Клэр Белл - The Named - The Complete Series

“If he had, the marsh birds would be picking at your dirty pelt. No, clan cat. I bear no name and I obey no one.” He grinned again. “Except my stomach.”

“That I can believe,” she said sourly, letting her prickling fur soften.He must be telling the truth, she thought.Meoran would never have anyone like him in the clan.

“Time to hunt, clan cat,” he said, turning his face toward her. “We’ll start with marsh-shrews. Later I’ll teach you how to catch bush-tails and diggers. Are you ready?”

“Yes …” she said, and her voice trailed off.

“Mmm?” He crooked his tail.

“What do I call you?”

“Don’t call me anything. I don’t have a name.”

“I have to call you something if I’m going to talk to you. If you can call me ‘clan cat,’ I should be able to call you something,” she said stubbornly.

He flicked an ear.“Very well.”

She hesitated.“What do you want me to call you?”

“You want the name. You choose it.”

“Arrr, it isn’t really a name,” Ratha haid doubtfully. “Only the clan can give someone areal name, such as mine.”

He looked irritated.“All that means is that it was bestowed upon you by some fat whelp that everybody bares their throat to. For no good reason I can think of,” he added scornfully.

Ratha began sorting through possibilities. None of the names of those in the clan fitted him at all. The only one that even came close was one she had invented. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. And there was nothing wrong with it.After all, shethought, it isn’t a real name.

She saw him peer into her face and knew he had caught the glint in her eye.“I’ve got one,” she said.

He drew back his whiskers.“I should have known better. Very well, clan cat. What am I to be called?”

“Bonechewer!”

“Arrr,” he grumbled.“I suppose it suits me. Very well then. Follow me to the marsh and I’ll see if I can make you into a hunter.”

Ratha followed him, cheered by her minor revenge. Bonechewer. It really wasn’t bad.

That evening he and Ratha caught more striped shrews and she managed to trap and kill one by herself. By nightfall, she was full and drowsy. She wanted a den where she could sleep. Instead, Bonechewer took her to a moonlit glade beneath the slope where the spring ran and told her to hide amid the ferns.

“We aren’t going to hunt,” he said in response to her grumble that she was stuffed right down to her tail. “Just stay here with me and watch.”

He crouched beside her and they watched as the glade began to stir. Ratha had run trails and herded animals by night, but she had never stopped to notice how the darkness brought so many small creatures out of their dens. Even though Ratha’s hunger was sated, she quivered with excitement and felt Bonechewer’s paw descend on her to keep her from wreaking havoc among the night denizens of the meadow.

Tiny feet pattered back and forth through the underbrush, rustling last season’s brittle leaves. Bonechewer listened and told her what creatures made which sounds. Some of them she knew, from her nights of guarding clan herds. Most, however, she didn’t and had difficulty telling one animal’s noises from those of another. Her ears were tuned to the calls of lost or straying herdbeasts or to the sounds of raiders lying in wait in the brush.

She started when a little blacksnake emerged from its hole almost between her forepaws and slithered away, its scales edged with silver. She watched it crawl through the grass and onto a rock still warm with the day’s heat. As the blacksnake coiled itself with a soft scrape of scales, an animal with dingy gray fur, a pointed nose and a long bare tail ambled by the base of the rock. The blacksnake raised its head, tongue darting and scanned the bare-tail as it went by. The snake sank down again, loosening its coils. Ratha wrinkled her nose at the bare-tail’s rank odor and agreed with the blacksnake that there were better meals to be had. A second bare-tail followed the first, the tail arched over its back. Several gray bundles dangled upside down by their own small tails wrapped around the larger one. The smelly bare-tail, Bonechewer said, often carried her young that way.

Bonechewer didn’t take Ratha back to his den until sunrise and she slept until midday. Again they hunted marsh-shrews, and when both had killed and eaten their fill, he took Ratha to another place where she could hide and watch. They spent several evenings hidden together. Each evening Bonechewer showed her thecreatures that made up his hunter’s world. He told her about their lives and habits and drilled her until she knew them. Not until she understood every quirk and characteristic of a prey animal did he let her hunt. She complained bitterly at first, for her instincts told her to pounce.

As she learned more, however, she complained less, for she began to see the wisdom in his method. Once she turned seriously to the task, she became so absorbed that it threatened to distract her from the business of filling her belly. Bonechewer varied things by showing her other hunters who shared his territory. One of Bonechewer’s neighbors was the flightless bird that had attacked her on her first hunt. From afar, she watched it stride across the marshland, the furred carcass of its catch dangling from its hooked beak. That limp pelt could have easily been hers, she thought, shivering. When the great head lifted and the lizard eyes stared her way as if they knew exactly where she was hiding, Ratha broke cover and fled, ending the lesson for that day.

Once Bonechewer took her out of the marsh along the lakeshore and turned inland until they came to a small plateau dotted with trees and wildflowers.

There they saw a huge beast with the body, neck and head of an oversized dappleback. The creature’s forelegs were longer than the rear legs, its back sloping down from shoulders to withers. Shaggy orange fur covered back and belly. Instead of hoofed toes, the feet bore sickle claws that forced the creature to walk with an awkward shuffle. Ratha hid among the flowers and watched the shambleclaw as it reared up to strip tender leaves from the trees or grub for roots with its claws.

It seemed to Ratha, as she followed Bonechewer on hunts and expeditions, that she was seeing every kind of animal there was. How narrow the herder’s life seemed to her now as she began to relish the variety of forms and the variety of flavors. Bonechewer also taught her to fish in the lake and she found that the finny denizens of the water were as varied as creatures on land and sometimes even queerer. He showed her a fish with four eyes, two above and two below the surface of the water. He said it tasted dreadful, but was fun to watch on lazy summer afternoons as it shot down dragonflies with a stream of water and gobbled the drowning insects as they thrashed on the surface.

The only creature they had not seen was another of their own kind. Bonechewer prowled his territory alone except for her and they saw no other Un-Named hunters. To Ratha, accustomed to eating or working alongside many others, this solitary existence seemed strange and unsettling.

They were stalking meadow mice on the hillside below the spring when Ratha asked him why he never saw the other raiders.

“They don’t come here,” he answered, after finishing his kill.

“Why?”

“Why should they? They have their territories and I have mine. They stay on their ground and I stay on mine. I like it that way.”

“If you like hunting alone,” Ratha asked, puzzled, “why did you take me in?”

He grinned at her and she grinned back at the sight of the limp tail still hanging out of his mouth. He swallowed and the tail disappeared.“You’re different,” he said.