The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  For thirty or forty miles around the city of New Orleans, as far north and west as Baton Rouge and Lafayette, and south, down to Thibodaux and the delta coast, lies a fluctuating, fragile, secretive and duplicitous landscape entirely inimical to man. There, the parishes of Iberville, Terrebonne, Lafourche, and Barataria eke out a tenuous existence amongst a maze of channels and quagmires, abandoned river channels, or bayous – dead-end cricks and sloughs, marshes, abandoned ponds and oxbow lakes; an impossible place to map; an easy place to be lost in; a breeding-ground for a billion insects, for fish with teeth as sharp as rats’ fangs, and for creatures seeking larger prey…

  And all throughout this five-thousand-year period, and well beyond that meaningless man-made time-scheme, the wild roads of the animals of the South have wound their way across and through this area, oblivious to the temporary changes inflicted upon it by humankind. The territory into which the wild roads debouch is still the treacherous, mystical landscape recognized, and avoided, by most humans; but the wild roads have traditionally offered safe passage through this quaggy labyrinth for those cats and other creatures willing to use them for their journeys. Until now.

  When Sealink entered, in a state of blind panic and horror, the wild road whose entrance lay between Iberville and Bienville streets in the old French Quarter of the city of New Orleans, she sensed that something fundamental in the nature of the roads had changed since last she had set foot upon them. For a start, all was dark, and the compass winds which all cats know to be not only themselves, but a gale of souls, were silent.

  Where were the ghost cats?

  It was too quiet.

  She raised her great head. The air inside this highway was sluggish and stale, as if the swamps were extending their domain into the very heart of the city.

  Perhaps, then, it was this road alone that was affected and, as Téophine had said, no-one used it any more, perhaps not even the shades of earlier cats. But if the road was long abandoned by living and dead alike, it would soon cease to exist. And if that happened, she would have a long and dangerous journey through the bayous. Better run, then, and make use of it while she could. Great paws striking and flexing with every footfall, Sealink let the powerful chemicals of her primal self absorb and dissipate her doubts and fears.

  *

  So it was that some time later an observer might have seen a rare sight: a great, striped cat emerging as if from nowhere into the fronded shade of a flooded forest. Luckily for Sealink, however, there were no observers here, at least no humans sighting down their hunting rifles for prey – for, if there had been at that precise moment, they might have bagged the trophy of a lifetime and started a fervour of debate about the natural life of the Louisiana swamplands.

  Now, just a second or two later, all anyone would have seen was a much smaller member of the felidae family: albeit a large and well-furred calico cat, its patches of orange and black and white now a far more random and less terrifying camouflage arrangement in that strange twilight than her wild-road pelt.

  If there were no humans here, of other life there was no lack. Where the highway had been eerily silent, the bayou was bursting with sound. An extraordinary din of life filled the heavy air – chirrups and peeps, buzzing and rasping and whining – heralding the presence of cigarriens and chiggers; crickets and gnats and ticks, and a thousand bird-voiced tree frogs.

  Sealink stared at this unfamiliar new environment. Channels, viscous and bubbling with gas, punctuated by islands of floating water hyacinth and natural levees bound together by mud and mangrove roots like claws. Beyond, a tangle of willow and hickory, dog-oak and sweetgum and myrtle, all swathed in trailing beards of grey Spanish moss. Webs inhabited by spiders as large as her head spanned the branches of a nearby cypress.

  Sealink shuddered. Where the hell was she to find Mammy Lafeet amongst all this chaos? She turned a tight circle. In particular, how was she to find the Mammy without getting her feet wet?

  At that moment there was a loud whirring and a flash of neon green-and-blue and suddenly a pair of large, prismatic eyes were hovering just in front of the calico’s nose, borne up by a rotor of sparkling, translucent wings. Sealink took a surprised step backwards, and found herself hock-deep in water the colour of tea, water that left a shower of tiny black particles plastered over her fur. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the dragonfly banked away steeply and vanished between the dark trees.

