Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“I feed her canned dogfood, but she’s always hungry. I haven’t seen a raccoon in the neighborhood for two weeks. Kevin, I don’t know where you can take her but she can’t stay here.”

Was Jonesy grown enough to survive on her own, on garbage, raccoons, and people’s geese? “How did she learn to eat the raccoons?”

“When I separated them, Emily kind of—split open, you know—and Jonesy stood over Emily, and then, as if she was sorry for the poor goose, she bent over and started licking her feathers, and she tasted the blood, and all of a sudden—”

Kevin had seen barn cats experience this epiphany. They discover their toy tastes good. Most learned from the mother cat, but get them hungry enough—

“She doesn’t bother the geese any more. They run away. But then there’s the deer.”

Kevin looked at his baby monster. “Jonesy couldn’t take down a deer.”

“Maybe not, but she sure knows how to chase them. And I worry about Mr. Trumbull’s cows.”

Kevin stood. “Thanks for taking care of her.”

She took his hand, then moved closer. They gazed at each other. Could he kiss her?

She stepped back. “Take her somewhere. Hey, what about your dad’s old trailer?”

The trailer featured scarcely more than a bed and a mini-dinette, abandoned on the lot near his mom’s apartment. Roof leaked, plumbing wasn’t connected. No trailer park would let him in with that wreck.

Nor with an “exotic animal.” Even if he could pass Jonesy off as a rescued bobcat or lion cub.

“I’ll call around.” He had brought a collar and leash, and he snapped these on Jonesy. Jonesy had been on leash before and didn’t like it, but she trusted Kevin enough not to fight.

Kevin was becoming an expert on smilodons. They weren’t even from the same branch of the Felidae family as lions and tigers, but still might live in families. He must seem to Jonesy like her mother or the leader of her—what did they call lion families?—pride.

He smiled at Sara, eyes full of hope.

“Go!” she said, shoving him playfully. The sabertooth bared huge teeth at Sara until she smoothed its back fur. “You can come back. Bring Jonesy if you can control her. Just call first.”

He led the sabertooth to his car. His mind roiled with possibility. Ask her! he thought. She’s got a new guy, or she doesn’t. Ask!

Too many secrets in Kevin’s life: an animal he couldn’t give up and couldn’t keep, and a girl he wanted and whose life had become a mystery.

“Cat,” he said. “We ain’t neither of us got no pride.”

Kevin’s uncle owned some unworked farmland twenty miles out of town center. He got permission to park the trailer there, planning to haul water and use cartridges for gas heat. He bought a generator and parked the trailer well back from the road.

Odd jobs weren’t enough. His mom’s restaurant needed a dishwasher. Since the owner knew him—and about the jail time—there was no background check problem. Kevin bought a cellphone that didn’t require a credit card, and the modern man out of his time and Ice Age cat went there to live their hard life.

College plans receded into mist. Maybe someday Kevin could write a book about this. He bought a cheap digital camera and started a journal of the Jonesy’s growth and behavior.

The sabertooth soon learned to paw open the refrigerator. Kevin was forced to keep only vegetables in it. To supplement the dogfood, he brought home a cut-up chicken or a chuck steak every night. Jonesy tore into these, sometimes before Kevin could get the wrapper off. Sometimes the wrapper would get impaled on the four inch-long canines, and she would run around the room trying to scrape them off. Kevin fell down laughing the first time that happened.

Kevin’s own meals were either vegetarian or eaten at the restaurant.

He bought a used copy of Born Free at a yard sale. Jonesy wasn’t any kind of modern cat, but it was a start. The librarian found him treatises on the smilodons of North America, though he wasn’t even sure that’s what Jonesy was. He had to play it cool when the librarian got nosy about his interest in cloning.

Jonesy shredded any book he brought home. To her, books, like everything else, were toys. So his reading was restricted to the library and their internet computers, and since he didn’t like leaving the cat alone when she was awake, he kept all his research in his head.

He couldn’t keep the sabertooth penned up, any more than Sara could. So, after a few weeks, he let her off the long line he’d tied to the trailer, and watched her lope the perimeter of the mowed area, where the demolished farmhouse had set. The line wouldn’t hold her anyway, if she wanted to get away. She would chew through chain, though it might damage her beautiful teeth.

She stopped periodically to smell things, and her ears perked at the passage of a bird.

Then she saw the fox, and he thought he’d have to change her name to Turbo.

Did she eat the fox? No doubt she’d caught it. No bloody carcass in the trampled down area where the chase had ended. But for two days later, Jonesy looked quite pleased with herself.

The rest of that summer, the winter, and spring. The sabertooth grew sleek and menacing, muscles moving smoothly under short tawny fur. One of her magnificent eyeteeth loosened. When it fell out, she let Kevin feel inside her mouth, and underneath where it had been, he felt a new sharp point under the gum. Which grew and grew and grew. The other side did the same, and one morning he awoke to her heavy paws on his chest and opened his eyes to see her monstrous white glistening sabers new and sharp and creamy white, each as long as the knife they used in the restaurant kitchen to hack apart beef joints.

Her inscrutable face and hot moist breath made his heart jump with terror. But she was his companion; he had held her under his shirt. He had fed her milk.

He reached up and stroked her ears, which alone of her fur retained kittenish silkiness. Then, with the greatest caution, he touched her saber fangs. Smooth, like ivory knives. This meant she was—Smilodon fatalis? Smilodon neogaeus? Or the other genus—Megantereon? He couldn’t tell: he was no paleontologist.

He called Sara, to share this experience. She picked up after two rings, and hung up. But not even Sara’s rejection could spoil that moment.

He was the first man ever to touch a living smilodon’s teeth, and survive.

Sara would call now and then to ask about Jonesy, or tell him about a job opening. He could leave the sabertooth with her during the day, she said.

But when he called, employers always knew he was the kid who went to jail for drugs. Such is rural town gossip.

Jonesy and he walked the perimeter of the farm every night, out of sight of the road. He’d been four years out of high school. College seemed much further away now. He thought, Some would say I have no life. A dumbass job. Had good grades, could gone to college, married a beautiful woman who owned land. Lost all that because I trusted the wrong person, didn’t fight the system hard enough. Could have done better. But I’ve touched the saber teeth of a smilodon, and if no other gift is given me in this life, that might be enough.

If Jonesy missed anything, she never said so.

Then Jonesy came into heat.

As she came insinuating up to him, dragging her butt against the floor, trying to hump the ragged sofa arm, beseeching him to do something, anything, he just said, “Kitten, I’d write you a personals ad, but your kind don’t subscribe to the Country Cryer .”