FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: Cat Versus Wilderness

Somewhere On Exmoor

It is late at night and fully dark and they are in some remote country place, complete with grass and bush and overgrown thickets and all the other staples such an environment demands. Cleo is in the second car (they are both Bentleys - of course) which is otherwise filled, just like the first car, with decidedly unsafe men in leather jackets, many of whom have shotguns and other assorted weapons. This is not a good thing, especially since the unsafe men, at least at the moment, are nominally on the right side and are about to meet some people who make their simple old-fashioned breed of profitable criminality look positively wholesome. Respectable, even. Cleo's misgivings are profound. The night is so black that even she can only see a limited portion of their surroundings. It is a nowhere place which could be anywhere.

They stop the cars and get out.

Naturally, there is gunfire. It is so predictable, in fact, that Cleo has already found herself a slightly less deadly spot to hide, on the downslope side of a small hillock. The grass is indeed quite wet, she notices irritatedly, as high velocity sniper fire from a nearby thicket of dense brush mows down the unsafe men. Most of them never even get a chance to fall back.

After the initial hail of bullets, in which it was pretty much impossible for them to miss, the unseen assailants break out one and then several more flashlights, apparently to search out anyone they might have failed to kill thoroughly enough in the pitch blackness. Suddenly Cleo realises that the appalling visibility might actually be an advantage, because if she can barely see anything, to her attackers everything outside the lights of the Bentleys or the beams of the torches must be to all intents and purposes invisible.

When the lights brush past, she rolls sideways to get clear, then scrambles a short distance supported, cat-like, by nothing more than her fingers and toes. More torch beams slide past, and then she finds herself next to a small rainwater grating sunk horizontally into a low point in the grassy gravel, next to the road. It seems rather ill-mannered not to take advantage of such an absolute stroke of luck, so she hooks her claws under the edge, pulls out the grille, and then in one bizarre if graceful movement, slides down inside the gravel trap with claw-taloned toes extended out to either side to slow her descent, the grille held in both hands over her head such that it clinks neatly back into place as soon as she is fully inside. Gravel trap rebirth.

Lights sweep across the grille pretty much the instant she lets go of it, but find nothing to see. She crouches down low and stops her breathing for the next few minutes, just to be sure they won't find her and force her to kill them all.

So much for Exmoor.

~*~

Some time later, she finds herself aboard a huge logging truck which is transporting vast boles of pine from one of the nearby plantings, towards some more civilized place. The huge logs are canted at crazy and dangerous angles, but fortunately Cleo has bought with her a kusarigama, her cats-claw, a handy tool consisting of a light chain with hooked metal blades on either end. The pointed ends of the blades will bite easily into soft wood, like pine, or close nicely around a wide range of conveniently sized objects when thrown. Combined with her already formidable feline speed and grace, it makes leaping onto a moving logging truck at forty miles an hour a relatively easy procedure.

Several more casts of the cats claw, and she has managed to climb up onto the highest, forward-most facing point of the moving log pile, where several of the logs make a convenient nest. Fastening herself safely into place with the chain, she lies back and catches a quick nap, looking up into the sky, as the truck rumbles onward toward the sunrise and someplace where she can get a decent cappuccino. Cats need their sleep, after all.

~*~