Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (14 page)

I knew all this about the Wild Ones because I'd studied the scientific literature on the subject in the past. At the time I happened to be going through a depressing mid-life crisis, as they call it, and was feeling rather cut off from my roots, so I embarked on this piece of research in an attempt to find my way back to them. But no book in the world could have shown me the overwhelming magnificence of one of these wild cousins of mine in real life. The basic colour of her soft fur was grey tabby with yellowish lights in it. Her powerful head held a pair of penetrating, light green eyes which registered the slightest movements in her vicinity with the sensitivity of a seismograph. My
belle de jour
was about a quarter again as big as me, with a much larger and bushier tail. At present she was rolling lasciviously on the ground and washing her paws now and then before continuing her siren song. I suspected that it wasn't pure chance I found her in this state of extreme excitement: there was a trace of blood and an almost invisible tuft of brown hair at the corner of her mouth. It looked as if she had been hunting unsuccessfully - her prey had probably managed to get away with a slight injury - and was thus denied the release from stress she longed for. So her fierce hunting instincts had changed to an urgent sexual need. I was faced yet again with the curious interplay of aggression and physical passion among our ranks.

Then she spotted me. Our eye contact was like the collision of two suns careering through space, uniting in a flow of boiling lava. No expression of surprise crossed her face when she saw me, only a satisfied smile as if her trap had finally snapped shut. I could smell her delightful odour some metres off, and the unbounded surge of my instincts made me feel I'd faint dead away. I had to mate with this grey ghost on the spot, even if she gave me a bloody nose for it.

'Welcome, little prince!' she began, narrowing her eyes until they were mere slits with the pupils glinting through them. Then she began rolling very slowly on her own axis on the ground, watching me closely all the while.

'Aren't you afraid all alone in this dark forest, so far from your palace?' she inquired. 'Or are you mingling with the people in the time-honoured way, looking for the prettiest girls in your kingdom? You're in luck! Here's your most loyal subject at your command.'

'Hold on,' I said hesitantly. 'For one thing I'm not a prince, and for another you're no one's subject, my dear! No, you're a Wild One, and the most enchanting Wild One I've ever seen - though I have to admit you're also the first.'

She smiled, purring, and for a moment it looked as if her irises and pupils would fade out entirely, making way for a turbulent turquoise sea.

'Whereas I'd call
you
about as wild as a dachshund, little prince. If you weren't so sweet, I could fancy teaching you a few wild ways. As it is, why not let nature and nurture unite? My name's Alcina. What's yours?'

'Francis - but my true name is Passion! And believe it or not, Alcina, but the real reason you see me here at all is because I insisted on hanging on to my nu ... er, to the inextinguishable wildness within me. You've set my wild heart aflame, princess, and may all the fire in it now flow into you ...'

I was whispering these sweet nothings like an oily Latin lover as my paws, almost without my noticing, stealthily brought me prowling towards her. I didn't know if she realised what my stop-and-go tactics were in aid of, but I was going to considerable trouble to move a bit closer whenever she turned her head away. In a very short time I was right next to my self-styled loyal subject, drinking in all the concentrated force of the impression made on me by the sight and scent of her. The odours emanating from her glands drove me positively mad with desire, and her sinuous movements almost had me flinging myself on her like some clumsy beginner. Only her aggressive spitting, growling and snapping prevented me from losing control entirely and getting my coat decorated with a pattern of painful love-bites. Such behaviour may seem inappropriate to the act of mating, but it's normal in queens on heat, something I have often regretted in view of the positively submissive sexual attitude of the human female. However, Alcina's perilous Black Widow charms drove my desire to incalculable heights quite new to me. What I intended to do, or rather what the urge which had taken possession of me intended to do, entailed considerable danger. I was going to mate for the first time with a beauty not of my own species and whose habits were entirely unknown to me. But carnal lust is like a torpedo: once it's fired you can't bring it back and it won't rest until it has reached its target, even at the price of self-destruction. I might be about to unite with an angel of death, but I braced myself and then, in defiance of my previous experience of love, I made a rush at her.

It was my good luck that I caught her just as she was finishing a roll, so that she'd seen my attack only out of the corner of her eye - and my bad luck that as she was lying on her back she had all four paws free to rake my face into bloody furrows with her sharp claws. I should have known better, dammit! She hadn't even pressed her body flat to the ground, let alone swung her tail over to the side to expose the glowing gateway of passion. Perhaps my rash action didn't come into the category of stupidity after all, but was just the randiness of a dirty old man. Well, anyway, I had to make the best of the situation I'd set up. We went for each other with our claws, but though stabbing pains pierced my body, erotic frenzy brought me to a state of ecstatic anaesthesia in which I relished every stab as the sharp spice to an exquisite meal. Meanwhile I could smell her hot breath as it came out in gasps through her shining incisors. It smelled of burning sulphur, as if her passion would spew fire at the whole world, it smelled of the harsh winds of the savannah - and it smelled of blood. It seemed she'd been able to do more damage than I'd thought to the prey that got away. Locked together like two wrestlers in mortal combat, we were now performing a breakneck dance of dark lusts which showed love in its true aspect: an eternal struggle for release. I tried to grasp the scruff of her neck in my teeth and exert the carrying grip that would make her freeze. However, as her blows and bites grew fiercer, making my body begin to feel as if it were being dissected alive, cold rage came over me. I flung myself on her with a shrill cry, forced her to the ground and sank my teeth into the scruff of her neck - just far enough for her to feel them prick, but of course no further. She immediately gave vent to an imploring whimper, raised her rump in the air, swung her tail over to one side and showed me her precious treasure.

