“Foolish dog,” Hrurr said, raising his fur and arching his back. “Strike at me if you can. At least then I’ll be free of this world, and become one of the spirits who stalk the night.”
The dog hesitated at his words.
“Free yourself,” Hrurr went on. “Leave your two-legs before it’s too late. Go into the forest and restore yourself before you can no longer hear our words.”
“Free?” Blondi replied. “Free now.”
“You’re a prisoner, like the one who holds you. You are both imprisoned on this mountain.”
Blondi bounced on her front paws, then crouched. Her two-legs knelt next to her, still holding her while his companions murmured and gestured at the cat. “Brave, isn’t it?” one man said. “What more could you ask of a German cat?”
The two-legs lifted his head, staring at Hrurr with pale eyes. The cat’s tail dropped, pressing against his side. He suddenly felt as though the man had heard his words, could indeed see into his soul and rob him of it, as he had robbed Blondi of hers. Hrurr’s ears flattened. The man’s gaze seemed to turn inward then, almost as if he contained the world inside himself.
“Blondi!” Hrurr’s heart thumped against his chest. “I see death. I see death in the pale face of your master. Save yourself. I see wild dreams in his eyes.”
“Have food,” the dog said. “Have shelter. No prisoner. Go where he goes, not stay here always. Black-clad ones and gray-clad ones serve him, as I do, as all do. I follow him all my life. Free. What is free?”
The two-legs reached inside his jacket, pulled out a leash, and attached it to Blondi’s collar. The dog licked his hand.
The procession continued toward the house. Hrurr leaped out of their way, then trailed them at a distance, hearing Blondi’s intermittent, senseless barks. Her two-legs turned around to glance down the mountain, waving a hand limply at the vista below.
“There is the mountain where Charlemagne is said to lie,” the two-legs said, indicating another peak. “It is said he will rise again when he is needed. It is no accident that I have my residence opposite it.”
“What does it mean?” Hrurr cried out, imagining that Blondi might know.
“That he rule everything,” Blondi replied, “and that I serve, wherever he goes.”
“We shall win this war,” the two-legs said. Behind him, two other creatures were shaking their heads. The fair-furred woman touched his arm.
“Let us go inside, my Fuehrer,” one man said.
###
The chalet’s picture window was bright with light. Hrurr sat below, watching silhouetted shapes flutter across the panes. Earlier in the night, the fair-furred woman had appeared on the balcony above; she had kindly dropped a few bits of food, glancing around nervously as if afraid someone might see her.
“Well?”
Hrurr turned his head. Ylawl was slinking toward him, eyes gleaming in the dark. “I see that Blondi’s still there.” The dog, a shadow outlined by the light, was now gazing out the window.
“Her master still holds her,” Hrurr said. “I think she would even die for him.” He paused. “Come with me, Ylawl.”
“Where will you go?”
“Down to the valley, I suppose.” He thought of returning to Mewleen, wondering if he would ever find her again.
“It’s a long way.”
“I wish I could go to a place where there are no two-legged ones.”
“They are everywhere. You’ll never escape them. They’ll swallow the world, at least for a time. Best to take what they offer and ignore them otherwise.”
“They serve no one except themselves, Ylawl. They don’t even realize how blind and deaf they are.” Hrurr stretched. “I must leave.”
The smaller cat lingered for moment, then slipped away. “Goodbye, then,” Ylawl whispered.
###
Hrurr made his way down the slope, keeping away from the roads, feeling his way through the night with his whiskers. The mindless bark of a guard dog in the distance occasionally echoed through the wood; the creature did not even bother to sound warnings in the animals’ tongue. He thought of Blondi, who seemed to know her two-legs’ language better than her own.
By morning, he had come to the barbed-wire fence; slipping under it, he left the enclosure. The birds were singing, gossiping of the sights they had seen and the grubs they had caught and chirping warnings to intruders on their territory.
“Birds!” Hrurr called out. “You’ve flown far. You must know where I would be safe. Where should I go?”
“Cat! Cat!” the birds replied mockingly. No one answered his question.
###
He came to the road where he had left Mewleen and paced along it, seeking. At last he understood that the broken mirror was gone; the omen had vanished. He sat down, wondering what it meant.
Something purred in the distance. He started up as the procession of metal beasts passed him, moving in the direction of the distant town. For a moment, he was sure he had seen Blondi inside one beast’s belly, her nose pressed against a transparent shield, death in her eyes.
When the herd had rolled past, he saw Mewleen gazing at him from across the road, bright eyes flickering. He ran to her, bounding over the road, legs stretching as he displayed his speed and grace. Rolling onto his back, he nipped at her fur as she held him with her paws; her purring and his became one sound.
“The fragments are gone,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m in my own world again, and the dog has been taken from the cage.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Mewleen asked.
