FREE STORIES 2012(19)

It was a bat. I’ve never seen any animal move so fast. I thought over my barking and running chances, as it ate the bat with a single crunch, and then sat down and scratched itself.

At least part of what the fleas around here fed on was explained, even if the water-deer weren’t. “Take it with us back to the pride,” said the one who hadn’t patted at me with a paw, and who hadn’t just crunched a bat. I’ve met a fair number of humans by now. We dogs have a sensible arrangement with litters and packs. Humans sometimes have something called ‘older sisters’. This was one of those, or as close as you can get to it in cats that move like ghosts. Older sisters are something to be treated with caution, who usually suggest unpleasant things, from what I have learned from watching young humans.

“Meb and my dragon will not like that,” I said with as much confidence as I could manage.

“What kind of creatures are they?” asked the young one who had frightened me out of a year’s growth by appearing in front of me.

“Dragons breathe fire. And Meb, she is great and terrible. She turns enemies to stone and can cause baths. They are my pack and they’re going to be very upset about my being missing. They can follow me anywhere.” That was not strictly true. I can follow them anywhere. I always know just exactly where Meb is. And I have got good at smelling out the dragon, and knowing one dragon from the next. What they smell like does partly depend on what they eat. Fionn has a fondness for mushrooms.

“Baths. What are those?”

“They involve water, and being dropped into it. They are to be avoided.” Not that I didn’t get wet sometimes for good reason, like going for a swim. But cats, if I recalled correctly, didn’t like water.

The idea didn’t appeal to this one, obviously. “Maybe we should leave it and go and look for water-deer. I’m hungry.”

I liked that idea.

“I thought it was maybe a dobhar-chú but its too far from the lake,” said the other big cat.

“Dobhar-chú! That’s just a story.”

“They’ll get you if you go in the water.”

The littlest of the big cats shuddered. I was winning...

The older sister one said: “Move, thing. It can’t be a dobhar-chú. They can pull one of the pride underwater. It couldn’t. It’s too small and it hardly has any teeth.”

I moved, seeing as I had to... sort of sideways looking for a gap that would take me the hundred dog-lengths back to the dragon. I worked on clever too, like standing on branches and leaves as hard as I could to make a noise. Unfortunately the older sister one was between me and Fionn. And the other two were very close. I was being pushed towards the bole of one of the huge trees.

“Clumsy thing. I don’t think it can climb,” said the littlest cat.

“Must be a kind of water-deer then,” said the bat-catcher, in a growl that was a death sentence.

The big sister one picked me up in her jaws. I tried to bark then, but I was a great deal too choked, and a great deal too swung about and afraid to make much sound, really I suppose. Being a brave dog is all very well, but it’s not something that came to me, bounding from branch to branch, many many times my own height up in those tall trees.

And they leaped a long way from tree to tree. I swung around like a rat in those jaws. I didn’t think I was ever going to see Meb or the dragon again.

After a while even terror gets numb. And I was increasingly sure that if I didn’t do something soon, I would definitely never get to see Meb again, and my cragon would wander around Sylvan lost. Eventually he might find his way out, but he could search for Meb forever before he found her. My heart-magnet knew where she was. I was a dog with work to do. I could not fail her.

I couldn’t really use my teeth, or my paws. The big cat was just too big. All I had left was my brains and my nose. And my nose caught a smell on the breeze, high up here. It was animal. Herbivore. And wet.

The cats stopped in the tree top, and I did my best cat-growl: “Prey. I smell food.”

“What did it say?”

“It said it smelled like food. It doesn’t, it smells like those weeds.”

“I can smell food. Wet animals that eat grass,” I said, doing my best to growl it in cat fashion.

The big cats all sniffed.

“Which way?” asked the bat-catcher.

I did my best imitation -- as good as a dog hanging in a cat’s mouth can do -- of one of those hunting dogs that point game. “There.”

“Lake Glissmearrrrr!”

And they took off again, through the trees.

They stopped and I pointed to their prey for them again.

There was a glade ahead, my nose said. A grassy glade. We’d seen almost no grass in the forests. Too many big trees, too thick a canopy...