“Every cat! Come quickly!”
A gentle breeze rustles the fruit trees’ leaves, casting dancing shadows over the overgrown ground. Grasses tall enough to brush a cat’s belly compete with weeds to crowd around the trees’ trunks, reaching tendrils of ivy pouring over low branches. Despite the salty scent brought inland by the soft wind, the air is sweet with overripe fruit. The dropping fruit draws prey, and all four cats eat well.
It’s Bird Dr
ops Apple’s favorite season. No cat is starving, which means no cat is dying, or fighting one another, or traveling far away. They can all be together when it’s like this.
Red Ears trots wordlessly beside her, their strides matching until he hisses suddenly in surprise and his paw steps stumble into silence.
Bird Drops Apple slows to a halt and circles back to him, snorting in amusement when she finds him vigorously wiping cobweb from his face. “Gull-brain,” she teases, and lifts her muzzle to the sky as she waits for him to untangle his whiskers. The clouds this season are her favorite, too: impossibly tall where they march on the horizon, the ideas of storms beginning in their bellies. They are too far away to disturb the lighthouse, smudged and incarnadine.
From over Red Ears’ shoulder, she sees the patched pelt of her sister split the grass. Spots Like Moth is panting, and immediately plops her hindquarters down in the shade. “You two go on,” she meows, breathless and sarcastic, “Don’t wait up for me. It’s not like I was in the middle of something.”
“Your flowers will still be there when we get back. The sun’s setting, and Watches Minnows will be waiting.” Bird Drops Apple glances back towards the crumbling lighthouse, but her older sister’s familiar silhouette is missing.
If Watches Minnows called them all to watch the sunset, she must have seen something important. Of the five of them, she was the most gifted cloud gazer. She could predict the coming season better than any cat Bird Drops Apple had ever met.
She suspected Watches Minnows had been able to foresee her own death, but that she kept it to herself to spare her littermates the worry. Always the responsible one.
If she was still with them, would she have been able to predict the orchard’s death? Was she warned of the plague of disease that targeted the trees, killing the fruit and sapping the trunks of life? The dried husks attracted less prey than ever, but drew in bizarre, aggressive birds who drilled at the dead bark in search of insects. The sound of their drilling fills Bird Drops Apple’s ears again, sunrises after leaving them behind.
The dream is beginning to fade, and she becomes aware of a prodding at her shoulder. The birds’ drilling falls away and she blinks awake, Spots Like Moth’s face swimming into focus. Her sister looks older than she did in the dream. Much older, suddenly.
“Can you see what prey you can find?” Spots Like Moth whispers, voice low. A small ginger shape is nestled against her side, asleep. Another rests against Bird Drops Apple’s stomach, snoring softly.
In answer, Bird Drops Apple rises slowly to her feet, carefully sliding the kit onto the sandy floor of their makeshift den. His sleep is undisturbed, so she ducks out to hunt without another word.
She hunts well, and comes back with a robin and a starling crammed in her jaws. Spots Like Moth has roused the kits, and is grooming a wriggling Coyote’s Jaw outside the bush they’d sheltered under. As usual, her tongue strokes barely affect his wild fur. Bee Dances in Sunlight yawns next to them, and she rises to her paws when she spots Bird Drops Apple.
“Prey!” She cheers. Bird Drops Apple can hear her purr from tail-lengths away. She drops the birds and steps out of the way of the kits, who launch themselves eagerly at the starling.
She shares the robin with Spots Like Moth, their pelts brushing. They don’t say much. After traveling for sunrises, their energy to even speak was waning. Between remaining alert to their new surroundings and keeping the kits’ morale from flagging, the older cats were exhausted.
The kits were, too, but Bird Drops Apple could tell they were pretending they weren’t. Coyote’s Jaw oscillated between giddy delight over finding bugs he’d never seen before and despair upon having to leave them behind moments later to continue trekking along. Bee Dances in Sunlight was eager to help Spots Like Moth collect dock leaves to rub on the cats’ sore pads in the evenings, but had foregone her assistant role last night. They were both reaching the end of their stamina.
“We’ll be there soon,” Spots Like Moth meowed, licking the last remnants of food from her lips. She glanced quickly towards the kits and back. “I can feel it.”
“We’d better be.” Bird Drops Apple kicked sand over the remains of the bird, bowing her head briefly to thank it for filling their bellies. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “They can’t go much further.”
Spots Like Moth’s tail twitched, betraying her anxiety, but her voice was bright when she called out for the kits. “Now that we’re all awake, we can get moving! Still paws are sore paws, after all.” She gave each of her paws a dramatic shake, earning a giggle from Bee Dances in Sunlight.
“Are we going to cloud gaze?” The little kit asked, like she’d asked the day before. Bird Drops Apple felt the fur prickle between her shoulders.
“No.” Spots Like Moth frowned at her curt tone, but Bird Drops Apple didn’t back down. The kits needed to understand. “We aren’t Skyview cats. We don’t cloud gaze anymore.” There’s nothing worth seeing in them anymore anyways.