He rolled away. “It’s nothing,” he replied, scrambling to his feet. He could not tell Mewleen what he had seen; better not to burden her with his dark vision.
“Look at you,” she chided. “So ungroomed—I imagine you’re hungry as well.” She nuzzled at his fur. “Do you want to come home with me now? They may shoo you away at first, but when they understand that you have no place to go, they’ll let you stay.”
He thought of food and dark, warm places, of laps and soft voices. Reluctantly, he was beginning to understand how Blondi felt.
“For a while,” he said, clinging to his freedom. “Just for a while.” As they left the road, several birds flew overhead, screaming of the distant war.
May’s Lion
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre; it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. She has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and the controversial multi-media novel Always Coming Home. She has had four collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, and, most recently, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. Her most recent novel is Tehanu, a continuation of her Earthsea series.
Here, in a tale that functions as a kind of transitionary prequel to Always Coming Home and its strangely transfigured California, she gives us a close encounter of a peculiar kind between an old woman and a cat—and in the process spins a moving and bittersweet story with her usual skill . . . which is to say, about as good as it gets.
* * *
Jim remembers it as a bobcat, and he was May’s nephew, and ought to know. It probably was a bobcat. I don’t think May would have changed her story, though you can’t trust a good story-teller not to make the story suit herself, or get the facts to fit the story better. Anyhow she told it to us more than once, because my mother and I w
ould ask for it; and the way I remember it, it was a mountain lion. And the way I remember May telling it is sitting on the edge of the irrigation tank we used to swim in, cement rough as a lava flow and hot in the sun, the long cracks tarred over. She was an old lady then with a long Irish upper lip, kind and wary and balky. She liked to come sit and talk with my mother while I swam; she didn’t have all that many people to talk to. She always had chickens, in the chickenhouse very near the back door of the farmhouse, so the whole place smelled pretty strong of chickens, and as long as she could, she kept a cow or two down in the old barn by the creek. The first of May’s cows I remember was Pearl, a big, handsome Holstein who gave fourteen or twenty-four or forty gallons or quarts of milk at a milking, whichever is right for a prize milker. Pearl was beautiful in my eyes when I was four or five years old; I loved and admired her. I remember how excited I was, how I reached upward to them, when Pearl or the workhorse Prince, for whom my love amounted to worship, would put an immense and sensitive muzzle through the three-strand fence to whisk a cornhusk from my fearful hand; and then the munching; and the sweet breath and the big nose would be at the barbed wire again: the offering is acceptable . . . After Pearl there was Rosie, a purebred Jersey. May got her either cheap or free because she was a runt calf, so tiny that May brought her home on her lap in the back of the car, like a fawn. And Rosie always looked like she had some deer in her. She was a lovely, clever little cow and even more willful than old May. She often chose not to come in to be milked. We would hear May calling and then see her trudging across our lower pasture with the bucket, going to find Rosie wherever Rosie had decided to be milked today on the wild hills she had to roam in, a hundred acres of our and Old Jim’s land. Then May had a fox terrier named Pinky, who yipped and nipped and turned me against fox terriers for life, but he was long gone when the mountain lion came; and the black cats who lived in the barn kept discreetly out of the story. As a matter of fact now I think of it the chickens weren’t in it either. It might have been quite different if they had been. May had quit keeping chickens after old Mrs. Walter died. It was just her all alone there, and Rosie and the cats down in the barn, and nobody else within sight or sound of the old farm. We were in our house up the hill only in the summer, and Jim lived in town, those years. What time of year it was I don’t know, but I imagine the grass still green or just turning gold. And May was in the house, in the kitchen, where she lived entirely unless she was asleep or outdoors, when she heard this noise.
Now you need May herself, sitting skinny on the edge of the irrigation tank, seventy or eighty or ninety years old, nobody knew how old May was and she had made sure they couldn’t find out, opening her pleated lips and letting out this noise—a huge, awful yowl, starting soft with a nasal hum and rising slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr . . . It got better every time she told the story.
“It was some meow,” she said.
So she went to the kitchen door, opened it, and looked out. Then she shut the kitchen door and went to the kitchen window to look out, because there was a mountain lion under the fig tree.
Puma, cougar, catamount, Felix concolor; the shy, secret, shadowy lion of the New World, four or five feet long plus a yard of black-tipped tail, weighs about what a woman weighs, lives where the deer live from Canada to Chile, but always shyer, always fewer; the color of dry leaves, dry grass.
There were plenty of deer in the Valley in the forties, but no mountain lion had been seen for decades anywhere near where people lived. Maybe way back up in the canyons; but Jim, who hunted, and knew every deer-trail in the hills, had never seen a lion. Nobody had, except May, now, alone in her kitchen.
