Red Girl Rat Boy (14 page)

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 massed 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 grasses, stiff and dead, whose hissing rustle masked her passage. Nearer the beach, saplings offered cover. The tide was coming in. She padded over rip-rap and driftwood, sniffed at shells and a dead crab. She urinated, defecated, scratched at the sand to cover and trotted back into the tall grass, head low, haunches high.

The park’s swimming pool, drained after Thanksgiving, had been replenished by rain. The water shimmered. 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 raccoon waddled along with her kits.

The cat rearranged herself often, for the foliage was sparse. 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, raccoons, 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.

The cat’s remains lay near the house of a social worker. This woman was on staff at a shelter for the homeless in the Downtown East Side, where each workday meant eight hours at the core of human misery and comedy.

To continue doing her job well, she travelled regularly. Among the happiest trips were those in autumn, when she and her old setter went hunting in the Interior or up north. To the faint blow of sage-brush or the rain’s hum, woman and dog awoke at dawn. Perhaps the nearly winter sun had warmed the earth’s surface. With pleasure, she fingered the dirt. Solitude. No voices. Once by Nimpo Lake she opened her tent-flap to meet a young coyote’s serious gaze. Seconds passed before the animal withdrew into mist framing the water.

After these trips, the social worker again could look civic indifference in the eye. She could face heroin, schizophrenia, dying child-prostitutes. With skill she carved free routes around the rules. “No bullshit!” On her shifts, both staff and clients laughed, and each autumn her home freezer once more stood stocked with game. A wall displayed the deer-heads, the satin fur so dense and many-coloured, the antlers’ complexity. The taxidermists, though, never got the eyes quite right, no matter whether glass or space-age plastic. She always hoped for better.

Today, her old dog’s bladder and bowels awakened him before first light. Out they went, the setter’s movements slow and arthritic, through her gate at the forest’s edge. Gently she talked to him, rubbed his thin head for long affection’s sake. He’d done his last hunt. In the year this old boy would go to his rest and a new pup would come.

He squatted. She was using her flashlight to check the state of his feces and scoop them off the damp path when he growled. Again. On his retractable leash he pulled ahead. Braked, snuffing. Where spine met shoulders, his fur stiffened. She hunkered down. Peering at the prints, she rejected her first thoughts, coyote or cougar. Smaller pads. Finer. She ran a finger around the indentations. Seeing the mangle of her neighbour’s cat, she pulled that leash tight.

At home again, she clicked on the coffee maker. At the window looking north, considered. An exotic. Got away somehow. Good for you! She put a muffin in the microwave, angrily sliced an orange, fed her dog and patted him. Still uneasy, he ate.

Some damned animal mill. What do they call those killings they set up? Canned hunts. Canned!

To the east, the clamshell of the world cracked open. She sipped coffee and observed the firs’ black dresses dripping with rain, the maples’ last ragged leaves, the scabby cottonwoods whose bark resembled the skin of chum salmon driving upriver to spawn. Somewhere among them crouched a tropical creature.

The Animal Rescue, whatever it calls itself. They’d come. No. They’d just lock the creature into another cage to die.

She left the whining setter. Against her body the deer-rifle lay solid, its strap firm over her shoulder. The dark woods stood up like a door.

For ever after she felt that in a hunter’s silence she’d walked for a long time among the trees, hearing her own pulse, but knew that only minutes passed before the cat revealed herself in the subdued radiance now flowing into the woodland from the east.

Her dapples soared to another tree. Her front claws nailed the bark as her tail curled and her hindquarters swung up to complete a perfect leap that went on, and on, as patterned brightness lasts under closed lids.

Landing, the dying animal turned her head. Pale gold eyes met the hunter, who shot her precisely between them.

Acknowledgments

 

My thanks to

 

many women friends and readers and writers, for their encouragement

 

John Metcalf, the short story's champion

 

Dan Wells, bookman, and all the Biblioasis staff

 

the editors of the following magazines, in which earlier

versions of some stories appeared:
The New

Quarterly, FoundPress.com, Grain, joyland.ca,

Fiddlehead, numerocinqmagazine.com

 

Dean Sinnett, whose love sustains me

 

The English Stories,
Cynthia Flood’s
acclaimed collection of linked short fictions, appeared from Biblioasis in 2009; individual stories won a
Prism International
prize plus both National and Western Magazine awards. Her earlier collections are
The Animals in their Elements
and
My Father Took a Cake to France
(the title story won the Journey Prize). Her fiction has been widely published in print and online, and has been selected four times for
Best Canadian Stories.
A novel,
Making a Stone of the Heart,
was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2002. After decades on the city’s east side, Cynthia Flood now lives in the West End on the brink of Stanley Park.

dean sinnett