  Sealink shook out her soaked back legs with an expression of disgust. What sort of place was this that the Mammy had chosen? What the hell kind of cat was she? You’d only retire to this place for pleasure if you were a fish. She rotated her ears back and forth, listened intently; but all she could hear were the tree frogs, gearing up for their evening chorus. The light was fading now, taking with it any semblance of normality.

  Cats have remarkable vision, an ability adapted over millennia for efficient hunting. In bright light, the pupil needs only to form the narrowest vertical aperture; in full dark, it will dilate to a full circle to detect and absorb the faintest glow of light, channelling it down thousands of rodshaped cells into the retina and the mirror-like tapetum lucidum, the bright tapestry of feline legend, to give back an extraordinarily clear image of the visual field.

  Sealink could feel her eyes adapting to the changing light; but being able to see quite clearly the tangles of vegetation and the wilderness of the bayou made her no happier with her situation. She was, she had to admit, an urban cat; by birth and choice. She liked streetlights. She liked the bright neon of restaurant signs. Even the glare of a pair of car headlamps would have been welcome here.

  Instead she was faced with the gathering, unrelieved, foetid darkness of unreconstructed swampland.

  She was just about to re-enter the wild road and try a different exit, when a whirring and a disturbance of the air behind her ears alerted her to the return of the dragonfly.

  ‘Hello, little guy.’ Her voice sounded unnaturally loud. She looked around, feeling more than a little foolish.

  Instead of disappearing again on its erratic flight-course, the dragonfly circled her head. It buzzed at her, the lenses of its eyes twinkling furiously, and Sealink almost thought she heard it say something. Then it veered off into a stand of willows, and, even as the calico turned to watch it, it was back, its whirring and buzzing even more insistent. This time, it clipped her nose with a wing-tip, a featherlight brush, and a minute, tinny voice sounded in the back of her ear:

  ‘Follow.’

  Sealink shook her head as if to dislodge a flea. She must be going crazy. Still, why not? She’d fit right in here. Feeling dislocated from her species and her own experience, the calico made a leap from the floating island on which she stood to the more substantial ground where the willows grew. Ahead of her, the dragonfly dipped and darted; and Sealink followed.

  *

  A short while later, led far into the swampland, Sealink was distracted by an interesting smell. It was quick and sharp and warm-blooded, and not far away. The calico had never been the most skilled of wild hunters: travelling with the Queen of Cats across the desolate moors of Cornwall they might well have starved had it not been for Pertelot’s unexpected talent. Give Sealink a trash can, however, and she would rip the life out of it in seconds; but there weren’t too many of those great symbols of civilized life around here, and, not having eaten for hours, she was, she realized suddenly, ravenous. Let the dragonfly hover for a moment: she’d inspect the food-source.

  Some yards to the left, beneath a stand of mallows, there sat a fat rat. Sealink had seen others of its kind in her past, but right now its precise taxonomy seemed unimportant. It sat there, apparently petrified by her presence, the moonlight glinting off its beady black eyes, exuding a fine, strong reek of well-salted food. The calico, delighted with her luck, squatted into stalking mode, waggled her ample bottom until she had the beast properly sighted, and launched herself into the mallows. From its lair, the nutrea rat watched her with alarm,
then, as soon as she leapt – a great, ungainly mass of fur and claws – shot neatly into the water.

  Sealink paced up and down the bank, hoping that it might have a very short memory, as some more stupid rodents do, and return to its lair, but the water remained smooth and silent in its wake and after some minutes she had to concede that the rat really had vanished.

  When she turned around and retraced her steps, so had the dragonfly.

  Sealink cursed her stupidity. She was lost, lost, lost. The wild road lay far behind her and would be impossible to locate until morning; perhaps not even then. All she could see in any direction were the dim shapes of trees, the glimmer of water through vegetation. All she could hear were a thousand cicadas serenading one another as if the night was their world alone.

  All she could smell was rot.

  For no apparent reason she recalled something she’d once heard down on the boardwalk from one of the older toms, about the disappearance of a cat who lived out on a shrimp-boat.

  ‘Fell in the water, Mama,’ the old white cat had said. ‘Fell into the bayou and his body got et by crawfish.’