“I thought maybe it was sick,” she told us. “It wasn’t acting right. I don’t think a lion would walk right into the yard like that if it was feeling well. If I’d still had the chickens it’d be a different story maybe! But it just walked around some, and then it lay down there,” and she points between the fig tree and the decrepit garage. “And then after a while it kind of meowed again, and got up and come into the shade right there.” The fig tree, planted when the house was built, about the time May was born, makes a great, green, sweet-smelling shade. “It just laid there looking around. It wasn’t well,” says May.
She had lived with and looked after animals all her life; she had also earned her living for years as a nurse.
“Well, I didn’t know exactly what to do for it. So I put out some water for it. It didn’t even get up when I come out the door. I put the water down there, not so close to it that we’d scare each other, see, and it kept watching me, but it didn’t move. After I went back in it did get up and tried to drink some water. Then it made that kind of meowowow. I do believe it come here because it was looking for help. Or just for company, maybe.”
The afternoon went on, May in the kitchen, the lion under the fig tree.
But down in the barnyard by the creek was Rosie the cow. Fortunately, the gate was shut, so she could not come wandering up to the house and meet the lion; but she would be needing to be milked, come six or seven o’clock, and that got to worrying May. She also worried how long a sick mountain lion might hang around, keeping her shut in the house. May didn’t like being shut in.
“I went out a time or two, and went shoo!”
Eyes shining amidst fine wrinkles, she flaps her thin arms at the lion. “Shoo! Go on home now!”
But the silent wild creature watches her with yellow eyes and does not stir.
“So when I was talking to Miss Macy on the telephone, she said it might have rabies, and I ought to call the sheriff. I was uneasy then. So finally I did that, and they come out, those county police, you know. Two carloads.”
Her voice is dry and quiet.
“I guess there was nothing else they knew how to do. So they shot it.”
She looks off across the field Old Jim, her brother, used to plow with Prince the horse and irrigate with the water from this tank. Now wild oats and blackberry grow there. In another thirty years it will be a rich man’s vineyard, a tax write-off.
“He was seven feet long, all stretched out, before they took him off. And so thin! They all said, ‘Well, Aunt May, I guess you were scared there! I guess you were some scared!’ But I wasn’t. I didn’t want him shot. But I didn’t know what to do for him. And I did need to get to Rosie.”
###
I have told this true story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history. Now the field that the poor man plowed and the rich man harvested lies on the edge of a little town, houses and workshops of timber and fieldstone standing among almond, oak, and eucalyptus trees; and now May is an old woman with a name that means the month of May: Rains End. An old woman with a long, wrinkled-pleated upper lip, she is living alone for the summer in her summer place, a meadow a mile or so up in the hills above the little town, Sinshan. She took her cow Rose with her, and since Rose tends to wander she keeps her on a long tether down by the tiny creek, and moves her into fresh grass now and then. The summerhouse is what they call a ninepole house, a mere frame of poles stuck in the ground—one of them is a live digger-pine sapling—with stick and matting walls, and mat roof and floors. It doesn’t rain in the dry season, and the roof is just for shade. But the house and its little front yard where Rains End has her camp stove and clay oven and matting loom are well shaded by a fig tree that was planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother.
Rains End herself has no grandchildren; she never bore a child, and her one or two marriages were brief and very long ago. She has a nephew and two grandnieces, and feels herself an aunt to all children, even when they are afraid of her and rude to her because she has got so ugly with old age, smelling as musty as a chickenhouse. She considers it natural for children to shrink away from som
ebody partway dead, and knows that when they’re a little older and have got used to her they’ll ask her for stories. She was for sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge, and though she doesn’t do curing any more people still ask her to help with nursing sick children, and the children come to long for the kind, authoritative touch of her hands when she bathes them to bring a fever down, or changes a dressing, or combs out bed-tangled hair with witch hazel and great patience.
So Rains End was just waking up from an early afternoon nap in the heat of the day, under the matting roof, when she heard a noise, a huge, awful yowl that started soft with a nasal hum and rose slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr . . . And she got up and looked out from the open side of the house of sticks and matting, and saw a mountain lion under the fig tree. She looked at him from her house; he looked at her from his.
And this part of the story is much the same: the old woman; the lion; and, down by the creek, the cow.
It was hot. Crickets sang shrill in the yellow grass on all the hills and canyons, in all the chaparral. Rains End filled a bowl with water from an unglazed jug and came slowly out of the house. Halfway between the house and the lion she set the bowl down on the dirt. She turned and went back to the house.
The lion got up after a while and came and sniffed at the water. He lay down again with a soft, querulous groan, almost like a sick child, and looked at Rains End with the yellow eyes that saw her in a different way than she had ever been seen before.
She sat on the matting in the shade of the open part of her house and did some mending. When she looked up at the lion she sang under her breath, tunelessly; she wanted to remember the Puma Dance Song but could only remember bits of it, so she made a song for the occasion:
MAGICATS II Page 16