while Mungojerrie isn’t as singular a specimen as Orson seems to be, and
while cats by nature are more adaptable to solitude than dogs are, this
small creature must at times know a profound loneliness.
When I began to pet him, Mungojerrie broke eye contact and curled up on
my chest. He was a small, warm weight, and I could feel his heartbeat
both against my body and under my stroking hand.
I am not an animal communicator, but I think I know why he led us into
the Stanwyk house. We were not there to bear witness to the dead.
We were there solely to do what needed to be done for Father Tom Eliot.
Since time immemorial, people have suspected that some animals have at
least one sense in addition to our own. An awareness of things we do not
see. A prescience.
Couple that special perception with intelligence, and suppose that with
greater intelligence comes a more refined conscience. In passing the
Stanwyk house, Mungojerrie might have sensed the mental anguish, the
spiritual agony, and the emotional pain of Father Tom Eliotand might
have felt compelled to bring deliverance to that suffering man.
Or maybe I’m full of crap.
The possibility exists that I am both full of crap and right about
Mungojerrie.
Cats know things.
Haddenbeck Road is a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that for a few
miles runs due east, paralleling the southern perimeter of Fort Wyvern,
but then strikes southeast, serving a score of ranches in the least
populated portion of the county. Summer heat, winter rains, and
California’s most violent weatherearthquakeshave left the pavement
cracked, hoved, and ragged at the edges. Skirts of wild grass and, for a
short while here in early spring, an embroidery of wildflowers separate
the highway from the sensuously rolling fields that embrace it.
When we had traveled some distance without encountering oncoming
headlights, Sasha suddenly braked to a halt and said, “Look at this.” I
sat up in full view, as did Roosevelt and Bobby, and surveyed the night
around us in confusion as Sasha rammed the Expedition into reverse and
backed up about twenty feet.
“Almost ran over them, ” she said.
On the pavement ahead of us, revealed by the headlights, were enough
snakes to fill the cages of every reptile house in every zoo in the
country.
Leaning forward into the front seat, Bobby whistled softly and said,
“Must be an open door to Hell around here somewhere.”
“All rattlers?
” Roosevelt asked, taking the ice pack off his swollen eye, squinting
for a better look.
“Hard to tell, ” Sasha said. “But I think so.” Mungojerrie stood with
hind paws on my right knee, forepaws on the dashboard, head craned
forward. He made one of those cat sounds that are half hiss, half growl,
and all loathing.
Even from a distance of only twenty-five feet, it was impossible to make
an accurate count of the number of serpents in the squirming mass on the
highway, and I had no intention of wading in among them to take a
reliable census. At a guess, there were as few as seventy or eighty, as
many as a hundred.
In my experience, rattlesnakes are lone hunters and do not, as a matter
of course, travel in groups. You’ll see them in numbers only if you’re
unlucky enough to stumble into one of their nest sand few if any nests
would contain this many individuals.
The behavior of these serpents was even stranger than the fact that they
were gathering here in the open. They twined over and under and around
one another, in a slowly seething sinuous mass, and from among these
slippery braids, eight or ten heads rose at any one time, weaving two,
three, four feet into the air, with jaws cracked, fangs bared, tongues
flickering, then shrank back into the scaly swarm as new and equally
wicked-looking heads rose from the roiling multitude, one set of
sentinels replacing another.
It was as if the Medusa, of classic Grecian myth, were lying on
Haddenbeck Road, napping, while her elaborate coiffure of serpents
groomed itself.
“You going to drive through that? ” I asked.
“Rather not, ” Sasha said.