  And Sealink, with the sublime wit and cheek of youth, had retorted, ‘Ain’t you got that the wrong way round, Chalky?’

  Now, with the wisdom of age, the calico recognized the eternal truth in this reversal of nature. Everything got recycled, from the greatest tree to the largest beast. It fell, it rotted, it was eaten by shrimp and the mudbugs and the scavengers; and they fell and died and were eaten in their turn. Just as cats lived and died to fuel the wild roads, so the rest of the natural world made its own simple, elegant economy. But Sealink knew with sudden force that she was not yet ready to submit to that process. She grimaced defiantly into the dark and, all of her senses on the qui vive, walked determinedly on.

  *

  Some time later she had walked a fair distance and had begun to feel more confident. The starlight clarified the definition of objects whenever there was a gap in the canopy, allowing her to identify a stationary owl upon a branch, the tall white flowers of an arrowroot, a cricket frozen against the bark of a live oak; but when something shifted in her peripheral vision, it seemed to come from the dark hollow between two logs, and, even with her night sight working overtime, she couldn’t quite make out the originator of the movement. She stepped closer, her paws making no sound on the soft leaf-mould underfoot.

  Then, suddenly, something shone out of the gloom.

  An eye!

  She sprang back, swallowing a cry. It was a big, golden eye, glowing in the darkness. With a sigh of relief she recognized the vertical black slit of another cat’s pupil.

  ‘Mammy Lafeet!’

  The relief was immense. It washed through her like hot milk.

  ‘You sure take some findin’, Momma. Can’t imagine why anyone should want to hide themselves away from civilization to such an extent – not that it’s all that civilized back there at the moment. Which is why I need to talk to you. But first things first, eh, podna? After that trek I sure could do with some nourishment, y’know honey. You don’t happen to have a little something I could chew on while we talk, do you?’

  The eye regarded Sealink steadily.

  Then, even as she was congratulating herself on locating the Mammy at the dead of night in the midst of this fearsome wilderness, the eye blinked, and the relief curdled in her stomach.

  The eye had blinked sideways, like a camera shutter.

  Sealink’s mind scrambled to make sense of this observation. Perhaps the Mammy was suffering from some kind of optical disorder. Perhaps she was lying with her head on one side. Perhaps—

  Then another detail insinuated itself neatly into this rickety structure of rationalizations. The pupil that split the golden eye was the narrowest of lines, yet she could feel her own pupils distended to full, black circles in this darkness.

  Not the Mammy, then.

  Not even a cat.

  Her paws started to go numb with shock.

  Then whatever it was moved, and a second golden eye came into view. The eyes were some distance apart, and did not look straight ahead. They twinkled at her. There was a subtle movement and the starlight picked out rows of crooked ivory gleaming beneath the eyes. They looked like teeth.

  Sealink stared. They were teeth. More teeth than she had ever seen on any creature in the world. In a strange empathy of panic, the calico cat suddenly found herself baring her own teeth; but they felt pathetically small in comparison.

  Then it spoke. Its voice was loud and cultured, deep and French and definitely male.

  ‘Eating is good.’

  It paused. Sealink could feel its cold stare assessing her snack-value.

  ‘I like to eat, as do all the beasts of the earth, for the sin of our existence.’

  Its lower jaw dropped down. Sealink stared into the depths of a vast, glistening maw. The stench was overwhelming. Perversely, she found herself examining its dental array. Some of the teeth were sharp and pointed. But others, many others, were broad and inturned, and little scraps of something indefinable were wedged between them. The word ‘alligator’ slowly permeated the calico’s brain and she felt her joints turn to water. Then the jaws snapped shut with an echoing thud an inch or two away from her nose. The alligator grinned.

  ‘Dead things have the most subtle bouquet, I find. Especially dead things which I have stored away in the bayou for a week or two, down beneath the roots of the mangrove. When they have marinated in the tannin of these fine brackish waters they have…’ the alligator considered ‘…a certain piquancy. A certain je ne sais quoi. Would you like to visit my secret store, little cat?’

