Free The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy Page A

evicted; a small, feathered corpse lay on the pavement, and he could see the thin yellow splatter patterns that the eggs had made. Tooth dipped his wingtips briefly—he had no objection to eating sparrow, despite the profusion of small bones, but he and the other cheels had conferred on the falling numbers of the birds.
    “Bad, very bad,” his mate, Claw, had said, quoting the old saw. “The sparrow may be small/ But when it leaves/ So will we all.”
    A flashing line of movement triggered his predator’s brain, and he automatically flexed his wings in preparation for a possible SD&K. “Target: kitten,” his mind registered. “Terrain: open, but riddled with boltholes. Prey mindset: young, inexperienced, unaware. Obstacles: cars, ledges, brickpile, foliage. Kill probability: 46 percent.”
    Southpaw felt rather than saw the approach of the cheel—a momentary coolness on his fur as the shadow overhead blotted out the afternoon sun—and reacted instantaneously.
    “To the hedges!” he thought, sprinting, his short paws covering the distance at surprising speed. There was more than enough time, and he risked an upward look.
    The cheel was coming down fast, and even at this distance, Southpaw shivered when he saw how large its talons seemed,curved like grappling hooks. The predator was terrifying, but also mesmerizing.
    He didn’t realize he’d taken his eyes off the ground entirely until he slammed into an abandoned plastic bucket. Southpaw miaowed in distress as its green edge caught him hard across the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and then he scrambled to stand up again. The hedge that had seemed just a paw’s length away loomed up in the distance, the thorny roots of the lantana grim and forbidding. The kitten tried to run but could only limp along. Fear knotted his small stomach when he realized how close the dark and rapidly growing dot spiralling out of the sky was to him. He felt the fur on the vulnerable back of his neck stand up, and he urged his paws to move faster, but they were still shaking from the collision.
    “Kill probability: 87 pe cent … 89 percent … 91 percent,” Tooth was in the last arc of his dive and sure of his kill now. He refined his aim, flexing his talons as he prepared to sink them into the spot on the kitten’s neck so helpfully defined by a band of white fur. If he got it right, the neck would break in an instant and he would take off with a limp body instead of having to cope with a wriggler on the line.
    The bushes rustled; a streak of muscle and fur erupted forth and rolled Southpaw over and away. Katar was on his feet before the kitten knew what had happened; with a swipe of his sheathed paw, the tom batted the brown kitten off the ground and into a pile of dried, dusty leaves near the lantana hedge.
    “Kill probability: 71 percent … 24 percent … 9 percent … PULL OUT!” signalled Tooth’s brain as he attempted to pull up, rise and avoid Katar’s scything paws simultaneously. Fromhis vantage point, Southpaw had a brief but unforgettable view of a glaring yellow eye, a confused impression of gleaming, rushing brown-and-gold wings and polished beak; Tooth executed a neat three-point-turn in mid-air and within seconds, the predator had soared back up into the sky, a shrinking dot in the distance.
    Katar stared up at the sky until he was sure that the cheel wouldn’t return. Then he nudged Southpaw roughly with his head, checking to see that the kitten hadn’t broken or bruised anything serious. When Southpaw sat up, his whiskers vibrating an abject apology, Katar cuffed him, but with his claws retracted to show that this was just a token reprimand. This was the fourth time that week he’d had to smack the kitten; Southpaw and trouble had a natural affinity.
    “If you’re old enough to go exploring on your own, Southpaw, you’re old enough to know that you never look up at predators,” Katar said, watching the kitten dust bits of leaves and