Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams

Squeaker-nests for newborns on his first night out!
    He would make a clean kill.

    Night birds wheeled and soared above. He could feel the presence of the Ruhuë in silent overflight. They were not hunting, he guessed: the Ruhuë preferred to search and swoop over flat ground. More likely they were leaving nests in the nearby forest.
    Just as well, he thought. The nearness of an owl would freeze the forest creatures and make it that much harder to find dinner.
    Other night-rising fla-fa‘az whistled and piped in the trees, up in the farthest reaches where the Folk were too heavy to travel. Fritti dismissed them without a second thought.
    Hopping down into a dry, rock-strewn gully, Tailchaser got a sudden and surprising whiff of cat-scent. He turned, muscles tensed, and the smell was gone. In a moment it was back again, and he breathed it long enough to note some familiarity in the odor. Then, oddly, it disappeared once more.
    Fritti stood perplexed by this bewildering phenomenon, hackles raised and nose twitching. The scent had not changed in intensity from movement or wind failure—it had simply vanished.
    When the scent returned to him he recognized it. No wonder it had seemed to have a familiar tang to it—it was his own scent.
    His nose wrinkled delicately as he sampled the air, confirming his suspicions. He had walked into a night-eddy: a slow, barely detectable whirlwind. The rocks in the dry creek bed, heated by the sun during the day, were warming the air above them. Contacting the cool night air descending, trapped and rerouted by the walls of the gully, the resultant swirl of air made lazy circles ... carrying his own scent back to him. If he had not paused for a moment, he would not have been in place long enough for it to circle around!
    Pleased that he had solved the puzzle, he leaped up to the far side of the stream bed and was moving away when an idea tugged at him. He turned back and inspected the gully wall for several jumps up and down on both sides. He found what he had been looking for—the half-concealed entrance to a Squeaker-burrow.
    He knew that the sunwarmth would dissipate eventually. He also knew that the trick would work only once. Carefully, he set himself in place: lying atop the gully wall three or four jumps down the stream course from the burrow opening. He tested the edge of the stream-bed wall on which he lay, and found a spot that would not crumble under movement and send a shower of earth down to betray his plot. Then, working the catechism that his mother had taught him, he stilled himself into immobility to wait.
    Unwilling to move his head, he sensed, rather than saw, that Meerclar’s Eye had moved but a short distance. When he was finally rewarded by a faint movement at the tunnel mouth, it seemed as if he had waited several lifetimes.
    Carefully, so carefully, a nose appeared from the hiding hole and sniffed the air. The rest of the Squeaker followed. It sat frightened-eyed on the lip of the tunnel for a moment, every movement showing a readiness to run at the first sign of danger. Crouched, with nose wrinkling, it tested for hazard. It was a field mouse, brown-gray and skittery.
    Without awareness, Fritti began to flick his tail back and forth.
    The Squeaker, scenting nothing immediately dangerous close by, moved a cautious distance away from the hole mouth and began to search for food. Its nose, ears, and eyes were constantly trained for predators. Never straying more than a quick leap away from its hole, the Squeaker scavenged from side to side of the dry stream trough.
    Fritti found that it took all of his control to not leap down on the mouse that seemed so close. His stomach clenched silently with hunger, and he could feel the impatient trembling of his hind legs.
    But he also remembered Bristlejaw’s admonition to be patient. He knew that the little Squeaker would be back down its bolt-hole at the first sign of movement.
    I will not be a kitten, Fritti told himself. This