Part 16 (1/2)
In seconds, the cat had entered the bathroom's stench.
Two more, to identify the source of fresh air.
Eleven to leap from the tub's rim to the sill and squeeze her head and front paws through and scrabble her strong hindquarters up and balance her weight and launch into darkness, tail flying out behind.
Three jumps took her across the grow-op's weedless back lawn. A slide to cover, under a rhododendron in the next-door garden. Thin leathery leaves festooned its branches, fallen ones lay on the cold ground.
A long scrambling rush took her, running low under fences and through hedges, to the end of the block. Under a j.a.panese maple she crouched, smelling, but the need for height was urgent. She leapt to a Douglas fir and went thirty feet up.
Since her escape, ninety seconds. She coughed.
Two dogs barked. A door opened.
In midnight terror, wings scissored away from the fir.
The cat sniffed water. Underground water, rain coming, salt. Animal fur, droppings, spray. Humans. Plants gra.s.ses bushes. Dead leaves loose, crackling, mashed, skeletal. Fish, sh.e.l.lfish, algae. Stiff bull-kelp on the stony beaches. Insects, their acid odours. Powdery bird-feathers. Bird-s.h.i.+t. A rabbit, decomposing. Insecticides, herbicides, pesticides. Also diesel, sulphur, fuel oil, hot metal, sawdust, transmission fluid, chlorine, gasoline, tar, rendering plant, concrete batch plant, wheat, logs, milled lumber, rubber, paint thinner, creosote-in billions, the molecules floated by.
Over there, that way, she smelled a density of trees. Something mechanical honked on the ocean. A dog got hauled indoors. Bright lights shone amid a thousand shadows. Fast-moving clouds spattered the heavens while a new moon appeared, vanished, again made the water glitter. Closer by, window lights, door lights, street lights. Someone rummaged through a garbage can and a yard light flashed on.
Restless, the cat moved up the fir. More birds flew. A bark. Stretched out, she let the Pacific northwest fill her damaged lungs and coat her palate. Down to the roots of her exceptionally long canines the flavours penetrated, entered her digestive tract to unite with her. The November night parted the hairs of her coat, drawing off the stench of cannabis, dead cow, human feces. She s.h.i.+vered. When clouds next covered the moon, she ran down the tree head-first.
In her exquisite camouflage she moved slow and smoky as a plume from a dying bonfire. Her pads silenced gravel, and a tabby kitten out exploring his night garden hadn't a chance. His spinal cord cracked like celery, his punctured windpipe hissed. To eat, she dragged her catch into ma.s.sed periwinkle. Around his neck looped a revolting thing. She tore his head off and moved her meal away from the circlet.
Down hill now, every sense thrilling. She coughed.
Between her and that far wooded darkness lay a barrier of brilliant noise. Back and forth the cat trotted by the highway. No choice. Only across. To gain her moment, she crouched on a guardrail. One trucker took her for a dog, what breed? Another, home on the prairies days later, told his son about a golden-grey monkey near the ocean.
She whimpered, rushed.
Safe, in a jungle of salal, salmonberry, morning-glory all wound through with tunnels, she went eastwards. Rats and mice stopped heart-still, sensing her amid dirty diapers, syringes, beer bottles, toasters, pop cans, condoms, rotting mattresses, rusted cylinders of hairspray and Lysol. She glided on. By the railway tracks, puddles blanched under sodium lights, and the water had a harsh savour. Coughing, she tasted her own blood. Cinders stuck between her toes. Now soothing gra.s.ses, stiff and dead, whose hissing rustle masked her pa.s.sage. Nearer the beach, saplings offered cover. The tide was coming in. She padded over rip-rap and driftwood, sniffed at sh.e.l.ls and a dead crab. She urinated, defecated, scratched at the sand to cover and trotted back into the tall gra.s.s, head low, haunches high.
The park's swimming pool, drained after Thanksgiving, had been replenished by rain. The water s.h.i.+mmered. Over the chain-link fence she flowed, her dapples interlacing with moonlight. Widgeons and mergansers took squawking flight, one mallard was too slow. Although her teeth sheared the flesh eagerly, she was more anxious than hungry and left the feathery bundle, instead drinking before traversing a marshy area to a line of trees by the grain terminal. The building groaned. For the cat, Lombardy poplars were poorly shaped but their height grateful. She perched. Some people stumbled by, mumbling, seeking shelter by the terminal, and later a racc.o.o.n waddled along with her kits.
The cat rearranged herself often, for the foliage was spa.r.s.e. When the darkness was about to fade, down she went, and another road pulled her through a tunnel reeking of skunk and burnt rubber. Next, at the foot of a hill, barbed wire ripped one shoulder. A valley of garbage then. Up. At last the forest.
Dank, chill, coastal November. Over the duff she moved, while news of her arrival broke into twitters and rustles. Then silence swelled. Her golden blink quick as a lizard's, she focussed on finding a good tree. On a high fir branch, weary, coughing, she curled up, drew her tail over her nose, closed her eyes. Under the lids, those fluttering ducks shattered the pool again. The day went by as she rested, not soundly.
Below her sloped forty acres of woodland, bounded to the north by Burrard Inlet where headlights always rimmed the enormous bridge, and by suburban houses to the south. Logged and logged again over a century of white settlement, these acres were now home to a gas company's tank farm; to stands of Douglas fir, white pine, cottonwood, oak, Manitoba maple, and the weed trees, scrub alder and sweet balsam poplar; to brambles and creepers and berries; to a hundred species of birds plus accidentals, rarities, and visitors; to five times as many insects; and to the common urban rats, skunks, mice, moles, voles, racc.o.o.ns, shrews, coyotes, squirrels, deer, cats and dogs both feral and domestic. Rarely, a cougar. To neofelis nebulosa most of these posed no threat, though all were unfamiliar, incomparable really-she'd known only the game ranch.
When dusk thickened, she began to travel. Simply to move meant delight, to feel rough bark give to her curved claws, to leap, to dangle by one paw, to hang by her hind legs at will, to peer through feathery conifer and shake her head against the tickling needles. Almost invisible she became, her blotches blending into the rainy evening.
Food: she smelled it everywhere.
Water: streams trickled down the hillside to the Inlet.
Shelter: trees by the hundred, though even the robust branches of the highest firs might not keep her dry. Cold was her enemy. Sunlight hadn't touched her flesh in years, but her prison had been heated. The autumn dankness, drawn into her lungs, easily followed trails scored by confinement into her bones and flesh. Stiffness came. Even though her judgment of height and distance remained superb, for thirty-six months her body hadn't lived the pounce, the snap and clinch of the canines; she hadn't rushed up a tree while her tail did its magical balancing act and the heart between her teeth quit beating.
Through the night she reconnoitred the aerial highways, thirty feet vertical, ninety horizontal, twenty vertical again. Through the trees she rippled, her sleekness attended by terror as she read the rainforest, a natural linguist. On the ground, her cold pads touched lightly as falling leaves, while vines and shrubs gave cover. Dog and cat feces lay about, near a big fence. The smell of the food those animals had eaten made her nose twitch with distaste, nor did she like that fence. Hunger insisted. Near dawn, she killed. The plump animal's blue eyes and cappuccino fur interested her not at all, but the tender fetuses tasted delicious. Then she drifted coughing through the woods towards a stream.