Free Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition by Akif Pirinçci Page B

the fatty tissue of his walrus-like body ripple wildly one last time, like foaming waves breaking on the rocks. Now I was gazing straight into the black holes in the flesh of his wrecked face. They looked like prehistoric tombs, like chasms which seemed to suck my whole mind into them. At the same time I felt almost as if I were admiring a ruined cathedral from the vantage point of a small tourist, which in a crazy sort of way I was.
    'Take a good look at what human beings have made of him!' said the big boss. Only minutes before I'd thought his own appearance couldn't be surpassed for horror, but now, by comparison with the mammoth confronting me, he looked like a cuddly stuffed toy on children's TV.
    'And look at what they have made of us. We can't see any more, sad to say, but you don't need eyes to know that the most violent animals in the world are not lions or cheetahs. So perhaps you can understand why we must use every means we can to keep them from discovering us. Take a good look at him, my friend, because I'm afraid he's the last thing you will ever see.'
    So these guys really meant it seriously. In that case, what was the point of crouching here in fright? They were going to murder me anyway. But to die unresisting, accepting my own execution meekly and in fear - that would be a real disgrace, unworthy of a Francis. No, I'd die like a man with nuts, good hard ones, not a trembling coward whose last act of aggression was to fire off a fart to sour earth's atmosphere. And if you looked at it realistically, the cards weren't stacked too badly against me. After all, this lot were blind, and an unexpectedly bold reaction on my part might well send them scattering in confusion. Moreover, I might not be up to their own level of bloodlust, but I was certainly more athletic than they were. They bore the marks of many diseases and ailments; a number of them were overweight from eating a poor, unbalanced diet, and where speed of reaction was concerned, the majority would have great difficulty in competing with my own hyper-sharp senses. See it in the proper light, and I really had just one ridiculous little disadvantage: there was only one of me, and - how many? -perhaps a thousand of them.
    At least, however, I now knew how to save my skin. It would be cruel, but they left me no choice ...
    'Your time has come, little one,' said the chieftain, with grave dignity. 'You'd better close your eyes. It'll be easier that way, believe me. And as you were saying yourself just now, goodbye, stranger, we shall meet in heaven!'
    A nasty smile crossed the Persian's distorted face, as if he'd been given permission to eat the whole birthday cake all by himself, and he bent a little way down to me. He seemed quite unaware of the time-honoured custom whereby our kind must go through a number of ritual moves such as aggressive hissing, tail-lashing, full frontal staring and whisker-bristling before launching into the attack. Instead, he did something which pointed the way, like a red arrow, straight to his Achilles heel. He swung his front leg and struck the left side of my head with his paw. I guessed that this strange move was not a bold challenge, but was made for a very simple reason: as Rhodes was blind, and in such bad condition that he had probably lost much of his sense of direction, he was using this trick to discover exactly where his opponent stood. He would simply deliver a sweeping blow in that opponent's general direction at first, and if his paw made contact he would know where his enemy was. Then he could wade in. The manoeuvre looked a bit like the way we 'play' with mice before dispatching them, a procedure humans find distasteful. The lords of creation forget that our original source of nourishment consisted of rats, relatively large prey animals equipped with dangerous teeth, so we needed to harry them until they were unconscious. Unfortunately these rough tactics have been extended to the relatively risk-free hunting of