We mated before the eyes of the ancient gods, to the accompaniment of jungle drums and the call of grotesque, curved horns. Those gods, who needed no cathedrals to make themselves heard, blessed us with a sense of total union. We merged with one another wholly, at the same time merging with the forest, the light, the life present in every atom of our surroundings. All her passionate whimpering beneath me, all my groans of bliss, all around us that was cracking, chirping, or even just existing in silence, all this swelled to a river of sound that made our inmost being tremble. The old gods without human features, gods who grew horns and bristles, gods who grunted and squeaked, the true gods of the wilderness urged our bodies on: more, more, faster, faster! At the moment of climax we died, becoming earth, plants, water. Yet at the same time we were reborn many times over through the miracle of impregnation, as creatures superior to all others, with the strongest muscles and tautest sinews, the most exquisite bones and the purest blood. We ourselves became those primeval gods to whom sacred nature really belongs.(
9
)

When I got off Alcina and scurried for cover, my life-giving tool was just about bursting with its exertions. The tiny sharp spines on it which stimulated ovulation in her paradisal grotto had hurt, so her aggressive tendencies were now like a can of kerosene begging for a burning match. Pleasure and pain, the perfect Siamese twins. I would have another go at her later, and she would let me, but for the moment we had to content ourselves with cleaning our overheated reproductive equipment. I set about this pensive occupation with my sandpaper tongue, but my partner was not quite so particular about cleaning. She mewed frantically, let herself fall sideways on the leaves, and began the game of rhythmic rolling all over again.

'Run out of steam already, little prince?' she gasped, curling her paws sensuously into little hooks. 'At home in your palace I suppose you ring for the court doctor to come and give you a fortifying suppository after such exertions.'

Now that my mind was beginning to clear again, I was struck by the way she expressed herself. Did all members of the
Felis silvestris
species employ this refined style, or was I just a victim of received notions about the rough way country bumpkins are supposed to talk? The various branches of our family have no difficulty in communicating with each other, except for those of our relatives in whom the bone at the root of the tongue is replaced by cartilage. Lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards, including snow leopards and clouded leopards, have a language quite unlike ours, and unlike us they can roar. Of course every species has its own dialect, but I very much doubted whether all the Wild Ones spoke in such high-flown terms. My curiosity stimulated by all the excitement, I decided to ask a few questions.

'Don't worry about supplies, Alcina. There are funds in reserve, and not just in the bank where sturdier males than I are required to give of their best. But it could be we've chosen the wrong spot for genetic experiment. It so happens that just before I met you a hunter's bullets narrowly missed me. I suppose you Wild Ones are used to running such risks.'

'That's the trouble with you townies: you think too much instead of using your instincts, except maybe to study some human's appearance and draw conclusions about the kind of scraps he'll throw out so that you can make a beeline for the edible contents of his dustbin later. You've gone soft! You're beggars and scroungers too! If you were better acquainted with our tribe then you'd know it's more likely we could leave a little pile of shit on a hunter's head unnoticed than that he'd ever get to see one of us.'

'Hey, what happened to your proper respect for your little prince all of a sudden, sweetie? And incidentally, isn't your own verbal style some way from the noble savage? The way my pathetic blunted instincts see it, you lot don't seem to be particularly good hunters yourselves. Unless I'm much mistaken you didn't get anything but a tuft of hair from the game you were chasing just now.'

'Well, fancy that! So our little prince turns out to be a brilliant detective! OK, so maybe that cunning rabbit did slip through my paws. These things happen. But there's more dignity in accepting such failures than in eating carrion from tins.'

'Not if the tins were designed by Philippe Starck, but never mind that for now. Alcina, I want to ask you what may sound a rather peculiar question. I won't go into the circumstances which brought me to this jungle in detail, but I must tell you that I learned some terrible things on the way, during an interlude in the realms of darkness. And I was told that universal harmony hadn't exactly broken out up here in the bosom of nature either. I gathered that brothers and sisters of my kind living on the local farms were in particular danger from terrorists ...'

'Oh, you must mean the Black Knight and his bloodthirsty goings-on.'

I felt my concentration drain away from my testicles and go back up to my brain. Really, my natural perversity was enough to make a cat laugh: faced with the choice between the amusements proper to my species and intellectual diversion, I always plumped for the latter! Not so long ago I'd been disowning any detective ambitions, with a view to beginning a new, carefree life as a tiger. And here I was already, in the middle of a not very veiled interrogation about something that was really none of my business. Curiosity, that old ruling passion of mine, seemed to have consumed so much of my brain that it was no more use for anything but solving mysteries. So now I was playing Chief Inspector in the Case of the Black Knight, without the faintest idea of the deadly consequences still ahead of me.

I must mean the Black Knight, must I? So that freak of nature was obviously famous in these parts. It was a wonder no animal conservationist had turned him in yet.

'You know him?' I asked.

'Well, we don't precisely swap recipes, if that's what you mean, but every child around here knows that he and his crazy dog are persecuting your farmyard friends.'

'Have you ever seen him commit one of his crimes?'

'No.'

'Has anyone else seen him do it?'

'No idea, but he's certainly at large in these woods. You're bound to come across him yourself some time if you stick around long enough. There isn't a shadow of doubt about that, or the fact that we're always having to save wilting Willies like you who've lost their way from starving to death.'

'Oh yes? I rather thought neither of us had anything to complain about where willies are concerned. But never mind that: I can't help noticing your teeth are not exactly chattering with fright at the thought of the monster.'

'Brilliant observation. We're immune to him, you see.'

'Why?'

'Do you really have to ask? Oh, Francis, the scraps of meat your master offers you as culinary delicacies have obviously clouded your powers of reasoning! Don't you really see any reason why my kind are spared the horror of the Black Knight?'