Certainly, powerful and intense storms were a fact of life here. The dry, parched land was occasionally punctuated by storms of sometimes destructive capacity and strength. The Rilla could smell such a storm coming and Beastie is no exception to this. But there is something different about the Storm that was coming. She can smell it in the air.
Beast has been, as usual, tracking the bachelor group. They too, are affected by the storm. Irritable and nervous, they have been fighting all day... petty quarrels with the loser usually skulking off to lick his bloody muzzle.
Beast is restless. The group hasn't made a kill, and she is hungry. She had trailed them today, hoping to scavenge from their abandoned kill. With no kill forthcoming, she tracks back the way she came. She can feel the storm approaching. The breeze that rustles the tall grasses is a precursor. She feels the hair of her ruff rising, and shakes herself like a dog, rumbling uneasily.
Something on the borders of her waking mind tells her it is nigh. Fragments in her mind, half-drawn images...prelude, warning, or just the fear that comes with a dangerous, powerful event? There is definitely something more than the smell of the air, the rise in humidity...but how could that be?
Her fur doesn't settle. She feels she is being tracked, and looks back, once, over her shoulder. A dark bank of clouds gathers on the far side of the savanna. She snarls at it, and moves faster, heading toward her den. Her stomach growls.
It is not the season for such storms. The wind picks up, tossing the tree branches wildly. There comes a startled squawk and a half-fledged nestling of a scavenger bird falls in front of her nose. Without breaking stride, she grabs it, breaking its neck with a sharp toss of her head. She does not stop to feed. The electrical feel in the air has her hair on end down her entire back. Carrying the bird, she breaks into a trot.
As she reaches the pile of rock that contains her den the wind dies. She scrabbles up to the narrow opening and turns to look. The sky is dark. The tree line across the plain is obscured, whether by low cloud or by falling rain it is impossible to tell. She snarls once, defiantly, and ducks into the crevasse that is her shelter. She turns three times round in the space beyond, coming to a stop facing the entrance. After a moment of staring at the dark sky visible through the gap, she turns her attention to pulling the feathered skin off her kill.
The scavenger bird begins to come apart under the attentions of her jaws and claws as the Storm continues to mount. A peal of thunder is followed several seconds later by a flash of lightning and the sound of a small explosion as the bolt strikes the rocky ground. This sequence repeats several times. The patter of rain is expected, too, it's not as heavy a rain as the prelude seems to suggest.
No, what is the kicker in this storm are the images that form.
It's difficult to see them from her vantage point but it seems that there are images in the sky, ghosts, perhaps. The lack of heavy rain gives her the ability to crane out her head just a bit, safely, and then she sees them with greater clarity.
What she sees are two ghostly figures in the sky. The first is two legged, and wields an object in one of its paws. The other is a quadruped like herself, with a mane and a twitching tale. The four legged one roars, and the roar is the sound of the thunder.
Her own answering roar startles her. Her hackles fully risen, she abandons the bird for later and stands at the threshold of her rockpile. She shakes her head - things are not right, things not as they should be. She is furious and confused. Her senses are triggering instincts, a misfiring of messages, and her continuing disquiet has found a focus in the sky.
Intruders. Challenge roars. Such things must be met. She roars again, ears flattened in the spattering, sporadic rainfall, teeth fully bared.
But what does this combat mean, to take place in the midst of the storm between such unearthly opponents? And why does her sense - that sense, the sense that she feels sometimes when she is moving toward sleep - why is that sense all haywire?
The rain continues to pattern on the rocks, and the two images continue their combat. It seems to be an even match.
Beastie continues to pace, growling angrily when she is not raising her voice to the thundering sky. Her anxiety does not diminish; the unease continues to torment her. When the other cat again roars, she 'leaps,' snarling...
The sky continues this phantasmagoric display, the other cat and the biped squaring off. Almost as if she were part of the combat, her actions and her agitation are mirrored in the cat above. And yet there is some sort of connection between the intruder and herself. The biped strikes the cat with its fist, its right in the upper shoulder. And, somehow, just at the same time, it is as if the biped were down here, striking her in turn. For now her own shoulder throbs slightly from the force of the blow.
She feels it. She FEELS it. Somehow, when the biped strikes the ghostly feline in the sky, she can feel the pain. Above, the feline roars, but the biped currently holds sway, holding it at bay.
Challenge met. Yet still something is not right. Not. Right. Agitation... she backs off a pace, shaking her head. Her coat is a sea of spines, as the strange defense that has made her outcast is once again exhibited in her current, aggravated state.
When another blow falls, she roars back in, claws fully out, teeth ready to bite and tear at anything they encounter. And it comes, but this time she is ready for the next blow. The pattern established, she leaps upward, teeth and claws extended and ready, as the image of the biped above her makes ready to strike the ghostly counterpart to herself.
And she feels something when she strikes! She should have been grasping at empty air, at nothing at all, when she leaped and attacked, yet she felt something. As if she was facing some invisible, transparent enemy.
What's more, she can smell, now, the blood oozing from the wounds that she has just given him. It makes no sense...but the part of her brain that does not think in those terms understands this all too well.
His next blow comes quickly, and she feels the throb in her hindquarters. It was only a glancing blow, though, since she is now alert, active and ready for them, even if it is from an invisible foe.
She now, somehow, has a fight on her turf.
