Vengeance

Cinder was missing. He hadn’t seen the graceful ruddy, fluffy queen in a week and he was worried. He’d finally found a trace of her scent, and he was following it doggedly, nose questing for any stronger traces. He’d long passed the border of the territory. Finally, he came across a scattered pile of feathers and down, and the many days old scent of bird blood. The color of the feathers said she’d found a blue bird of some kind.

The scent trail, and the feathers, arced around, heading back toward home. She’d been heading home with the bird, it seemed. A gift, probably. Then he found the aged marks and traces of a scuffle. He pressed his nose into the tufts of cat fur, laded with sudden terror in their strands that hadn’t been there before. Finally, he found a semi-clear print, and the blood. A coyote.

The blood from his friend was too much to give him hope that she’d somehow broken free and fled, and might be alive somewhere, gravely wounded. He circled the area, nose and eyes still vainly questing for any trace of her, but with a heavy heart, he finally turned to follow the coyote traces. They were paired with droplets of blood, the occasional tuft of hair.

It was nearing dusk when he found her half-eaten corpse, dropped carelessly near a bush. There wasn’t enough left of the cat to merit caching her body. A soft whine left him. Cinder had been like a little sister to him, since he’d found her in the snow as a pup. She’d been a hunting buddy, patrol partner, and his best friend.

Gingerly, he picked up what remained of the corpse and turned back toward home. She would be laid to rest beside his parents and grandmother. Once he’d tamped down the mound of earth, he turned back, pausing at the cave dens to wash his jaws of her dead flavor before trekking onward. That coyote was going to join the dead, soon enough. His bearing was grim, and if any of his pack happened along, he wouldn’t begrudge them the choice to come along and eradicate a natural enemy, so long as they were old enough to leave the territory and fight.