented in the grass (I'm faster than any rabbit. Why can't I catch them?), and about the nature of the gulls that wheeled and screamed above her. And, filled to bursting with questions, in her fierce small presence shone a power far bigger than she, a power that glowed from her yellow eyes, and of which she had little understanding.
But now, far below her along the highway, another cat came trotting, leaped into the grass at the foot of the hill, and started up toward her. This cat was not one of her clowder.
But it was not a stranger, either. She had seen this one before, this brown tabby with the peach-tinted nose and ears. The cat disappeared suddenly, into the whipping tangles. She waited for it to appear again, her yellow eyes wide, her pink mouth open in a soft panting.
The cat poked her head out, looking up toward the boulders, her gaze so intent that the tortoiseshell kit took a step back. The two remained frozen in a staring match not of confrontation but of curiosity. Intense, wary, excited. Diffidently, the scrawny kit waited for the older cat's lead-but suddenly the adult cat backed away again and vanished into the grass as if uncertain in her own mind.
The stray fascinated Dulcie but filled her with a peculiar fear. Even at this distance, she could see in the kit's eyes a difference, a bright wildness.
How thin the kit was, all frail little bones, but with that balloon tail and those huge pantaloons. When Dulcie drew back out of sight, the kit, shifting nervously from paw to paw, opened her pink little mouth.
She yowled.
Three shrill, demanding yowls, amazingly loud and authoritative for such a small morsel, an imperative command. Fascinated, Dulcie was about to show herself again and approach closer when the kit crouched, staring away past Dulcie, wide-eyed, and suddenly she spun and fled like a feather sucked away in a whirlwind.
She was gone. The hill was empty. Dulcie reared up to look behind her and saw Lucinda Greenlaw coming up the hill, and with her, stumbling along at a hurried and uneven gait, came Pedric.
But perhaps it was not Lucinda who had startled the kit, nor even Pedric, because at the humans' approach, a half dozen cats reared up in the grass staring at Lucinda and Pedric, then leaped away like terrified birds exploding in every direction, vanishing wild and afraid. These were surely a part of the kit's clowder, surely she had run at their cue.
Dulcie thought it strange that Lucinda would bring Pedric on her solitary walk, that she would bring anyone-though she did seem to trust the old man; she seemed to have a closeness to Pedric as she had with Newlon.
Her friendship with Pedric was new and tentative. She had not met Pedric or most of the Greenlaw family until they arrived for the funeral, while she had known Newlon longer, Wilma said; and it seemed to Dulcie that Lucinda had some sort of quiet understanding with Newlon.
When Pedric and Lucinda headed in her direction, Dulcie slipped beneath a tangle of dense-growing broom bushes. How very much at home old Pedric looked as he climbed Hellhag Hill, almost as if he belonged there. Watching the two approach, she glimpsed the tortoiseshell kit again creeping down the hill toward the two humans, her yellow eyes bright with curiosity.
"Such a peaceful hill," Pedric said, sitting down with his back to a boulder, very close to where Dulcie sat unseen.
Lucinda made herself comfortable on the little folded blanket she always carried. "I've come here for years. I like its solitude."
Pedric looked at Lucinda strangely. "Solitude. That puts a kinder shape to loneliness."
She looked at him quietly.
"The loneliness of living with Shamas."
"Perhaps," she said.
Pedric's lean old body cleaved easily to the lines of the hill. "It is a fine hill, Lucinda."
"Do you sense its strangeness?"
He inclined his head, but didn't answer.
"I come here for its strangeness, too."
They were silent awhile; then he turned, looking hard at her, his thin, wrinkled profile fallen into lines of distress. "Why didn't you ever leave him? Why, Lucinda? Why did you stay with him?"
"Cowardice. Lack of nerve. When he began with the women, I wanted to leave. I tried to think where to go, what to do with my life. I have no family, no relatives."
She picked a long blade of grass, began to slit it lengthwise with her thumbnail. "I was afraid. Afraid of what Shamas might do-such a lame excuse."