Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams Page A

is a good hunt-plan. I will wait for the proper moment.
    Finally, he judged that the mre‘az was as far from the burrow as was necessary. When the mouse turned its back on his position for a moment, Tailchaser brought up his forepaw and dipped it slowly over the edge of the gully wall, halting and freezing if the mouse seemed about to turn his way. Gradually, with great care, he stretched his paw down, until he felt the faint currents of the night-eddy ruffle the fur of his extended foot.
    The eddy carried the scent around—down the gully walls to circle slowly back up to the mouse from a point seemingly near its own tunnel.
    As the cat-smell reached it the rodent went stiff, nostrils flared. Tailchaser could see the bound, shivering tension of the mouse as it scented a mortal enemy—apparently between it and the escape route. The Squeaker remained frozen in place for several heartbeats as the eddy carried Fritti’s scent past it. Then, in an agony of confusion, it made a halfhearted lunge away from the hole mouth, toward Tailchaser.
    All the cat’s pent-up energy was discharged at once. His tight-coiled muscles took him over the edge of the stream bed in one motion. As soon as his hind legs touched the ground, he was airborne again. The mouse did not even have a chance to utter a noise of surprise before it died.
     
    Following his left shoulder in the way Stretchslow had directed him, Fritti thought about his strange encounter with the older hunter.
    He had always seen Stretchslow at leisure—an aloof, unapproachable figure—but he had not acted like that today with Tailchaser. He had been different: animated and energetic. Even more strange, he had treated Tailchaser with great kindness and respect. Although Fritti had been very careful not to offend Stretchslow in times past, he had certainly never done anything to merit respect from a mature hunter. There was a riddle there that he could not solve as he had the night-eddy.
    Such a day! How the others back at the Wall would laugh and call out at the story of one of the Folk learning Rikchikchik language in the tree of a squirrel-lord.
    But he might never return to Meeting Wall to sing his song. He was of the Folk, and his oath would bind him. And now he was a hunter—sung and blooded.
    Still, the hunter felt very sad and small.
     
    Past the midpoint of night he began to feel a continuous weakness in his tired muscles. He had walked far by the Folk’s standards; even farther for one his age. Now he had to sleep.
    Nosing about for a sleeping place, he selected a grassy indentation at the base of a large tree. He sampled the breeze carefully, and found nothing to prevent him from bedding down. He turned three times around in the small hollow—honoring Allmother, Goldeneye and Skydancer, the life-givers—then curled up, covering his nose with his tail-tip to save warmth. He was asleep very quickly.
     
    Dreaming, he was under the ground, in darkness. Fritti was struggling, scrabbling at dirt that gave way under his paws, but always there was more dirt.
    He knew something was hunting him, just as he hunted Squeakers. His heart was racing.
    His scraping paws at last broke through, and he fell through a wall of earth into the open air.
    There, in a forest clearing, were his mother and siblings. Hushpad stood there, too, and Stretchslow and Thinbone. He tried to warn them about the thing that was chasing him, but his mouth was full of dirt; as he tried to speak, dust fell out onto the ground.
    Looking at Tailchaser, his friends and family began to laugh, and the more he tried to indicate the danger they were in from the following-thing, the thing that hunted him, the more they laughed—until the sneezing, high-pitched sounds swarmed in his ears....
    Suddenly, he was awake. The laughter had become a high-pitched barking. As he listened, stock-still, he could hear it clearly. It was quite close by, and in a moment he identified it: a fox, yipping in the darkness beyond