“Do they do that to every newcomer? she asked Bunny.
Shush had put on a good deal of flesh in the scant week she’d been at the Fjord and no longer looked like a rack of orange-skinned bones and pathetic eyes.
Bunny looked over and grinned. “Naw, they’re educating her. Nanook said something was necessary since the poor cat’d had no one to teach her how to pass on messages. Her mother got killed before she could, so she’s being brought up to speed with the rest of Clodagh’s cats. And” Bunny frowned, because there were far more cats there than there should have been. “There must be messages coming in.” She put down the body brush she’d been vigorously using on her pony and walked over to Nanook.
“What’s up?” she asked, sitting down beside him in a space made available by a resettlement of many orange bodies.
Liam Maloney is not pleased at what happened to Dinah, Nanook told her. The cat sat perfectly still and stared into Bunny’s eyes through his own wide golden ones, the message rumbling into her mind as all of the more complicated messages did. The cat’s vocalizations were limited to the few short human terms within the range of its speech centers. These longer communications needed a bit more concentration, especially with a neophyte recipient such as Bunny or Yana Maddock. With Sean Shongili it was a different matter altogether. Talking to Sean was second nature.
Bunny sighed. “I knew Liam would be upset but he does know she’s recovering and is being very well treated?”
Nanook licked a front paw briefly to indicate the affirmative. He passes on that there is trouble at Deadhorse like what you found at McGee’s Pass. Trouble also waits at Wellington and Savoy.
Bunny thought about that. These were the four towns most remote from Kilcoole, and each of them had been reported by the cats as being in favor of mining. She couldn’t help but wonder if each of the towns had also had recent changes in their shanachies. She gave a convulsive shudder. If there were any more like Satok, the trouble was bigger than she’d ever conceived it could be. And if all four of those villages had had their caves coated in Petraseal … She shuddered again.
“What else?” she asked, sensing that Nanook was waiting for her to absorb that information.
Satok has been visiting these other villages. Satok has friends in all of them. The reports, by the way, are from track-cats and feral cats. No more like Shush live in those villages.
“The hell he has!”
“What’s the matter, Bunny?” Yana asked, startled by Bunny’s loud, angry outburst.
“But what can we do about it?” Bunny asked quickly, waving to Yana to keep on with what she was doing.
Nanook licked the tip of his tail thoughtfully. Clodagh has been informed of all. There is more. When the pilot man goes south, we must go with him.
“Sean’s not in danger, is he?”
Nanook blinked. We go south, too. Then he stretched his long body out across the sun warmed stone of the wall, and Bunny knew he had finished talking to her.
She went back to Darby and picked up where she left off.
“What was that all about?” Yana asked. leaning against Darby’s rump.
“Nanook says we’d better go south with Johnny.” She added hastily, “No, Nanook doesn’t think Sean’s in trouble, but he does think we should go south.”
Johnny Greene did, too.
“I’d have to go back even if I didn’t want to check up on the kid,” he said. “Whit wants me to keep an eye on Luzon. Actually, I was supposed to pick him up at Sierra Padre a couple of days ago.” Johnny grinned unrepentantly. “Had engine trouble.”
Bunny cocked an eyebrow at Johnny.
“Oh, I’ll have a real one for Dr. Luzon,” Johnny said, brushing aside her skeptical reaction. “But I had a sudden premonition, like, and since I’ve rarely had one that strong before that didn’t turn out that I should have listened more closely, this time I did. So I called in a few favors and sorted the problem out. Just in case.” Then he grinned with all the abandon of a boy who had just pulled the best practical joke in the world on his worst enemy and there’d be no way of assigning guilt to him.