Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (28 page)

At this point, of course, it would have been easy to identify the murderers - if the satellite picture hadn't kept that last secret to itself. For the figures in the photographs were only blurred silhouettes, often just shapeless splodges because of the coarse graining of the film. In that case, you may ask, how did I know they were animals at all? Because of their green eyes. Some of them had looked up just as the picture was taken, as if they felt instinctively that something in space was spying on them. So I absolutely must find out what the video cassettes showed.

Taking a great leap, I jumped off the surface and raced back to the studio. There I got my teeth into the first cassette I chanced upon on the bottom shelf and pulled it out. I pushed it into the slit of the video recorder and pressed the play button. At first the small screen remained black, and I almost exploded with frustration. But then, suddenly, a scene of happy relaxation appeared. Several men with long hair and beards, most of them wearing shorts and braces, were sitting round a large wooden table in a forest clearing, singing a comic song at the tops of their voices; it was hard to make out the words. They were pretty well primed, as you could tell from the number of empty wine bottles in the picture. They seemed to be celebrating something. The wobbly camera, obviously operated by someone who was also sozzled, swayed to the right and lingered on another person. It was Diana. But a Diana several years younger, a conspicuously attractive woman with curly red hair, clear porcelain skin, and a happy smile on her face. She wore jeans cut off at the knee and a worn old T-shirt. There was no sense of melancholy at all about this figure, which radiated life, and nothing to suggest that bitterness would mark her face so deeply some day. As she talked and laughed with the men round the table, she was petting Ambrosius, whom she held close to her breast. Ambrosius seemed to be from another time too: he was still only a baby.

The picture wobbled more and more violently, and finally blanked out with a jerk. The next scenes showed Diana and the men, who obviously formed a team, putting up the cage and hut I'd found in the forest this afternoon. Heavy construction and welding equipment had been brought for the purpose, and there were a number of Land-Rovers and trucks loaded with building materials standing around. So Ambrosius had lied to me about this too. Diana was not a scientist doing research in forestry at all, she was a zoologist or biologist. In fact, from the way she was telling the men what to do she seemed to be head of the team. Pictures followed showing the various stages of construction and the planting of vegetation in the cage. Finally the huge prison was complete and they celebrated again, with another merry party. My friend Ambrosius, growing larger from one phase to another, watched all these activities from the background with an inquisitive expression. I glanced briefly at the display on the video recorder showing how much tape there still was to run. The remaining playing time of the cassette was only a few minutes, and I wondered whether I might not discover more about the captives in the cage themselves from the other cassettes. But just as I was about to press the Stop button, the screen came up with a sensational surprise.

After a sudden cut, the camera was suddenly turned towards the sky. After a while a helicopter appeared, to the accompaniment of shouts of joy. The chopper, a sports model, came lower and lower and finally landed near the cage. Diana and her team went over to it and enthusiastically welcomed an elderly man in glasses. Then they unloaded about a dozen small cages draped in cloth from the hold. The cages were carried into the big complex, where the covers were taken off and the contents let out.

When I saw what ran out of those cages, the surprise was like a slap in the face - a slap for being so slow on the uptake. There were a lot of small animals, all of them still young, and I knew their species very well indeed. I'd met them in the same spot only a few hours ago: the Wild Ones, now older and more numerous, and no doubt very different from what their human patrons had expected. It was as if scales fell from my eyes. Before Diana's team began their programme of reintroduction to the wild,
Felis silvestris
had been extinct in this forest. As with the lynxes, the whole thing was a classic case of human restoration of the environment. Species threatened by extinction were to be re-settled in their former habitats. They'd been lying to me all along, starting with my beloved Alcina, who had made her tribe out to be watchful guardians of their native forest operating to a stern moral code. Tribe? How come 'tribe'? Another slap in the face! I'd been so proud of what I knew about the behaviour of the Wild Ones, but I'd failed to see their most striking deviation from it. In nature, the timid 'grey ghosts' lived solitary lives, coming together only briefly to mate. They did not hunt in packs, and they didn't form tribes either.