She has no experience with bipeds. Well, small ones crunch well, but they stink. She's never observed a biped like this one, and therefore she would normally want to investigate the creature. She wants to circle round it and test its defenses. She would claw for a hamstring cut if she could see... this blind fight is continuing to keep her in an agitated state... Agitated and dangerous... her impulse is to kill the threat before it is able to kill her...
Without sight, but with a scent that belies its position, the fight continues. The large biped, although injured, is far from done. She doesn't need to see the ghostly apparition in the sky to know that fact. She circles around where she perceives the invisible intruder down here, jaws snapping, claws extending. True, the biped lacks armor, and perhaps lacks even claws, but it has something sharp in its paws, something that feels like the sharp tip of her own claw, although it is not attached directly to its paws. And the legs it stands upon have no such claws at all, you brush past what must be the small nails of its digits.
The battle continues. She feels a painful wound to her rear hindquarters, and her blood oozes out, slowly. It is enough to slow her some, but even with the wound, she is still faster and more deadly than this thing. It takes a few passes around the biped to realize where the creature's legs are situated. It's not a perfect shot by any means, but she rakes with her paw, and scores the top of the hamstring of the biped. A howl of pain, and she senses that it crumples onto a knee. Something invisible hits the ground near the biped, and she dodges a whirlwind strike from its bare paw easily.
She's hobbled it. It's likely still dangerous, but its mobility has been reduced severely by her shot. And she smells something else from the biped.
Fear.
Beast hesitates, and circles a few times, growling and roaring. She is at a disadvantage. In her herdpride, she would distract the downed prey while a higher ranking packmate would move in to break the neck. This is large prey. She doesn't have a learned response for taking such prey solo.
The fearsmell encourages her, and she works herself up to move in. After three or four passes around, she will run up the creature from the bloodsmell leg, attempting to find and bite the back of the neck.
Four passes does the trick.
The downed prey tries as best as it can to hurt her with its paws, that sharp thing is gone, but the blows are not much of a distraction to the likes of she. Such a strange biped, this thing. But the fear it shows only increases with each roar and growlshe utters. Although she can still can't see it, except as shown in the ghostly fight above, she can sense it trying to turn and keep its front to her. It's smart, of course, considering what her next move is.
Like a whirlwind, she manages to jump behind it, and then up its back. She feels the biped struggle, and try to throw her off. She isn't really paying attention to the ghost in the sky any longer, as the blood lust is upon her.
And she quickly sinks her teeth into its neck. Now in this, it acts as any other prey, and soon it stops struggling. She feels the invisible opponent sink to the ground, and a new smell enters her nostrils.
It's the smell of freshly killed meat. Above her, she can see that the ghostly image has sunk to the ground, as if she really was up there and dealt it the death blow. The ghostly quadruped sits on its back, but then turns its eyes down, as if looking directly at her.
Its look, if you can interpret it properly, is that of a pack-mate that appreciates your contribution to the hunt.
Meat.
Meat. Lots of lovely meat. And herdpack pride. She roars, the call roar, the group roar. Then bites and tears at the meat...
Not long after her roar, announcing the acquisition of food, of meat for the pride, she sinks her teeth into the invisible flesh. She tastes it, it seems real enough, it fills her mouth, and soon, her stomach.
With the storm dissipating and subsiding, the pack reaches her location, at the sound of her voice, rather quickly. They were not so far away after all. Confused, they apparently cannot see the invisible prey that she has brought down, either. However, they can smell it.
One by one they come. Perhaps surprised that she made a kill, much less a solo kill. They sniff in the air, trying to sense where the freshly killed meat really is. And they regard her with baleful eyes. This is not a position that she, or they, are so accustomed.
Above her, perhaps her own work done, the ghostly quadruped vanishes from sight. The biped that was downed by her also vanishes. The Storm, and the combat, are over.
And the pack watches her with wide eyes. The largest male, the alpha of these bachelors, moves forward from the rest and approaches her slowly, gauging her reactions and her next move.
She backs off, hissing. The meat is still there, and she will back off to offer it. They will also smell the remains of the bird only a few strides away in the rockpile. She nows this is lost, but with her full belly it is not such a great one, and she beats a strategic retreat, slowly backing away and hissing warning.
As she backs off, the lead male comes forward, sniffing furiously. His jaws clamp down, and apparently strike home. It is going to be the usually order of things, the alpha will take first, and then his lessers, in order.
The rain is sort of spritzing, and it will shortly stop doing even that, Beastie can tell. At one point, one of the tertiary-ranked males decides to forego the invisible quarry, and heads over to the rockpile. It is, in the end not such a loss, her belly is full, and with something more than a run of the mill bird.
It has been a good hunt. The pack stays there some time, taking their fill. Once they are done, she is fairly certain that the biped, invisible or not, has been reduced to bones and gristle. To say nothing of course of the bird, devoured completely by two of the lesser males.
She's now gotten some more respect - that much is clear when they finally back away and out of her territory.
She reclaims her crevasse after they leave, and settles for sleep. If she had the word or concept, she would be surprised. As it is, it takes her a long while before she stops lifting her head and looking off in the direction they went off in.
The bachelors move off, and she watches them for some time before they are out of sight. They are headed in the direction of the area they had previously staked out. None of them really look back or anything of the sort, they know that she is there, in her place.
After the exertions of the night and a full belly, sleep comes easily, perhaps more easily than in recent days. The rain stops the straggling remnants, and the night cools off nicely.
Life is good.
