Ravine Cats

Overview

Ravine cats are the ambush hunters of the Briarreach. They lie up in the thickets above the wet ravine floors and take deer when they come down to drink. The Thornbound teach their sign to children with the other warnings of the forest, and the Troll families who keep the crossings mark a cat's kill-place beside the collapses they remember.

Appearance

A ravine cat is the length of a tall Human from nose to rump, with a thick tail as long again, and stands knee-high to a Human at the shoulder: long and low, heavy in the forelegs, with large paws and a short, broad face. Its coat is tawny to grey-brown, broken all over by dark rosettes and streaks, so that in the dappled light of a ravine it is very hard to see. The ears are tufted black, the eyes pale green.

It moves slowly and flat to the ground, then rushes in a few great bounds. It is mostly silent; in the mating season it gives a harsh, coughing call that echoes up the ravines at night. Its kills are dragged into the thicket and covered with leaves.

Habitat and Range

Ravine cats live only in the Briarreach, along the wet ravines that fall southwards through the belt, thickest along the Sallow's deep cut. Each holds a stretch of ravine a few days' walk long and keeps to it.

Behaviour and Temperament

A ravine cat hunts alone, at dusk, dawn, and on dark wet days, waiting above a drinking place or a crossing where the ground forces prey into a narrow way. It takes deer, wild boar piglets, and anything else that comes to the water. It shies from groups and from fire. A lone walker crossing a ravine floor, slowed by mud and looking at the footing, is the shape of prey it knows, and now and then one is taken.

Life Cycle

A female bears two or three spotted kittens in a hollow under a deadfall in late spring and raises them alone for nearly two years. Ravine cats live perhaps twelve years.

Uses and Dangers

The Thornbound do not hunt them for skins and kill one only when it has taken a person. Their danger is to the lone traveller and the late walker on the through-route, and to the crossing-keepers' goats. A crossing where a cat has killed is a crossing nobody uses alone afterwards.

Lore and Belief

Troll crossing families keep a cat's kill-place in their memory of the crossing as they keep its collapses, and mark both with the same notched post: to them a crossing has two ways of taking someone, the ground and the cat, and both are part of what the toll pays for. Thornbound children are taught the cat's scrape-marks, its covered kills, and the silence of birds above a thicket, and are told the cat watches the paths as closely as their elders do.

A cat that has taken people is hunted by every crossing family on the ravine, and the hunter who brings back its skin is given a place at every hearth on the crossing; the crossing families still tell of one who went down a ravine alone with a short spear and came up with the cat on her back and a scar from ear to hip.

Where It Appears

• The Briarreach
• Writers' Guide: The Forest Heartlands