  One eye blinked for a second then focused sharply on her again. Sealink realized, with a sudden twinge of hope, that it had winked at her. She struggled to find her voice.

  ‘Er, not right now, babe. Maybe some other time?’

  The grin widened a crack.

  ‘That’s a shame, chérie. I have a nook down there that’s just your size. Unfortunately I visited my store only a short while ago and gorged myself on the most succulent little white-tailed deer you could ever imagine. Ciel!’ It smacked its chops together appreciatively. ‘Sheer bliss.’ It pushed itself up on its stubby arms so that Sealink could observe the great swell of its scaly belly. ‘Indeed, I am so full it hurts. I couldn’t fit in another morsel. Vraiment, c’est dommage, it is a profound pity, mon ange: it has been such a long time since I had the pleasure of partaking of the subtle flesh of a feline friend.’

  Sealink decided to push her luck.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find a very old, and I’m sure extremely stringy, feline known as the Mammy Lafeet, would you?’

  The alligator laughed, a strange creaking sound like a dead branch sawing in the wind. ‘Even creatures of the greatest age and gristle become tender when subjected to my fine Louisiana marinade, chérie.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Although I pride myself on being a true gourmand—’ he leered ‘—even I must draw the line somewhere. And the Mammy has, how you say, “laid the bones upon me”. I eat her: I die of the bellyache. This is what she promises me. Not a friendly gesture in this cruel and hostile world. Not the sort of hospitality one would expect from a neighbour. Alors, I think she is not to my taste, pour le déjeuner, or as company! You however…’ he paused.

  The calico watched him distrustfully, flight plans formulating swiftly in her head.

  ‘…may keep on walking. She’s somewhere out there.’ He waved a tiny, clawed hand airily. ‘Eh bien, it is time now for my swim. Life on the levee is hard and lonely. Do visit with me again, bébé, when you are passing in this direction.’ He finished with a toothy grin, ‘I will be sure to make you welcome, chérie.’

  Then, with a slither and a great splash, the alligator launched himself into the bayou. He lay there in the murky water, his eyes just above the surface. After a few moments he winked again – a wink of vast and deliberate irony – and was
gone with a flick of the tail.

  The calico watched the water for some time to make sure he was not suddenly going to erupt out of the bayou in a thunder of spray and down her in a single gulp, then, affecting nonchalance, strolled with stiff-legged anxiety through the alligator’s reeking domain and into the dark vegetation on the other side of the logs.

  A narrow escape, that.

  She shook her head irritably.

  The damned dragonfly was back. She heard it well before she saw it, descending from above the canopy as if homing in on a target. A few seconds later she realized that the target was her. Then she thought: what the hell is a dragonfly doing out and about at night? Like other bugs they liked the sunlight, used its warm rays to stir to life their cold insectile blood.

  She stared up into the darkness. ‘Come near me, fishbait, and you’re history!’ The whirring continued, grew louder. She snapped at the air. ‘I ain’t kiddin’. You led me right into that set of jaws on legs, so get too close and I’ll have me a little bitty crunchy snack.’

  ‘Follow!’

  This time the voice was unmistakable; and beneath the high-pitched buzzing there was even inflection and cadence.

  But how could it speak, let alone intonate? No bug she’d ever ate even had vocal chords…

  Sealink shivered. Perhaps it was all in her head. Certainly, something weird was going on here.

  The fly was visible now, its magnificent wings iridescent in the starlight, hovering about a foot above her head.

  ‘Come at once. Want to drown, foolish cat? I lead you and what you do? Take eye off me. You chase rat. You miss it! Then you get lost!’ It tutted. Sealink could almost see it shake its tiny head in vexation. When it continued its tone was severe. ‘Walk into Monsignor Gutbag. Greed meets greed. And you blame me! Ingrate.’ A pause. Then, so softly that Sealink could barely catch it, ‘Not called fishbait.’

  That was it. She was definitely losing it. She was lost in the most horrible wilderness she could ever have imagined; an alligator had nearly had her as a postprandial treat, and now she was getting lectured by a dragonfly!