I tugged the cassette out of the video recorder with my jaws, snatched another one at random from the shelves, and started it playing. Diana, years older now and grey-haired, was standing in the researchers' hut injecting something into a wild female who was shaggy and thin and looked very ill indeed. The camera moved to a truck on which five dead animals lay, their eyes staring. It looked as if some epidemic were raging, something which the immune system of the creatures in Diana's care couldn't cope with. I remembered the empty medicament containers behind the house; I could fit them into the puzzle now. At the same time I began to realise that these living proofs of humanity's guilty conscience, presumably conceived in captivity, perhaps by artificial insemination, never had any chance of reverting to their wild origins. Man had turned nature inside out, and any attempt to rectify matters led to weird mutations.

Diana's features became gloomier from picture to picture, sadder, more bitter. The happy young woman of the old days was inexorably changing into a resigned researcher. And as time went on certain extras slipped into this shattering record of events, extra features that might seem insignificant but made the careful observer unbearably sad. By now the experimental animals had been let out of the cage into freedom; the acclimatisation period was obviously over. But instead of running off into the woods, where a wild if hard life awaited them, they crouched timidly around the cage, yowling at their human attendants, who watched from a distance with concern. In this picture, Diana was wearing the woollen cap with loose earflaps for the first time as she conducted a heated professional discussion with a colleague. Subsequently all the other items which had already branded themselves on my brain in a different connection were added to her outward appearance: the red and black check lumber-jacket, the nickel-framed sunglasses, and finally the hunting gun, originally used to fire anaesthetic darts. By the time the metamorphosis was complete, I was looking straight into the masked face of the terrifying hunter who would now obviously fire at anything with pointed ears. And most significant of all, with live ammunition. Diana the committed scientist who once wanted to give the Wild Ones their wild nature back had become a pitiless murderer of animals. But why so extraordinary a change of attitude? And why had the nature of the Wild Ones also undergone a change, a change making them murderers who would even kill each other now?

I didn't feel like watching any more videos. It was too time-consuming, and it didn't give me the real background. It would be more useful to get first-hand information, talk to someone who'd been in on the whole sequence of events from the start.

As if I'd come under fire from Diana's hail of bullets again, I raced out of the room into the hall, where there was a wooden staircase leading to the first floor. I shot up it and saw a half-open door on the landing. Candlelight fell through the doorway into the corridor, a sign that Ambrosius was deep in his nocturnal studies. I stormed in - and came upon a scene of incredible chaos. All the books had been knocked off the shelves in a fit of frenzied rage, and their pages were torn and shredded. The magical bits and bobs from all over the world, probably brought home by Diana when she travelled abroad to study, lay smashed and broken on the floor. There were deep scratch marks on the statues of African gods; all the bows and arrows, brightly painted spears and other such hunting weapons had been battered into splinters. The whole room looked as if a wild horse had been rampaging round it. Only the candles burning in the old candlesticks were intact, standing in their usual places and spreading their cosy light as if they were superior aristocrats who could only turn up their noses at the crazy behaviour of the common people. I thought I knew why they had been spared. If they too had been overturned in the course of this deliberate devastation, there could easily have been a fire setting first the house and then the whole forest alight and reducing it all to ashes. But the forest was still sacred to the hooligans who had done this - a kind of gigantic church, although a church they had long since desecrated.

Ambrosius was lying on his back on the desk. All the pages of scribbled writing soaked up his blood and made him a deep red bier. He was badly injured, breathing stertorously, while bloody mucus dripped from the corners of his mouth and from his nose. He was waving his paws in the air as if in slow motion. I let out a shriek of horror and jumped up on the desk. His once apricot-coloured coat looked as if it had been turned inside out. It was covered with blood and a great many bites, some of them so deep that his internal organs were showing. His face looked as if it had been mistaken for a practice fencing target. Stab wounds, scratches and cuts made his once attractive countenance almost unrecognisable, turning it to a dreadful grimace of horror.

I carefully put my paws round him and raised his head a little way. Slowly, groaning, he opened his eyes and looked mournfully at me.

'F-F-Francis! What a mercy you're the last thing I shall ever see. I thought it would be those mo-mo-monsters.'

'Hush, Ambrosius, you mustn't talk now. Diana will soon be back. She'll patch you up.'

'Is that some kind of a jo-jo-joke? Diana's out hunting. Hunting the sp-sp-spirits she co-co-conjured up.'

'Hush all the same. You're wounded. And I know everything now anyway.'

'I venture to d-d-doubt that, my friend. Anyway, you shouldn't try to know everything in life, or you end up looking foo-foo-foolish in the end. Like me.'

He swallowed, and spat out more blood, which covered his chin and then spread over on his throat and chest like a red bib.

