“If my name doesn’t make me different, then what does?” Ratha demanded.
“You’ll see, clan cat.” He turned his head sharply and pointed with a paw. “There’s a fat one over there.” Ratha followed his gaze and saw the grass rippling. She wanted an answer to her question more than she wanted another mouse, but she sensed she wouldn’t get it. At least not from him. She put away her annoyance and began to stalk, but she couldn’t help wondering what he meant.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Summer’s golden grass and lazy sun faded into wind and blowing leaves. The rushes beside the shore withered, turning brittle. Their crisp green odor turned dry and nutty. The mornings became cold and drizzly; the afternoons gray. Only once in a while did the sun seep through the clouds hanging above the lake. Everything smelled dank and rotten.
Ratha shed her summer coat and with it the last faint tracings of her spots. Her fur grew back thickly in gold and cream. She was pleased with her new beauty, but, to her dismay, it didn’t last. The autumn rain turned all the trails to mud and she returned from hunting soggy and spattered from nose to tail. Bonechewer also shed his copper fur for a somber brown, which looked black in the rain.
The weather kept small creatures in their burrows. Both Ratha and Bonechewer worked hard to keep their bellies full. There were times when they returned empty to their den and could only lie and listen to each other’s stomachs growl until hunger forced them to hunt again.
Ratha learned to eat lizards and earthworms and to chew on tubers she dug from the ground. She developed a taste for the noxious bare-tails, for they were often the only thing she could catch.
Autumn yielded to winter. The rain fell hard and often turned to sleet. Ratha and Bonechewer hunted by day and spent the bitter nights curled up with each other in a nest of leaves in a hollow pine. It got so cold that the one who slept closer to the entrance would wake shivering, his or her whiskers rimed with frost.
The morning was still and pale as Ratha poked her whiskers out of the den. She was alone, as Bonechewer had risen earlier to forage. She crawled out and shook herself. She felt itchy and irritable. There was a strange fragile feeling in the air, an uneasy lull between last night’s storm and the mass of heavy clouds crawling down the ridge above the lake.
Better hunt now, she thought, knowing that she and Bonechewer would spend most of the short day huddled together in their den while the new storm lashed the lake to churning froth and flattened the rushes.
She circled the old pine until she picked up Bonechewer’s scent. Soon she saw his tracks and followed them up along the lakeshore.
There she found him, up to his chest in muddy water. He was trying to drag something ashore. As Ratha came closer, she could see that his prize was the drowned carcass of a young deer. She waded in, despite the freezing water, and helped him haul it ashore.
“It hasn’t been dead long,” said Bonechewer, nosing the body. “For carrion, it is fresh. See? The eyes are still firm and clear.”
“A three-horn fawn,” Ratha said, noticing a bony swelling on the animal’s nose that matched the two horn-buds on its head. She placed a paw on the fawn’s ribs and rocked the carcass. It seemed oddly limp and the head rolled on the ground.
“Are you sure it’s fresh?” she asked Bonechewer. “Put your paw on the back. Here, between the shoulders.”
He did. “The back is broken,” he said, cocking his head. “So is the neck. And here are the marks of teeth. This beast didn’t drown. I think this is a kill.”
“Who would throw their kill into the lake?”
Bonechewer twitched his tail. “Someone may have lost it in the storm last night. He may have been dragging it along the ledges that overhang the lake on the far side. We may find the hunter’s body washed up further along the shore.”
Ratha sat down and stared at the carcass. The prickly sensation she had been feeling all morning had soured her temper. “Bonechewer, I haven’t seen any three-horns around the lake, or anywhere else here.”
“I haven’t either,” he answered, shaking his pelt dry. “There aren’t any. I’ve lived here long enough to know.”
“Then where did this one come from?”
He grinned. “Perhaps Meoran sent you a gift.”
“Bonechewer!” Ratha stamped, sending mud up her leg, spattering her chest. Again she stared at the carcass, feeling waves of heat wash over her. She was in no mood for mysteries. She should just eat and be done with it. Something kept her back. This animal had to belong to the clan herds. There was no other place it could have come from, for it was fat and well taken care of, not scrawny and wild.
Bonechewer yawned, “I don’t care where it came from. It’s fresh and both of us could use a good meal.”
“Yarrr,” Ratha agreed, although the sight of the slain clan animal disturbed her more than she would admit. She was sure Bonechewer was teasing, but she sensed truth behind his words, even if it was twisted. She glanced at her companion, who was already tearing at the fawn’s belly. The sound of him eating and the smell of flesh in the damp air made her stomach cramp with hunger. She joined him and ate.
When Ratha thought she couldn’t force another bite down her throat, she felt Bonechewer start and stiffen beside her. She wiped her muzzle on the inside of her foreleg and stared over the barrel of the kill. In a patch of weeds several tail lengths away, sat two intruders, one gray, one spotted. Ratha bristled and started to growl.
“Sss, no!” Bonechewer commanded and her challenge died into a puzzled whimper. She watched as he stepped, stiff-legged, in front of the carcass and faced the two.
These were the Un-Named, Ratha realized, her heart thudding in her chest. One was a half-grown cub and the other an elder, but they looked rough and wild. Their faces were wary, their eyes hunters’ eyes. Their smell, drifting to her through the drizzle, was a scent she had never smelled before. The Un-Named had a strong odor, both sour and musky at once. It was laced with a mixture of prey blood-scents, some old, some fresh. It held the stale scent of age and the smell of mud carried far between weary pawpads. And along with the scents of the Un-Named and the creatures they hunted came the wild scents of unknown valleys, plains and forests where a hunter might roam in freedom or die miserably of starvation.
Ratha stared at the Un-Named Ones and saw that what their smell told her was also written in their eyes. Would such a life allow them to learn anything more than survival ? She had been taught that the clanless ones knew nothing but the urge to fill their bellies. She knew better now. Bonechewer bore no name, yet he spoke as well as any in the clan. But she realized, as she glanced at him and then at the two Un-Named, he was as different from them as he was from those in the clan. She waited, watching Bonechewer. She saw his eyes narrow and his mouth open.
She waited for him to attack or to roar a challenge at the witless ones. He did neither. He spoke to the Un-Named cub as he would have spoken to her. “Do you travel alone with the gray, spotted-coat? Or do more follow?”
The strange cub got up and walked forward. The gray female remained seated, following the cub with eyes that seemed strangely unfocused and diffuse. Ratha thought at first that the gray was blind, but she saw the grizzled head turn and the slitted pupils move as the cub walked past.
She sought the cub’s gaze, thinking she would see the same dull stare. As his eyes met hers, she felt her fur rise. His gaze was as sharp and clear as Bonechewer’s. Yet he was Un-Named. Would he speak?
He waited, holding Ratha’s eyes as if he knew the question burning behind them. Then he turned to Bonechewer. “More follow, dweller-by-the-water. Hunting grows hard. We turn to other ways.”