Free Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms by Suzette Haden Elgin

that had slapped me into that cold water had been big, and because I’d had my head covered up in swathes of lace and velvet I hadn’t seen or heard or smelled it coming. I hoped I’d given the dratted clothes a hard enough pitch to keep them dry, but not hard enough to throw them into a bramble-bush ... or I’d be spending my planned period of self-indulgence manifesting a new set just like them, out here in the middle of nowhere, by magic, with nothing but my emergency kit and whatever happened to grow handy for makings.
    On the rough principle that what had knocked me into the water was not a water creature itself, since it had been on the bank at the time, I dove for the bottom of the creek. It was murk down there, naturally, no nice clear ocean all pretty with water like a gemstone, but it seemed to be clean water, and flowing, and there were no deepwater weeds in my way to get caught in. And about the time I was congratulating myself on that, I discovered that I’d made a major mistake.
    I’d never seen one before, but I recognized the shape of it well enough when I got my eyes open, even through the dark of the water and the stuff I’d stirred up going in. Only one thing on this planet goes with six legs and is the size of the shadow that twisted just ahead of me (I hope), and I was in sizable trouble. The cavecat can climb anything, and it can swim, and it lives to kill; four of the legs are for running, and the other two for slashing and clawing, and the clawing involves eight three-inch razors to every paw. Not to mention its teeth , of which it has more than it needs by a goodly number:
    There are not supposed to be giant cavecats on Oklahomah. Kintucky, maybe, just maybe, though I’d never heard of one showing up there the past thirty years. But the way of things was supposed to be that cavecats had been wiped out everywhere except in the Tinaseeh Wilderness—where I was convinced the Travellers not only didn’t try to get rid of them but encouraged them, just to keep everybody off. Nevertheless, this was not Tinaseeh, nor yet Kintucky, this was placid, long-settled Oklahomah, with its Wilderness not much more than a pocket hanky as Wildernesses go, and that was a giant cavecat in the water ahead of me. Right smack dab ahead of me. And I could see how, in this backwood tangle, the Family hunts might of missed a specimen or two.
    I didn’t know how well they swam, but I knew if it got to me it would drown me, even if it had to surface and just hold me under with its middle legs while it had all the air it wanted or needed. And I needed air badly, myself. The bottom was right there, and praise the Twelve Comers, it was rocky—I gave myself a hard shove off the cobbly rocks and shot toward the light, with the cat right behind me, and I scrambled out onto the bank and hollered for Sterling.
    Mules. If she’d been there, where I’d left her not two minutes before, I might have been able to SNAP out of that particular hard place before the cat made it out of the water. She wasn’t there, though, nor anywhere in sight. Gone looking for something edible, probably.
    “Sterling, you damn Mule, you, damn your ears and your tail and your bony rump besides!” I shouted, and then I made the very close acquaintance of hundreds of pounds of soaking wet cavecat.
    It pulled me in with one front paw and held me to its chest, which stank the way you’d expect wet cat to stink and then some, and started off across the rocks on the bank. Almost dainty, the way it picked its footing, and in no hurry atall—like any cat, it intended to play with me awhile before it made its kill, and no doubt I was an unusual play-pretty for the nasty thing. If there’d been any people around here in a long, long time we would have known there were still cavecats on Oklahomah ... and I made a note, as it carried me, that when I got back— if I got back—word had to be sent to the three Castles to clear them out.
    It’s amazing how