'Keep quiet, Ambrosius! I don't want to know anything. I can see you meant well.'

'P-p-perhaps. Suddenly I'm not so s-s-sure. Funny, eh? Francis, please, don't condemn them, think of them as vi-vi-victims driven into this desperate situation.'

'But why our brothers and sisters on the farms, Ambrosius? They were the murderers' cousins, more or less.'

'That was why. There was one little di-di-difference: while one lot had a life of comfort, the others had to exist in misery and deprivation. They'd forgotten how to h-h-hunt even before they were born, Francis. F-f-first the males died, because they turned out more sus-sus-susceptible to the diseases that ravaged them during the long periods of famine. Those who were left faced the d-d-deadly paradox that the forest in which mankind had dumped them was too small and too short of prey to support them all. Even if they'd eventually 1-1-learned to hunt properly most of them would still have died. Th-th-that was why they got together to form a tribe. And that was why they attacked their do-do-domesticated cousins, who having no natural enemies enjoyed a deceptive sense of security. But that wasn't the only r-r-reason. Hatred came into it, and as you rightly suspected, a kind of s-s-semi-cannibalism. You see, they very soon found out that the blood of their di-di-distant relatives contained substances which could help them survive famine for a few days. So they t-t-tore pieces of flesh out of their victims, but something stopped them devouring the corpses whole. And then that became a satanic ritual, like a good old family custom. Your beloved Alcina turned out to be the most be-be-bestial of the lot, by the way.'

I rapidly went back over our meeting again in my mind, and came to a depressing conclusion. When I met Alcina she'd had a tuft of brown hair matted with blood sticking out of her mouth. She explained it by saying she'd been after a rabbit before I turned up and it had got away. Now I was haunted by a memory which cast doubt on her tale in a dreadful way. The first corpse I'd encountered in the farmyard, the body of the fat, mutilated member of our kind whose head was severed, had brown fur too. Could she really have been capable of such an act of unutterable cruelty? Impossible! Unthinkable! What a strange world this was, where angel-faced beings challenged the devil on his own ground - and seemed to do it successfully too.

'So you gave them those medieval names yourself, Ambrosius?'

His eyes were slowly closing, and he could look at me only through half-open lids. He was bleeding to death in my paws. No Diana, no vet, no one could help him now. Least of all Francis the brilliant detective.

'I di-di-didn't just give them names, Francis, I gave them dignity too. I gave them the illusion of being wild creatures identified with the heart of the fo-fo-forest itself. Sad to say, it was only an illusion; they resemble a dried-up thorn bush rather than the forest. I became more and more fa-fa-fascinated by
Felis silvestris
as the project of reintroducing them to the wild progressed. To outward appearance, I was Diana's sp-sp-spoilt pet. But in secret I found I felt a dangerous affinity with the Wild Ones, and made myself their undercover adviser in their s-s-sad fate. I read all the scientific books about them, and then began writing works of my own on the subject. I really developed my writing skills just for this purpose. The skill of hypnosis, on the other hand, is o-o-only a conjuring trick anyone can master if he really puts his mind to it. Then came the day when Project Ark had to be declared a failure. The farmers had complained to the fo-fo-forestry commissioners that the Wild Ones were attacking their livestock. So open season was declared on them and they could be shot. That broke Diana's heart, but even she c-c-couldn't close her eyes to the facts. And although she'd been the most committed supporter of the environmental programme, she was the first to change from anaesthetic darts to live cartridges. She pro-pro-probably had you in her sights so often because you look rather like one of the Wild Ones. I for one couldn't go along with such mass murder, I was too obsessed with the Wild Ones, and I ca-ca-callously accepted the murder of my own brothers and sisters. I thought up two strategies to save my friends - one directed at human beings, the other at the fo-fo-forest creatures. The cu-cu-current position of the Wild Ones was always determined from pictures taken by the Ark eco-satellite. It was simple, because they always went round together, and a whole tr-tr-troop was easy to spot. So I secretly manipulated the satellite to give clear pictures but the wr-wr-wrong coordinates and times. Then I acted the part of Black Knight at night for the be-be-benefit of the forest creatures, to divert suspicion from the Wild Ones and show them, de-despite everything, in a rosy light. By the way, Crazy Hugo and the mastiff were their first victims. They killed the couple only a few days after they left the sewers. Th-th-that's what gave me the idea.'