Shush’s family had been murdered. More critically from her viewpoint, all the toms had been murdered. She had gone through heat after heat alone, risking death in the woods to keep her cries from reaching the ears of Satok. Krisuk Connelly commiserated with her occasionally, but everyone else had been told the cats were spies; which, of course, they were, since it was only natural to lurk and spy and satisfy one’s curiosity.
Until she had heard from the Kilcoole cats, in fact, she had imagined herself the last cat on Petaybee.
Well, the last proper cat anyway. There were lynxes, of course, and bobcats, and she had once or twice heard the hunting cry of a track-cat, but her mother had told her that those sorts of creatures, if you caught them on a bad day or when they had nothing in particular to socialize about, would eat you as soon as look at you.
So Shush stayed solitary for years, living off her wits, spying on the village and making herself invisible whenever Satok was around. It had taken a great deal for her to lead the Kilcoole cats’ people to the cave, but she had in mind that somehow, being from elsewhere, these ones might not succumb to Satok.
When the girl was taken there was no one to cry to. The dog lay stricken, as Shush’s own family had been stricken, by Satok’s cruel staff. Krisuk and the Kilcoole boy were in the dead place. Not even to save a litter of her own would Shush brave that place.
Instead she bounded off in the opposite direction, down the road and out of town, back tracking the hoofprints of the big horses, already nearly lost in the snow. When she was tired, she rested, licked the snow from her feet, and thought. The Kilcoole cats had contacted her, but she didn’t know how they had done it. She had been trying to flush out a rabbit at the time, pawing at the half-thawed ground, when a voice spoke to her in her own tongue, within her mind. She asked the voice who it was, thinking it was perhaps the ghost of one of her relatives, asking if it was safe to spend another life there, but the voice replied that although it was, like herself, a cat, it was from the village of Kilcoole.
The voice belonged to a tom. She was sure of that. The question was not highly detailed. It wanted to know if the people of McGee’s Pass would mine for the company or not. She said they would if they were told to, which had been her experience of them. They weren’t bad people, but Satok had taken away their partnership with the planet and creatures like herself and turned it to his own purposes and against them.
The tom had said nothing about people coming, but Shush sensed that there would be visitors. They had come! And now Satok was dividing them and destroying them as he had so much in the village.
So Shush left, having nothing more to wait for. She leaped from one horse track to another. She sniffed when the track disappeared; she felt the howling wind roughing her fur the wrong way.
Late that night she found where the horse and dog tracks met with other tracks, including those that made her lift her lips in recognition. A track-cat, quite likely a Kilcoole cat, since the people had come from Kilcoole. A large one. And more horse tracks, like those of the people. She clawed at the cat tracks, rubbed her head against them, marked them with her scent. From the other scents mingled with the big cat’s, he had been among others of her kind and probably was unlikely to eat her.
Thinking that these new folk might be camped just ahead, she followed the tracks. But she was small and the trail was long, and Satok had won again. She yowled for the Kilcoole cats to answer her, but none did.
Finally, at daybreak, she slept for a few hours, then began moving again, though the tracks were older and much harder to follow. What other choice did she have?