“If we’re not Skyview cats,” Coyote’s Jaw began, confused, but Bird Drops Apple interrupted him before he could ask: “then who are we?”
“Let’s get going.”
Spots Like Moth nudges Bee Dances in Sunlight to her paws. “There will be plenty of clouds to watch when we get to where we’re going,” she says, ever the optimist. Bird Drops Apple is glad the kits can’t see through it like she can.
They make little headway, the kits’ paws getting caught on every root and bramble tendril and their little tails dragging. Their morning meal does little to speed the working of their tiny paws. After some time, Spots Like Moth and Bird Drops Apple exchange a glance, a silent call to action, and each dips their head to pick up a kit. Coyote’s Jaw is heavy, and she must crane her neck not to bump him on the ground, but he miraculously does not protest.
She numbs herself to her own discomfort and lets Coyote’s Jaw’s scent soothe her. If she focuses, she can smell the parts of it that remind her of Watches Minnows, and even the parts that remind her of Red Ears, similar as he was to his brother, the kit’s father.
Would they ever see Many Fallen Oranges and the rest again? They hadn’t been able to tell them where they were going. They had no way of knowing Skyview was gone. When they came back, there would be no cat waiting for them. Will they go looking for them? Will they assume they’ve died, or, worse, that they’ve abandoned Skyview? Will they mourn? Will they be angry?
Will Red Ears still call her his friend?
Lost in the thicket of her thoughts, Bird Drops Apple nearly runs into Spots Like Moth, who has stopped. The pale cat gently sets Bee Dances in Sunlight down, and Bird Drops Apple follows suit, depositing Coyote’s Jaw beside his sister. Both kits slide off their feet, drowsy.
“What is it?” Bird Drops Apple asks, and tenses when Spots Like Moth gestures at her to lower her voice.
“Cat scent!” Spots Like Moth hisses, her eyes wide with trepidation and excitement. “Lots of cats!”
Bird Drops Apple forces herself to exhale slowly as her stomach flips. The urge to sweep up the kits and race back towards the crumbling lighthouse surges through her like the tide, threatening to sweep her off her feet.
The cats they were looking for were shrouded in mystery. Why so many lived together, whether they would welcome the displaced cats, and whether the kits would be safe was up in the air. All the cloud gazing in the world couldn’t prepare them for what was about to happen.
Spots Like Moth pushes her muzzle into Bird Drops Apple’s shoulder fur, twines their tails together. “I know you’re scared,” she says, and remains close even as Bird Drops Apple shifts away, pelt hot. “I’m scared too. But remember what we promised Watches Minnows?”
A thorn of grief spikes Bird Drops Apple’s heart at the mention of their eldest littermate. Watches Minnows’ kits, her siblings, her life, had been snatched away in an instant.
“Of course I remember.”
“Right. She told us to stick together, and we said we would. Now the kits are a part of that.” Since she can’t be, Bird Drops Apple thought her sister left unsaid.
Bird Drops Apple holds in a sigh, worried there isn’t enough room left in her tight chest for the air required. She watches the kits in their fuzzy pile, already half-asleep. They’re thin, bedraggled. The journey has worn them down like sandstone in a storm. They’d be hardly a mouthful for a hungry fox, and all four cats would be too weak to put up a fight against territorial cats who didn’t welcome four more mouths to feed.
Allegedly, the huge groups of cats live honorably, but without mercy for strangers. The knots in Bird Drops Apple’s stomach redouble. Was she leading her family to their deaths?
Spots Like Moth seems to read her mind, soothing the prickling fur on her spine with a pass of her tail. “No matter what happens, we’ll be together. That’s the most important thing.” With a final lick to her sister’s cheek, Spots Like Moth pads over to the kits and nudges them to their paws.
“Come on, brave ones.” She lifts her muzzle, scenting the air. “We’re almost there.”
And she’s right—they’ve just finished crossing the sun-hot stone of a twoleg bridge when a solid wall of scent stops them. Multiple cat-scents swamp them, the message in their markers clear: this land is ours.
“Stop here.” Bird Drops Apple sweeps her tail before the kits to halt their stumbling, and they collapse against her hindquarters, too tired to even complain.
Beside her, Spots Like Moth is quivering with renewed energy. Her eyes are wide with excitement, a foil to the dread building inside Bird Drops Apple. She sniffs one bush then another as if she can memorize the identities of the cats who marked them.
“The cats who left these markers will be back,” she guessed. “We’ll wait here for them.”
Curling herself around the kits, Bird Drops Apple fixes her eyes on the low branches of the trees in the forest before them, half-expecting an ambush at any moment. She lays with her claws unsheathed, prepared to spring up and flee, or get her pelt ripped in defense of the little souls in her charge.
This is it, she thought, and wished she could say aloud. One way or another, what happens today will change the rest of our lives.
Spots Like Moth returns to crouch beside her. “I can feel Watches Minnows watching over us,” she whispers, unbothered when Bird Drops Apple avoids her gaze. She looks instead towards the clouds that billow in the sky above them.
“Her spirit will guide us to where we’re meant to be.”