The great lynx kitten shook itself fully awake when it was time to leave, when the others had turned tail or wing or hoof and the night had begun to draw breath. Sniffing my pink backpack once, it gulped the whole thing down to keep it dry in its stomach. Then it was time for me to ride in the cat’s mouth as it bounded down to the slop to the Reserve’s exit point.

Despite not needing to breathe, the jump in the lake still made me gasp.

The cat swam down, its spines expanding and supporting fins, and its tail pumped once to send me into the water that was deeper than deep, dark beyond my senses and chilling enough to make my fangs chatter. But worst of all was the pressure.

The world turned upside down, and I turned inside out.

Then it happened again, and the great lynx erupted out of the waters of another lake south and west of the Reserve, landing on the shore with me ragdolling and moaning in its mouth, hearing crickets halting their song in confusion in the reeds around us. We were a little closer to Deep River, where another magical cat would lake-hop me to the Land with No Trees (any place with concrete, to these creatures).

Sprinting through the forest to the next lake, I noticed that my mighty steed was preoccupied with the southeast – I had to notice, since every time the cat twisted its head in that direction I flopped around extra hard. I saw nothing unusual over there in the first hour of night, and we made our second lake-jump before midnight, the pressure even worse and forcing a cough of St. Elmo’s indicative fire from my mouth down in the dark. But I didn’t want to complain, seeing as the slightest squeeze of the jaws from the cat would end me – I was still not fully recovered from the tussle with Nocome.

But after the night’s all-encompassing exhale touched my senses, during the sprint to the next lake for the third teleportation, I finally realized what the cat had been noticing about the southeast for quite a while. There was a light grumbling over there, and the growing smell of ozone. That was a thunderstorm.

“What’s over there? Under the storm?” I gasped. It was impossible to say more than three words at a time as the teeth crossed so delicately over my compressed chest. “Tremblant, right?”

YES. The psychic voice was a swift mallet to the inside of my skull. I longed to be huffing on my blood diamond and crashing for another extended period of rest. My body felt increasingly like a rubbery chew-toy, and now I had a headache.

It was very hard to track how much time passed while we were underwater – I felt that it was nearly instantaneous, but perhaps I was just passing out each time. Emerging onto a rocky shore after our third lake-hop, surveying a dark wilderness to the east marred by a strip of powerlines with red warnings lights on the towers, the cat set me down and stood up on its hind legs to glare into the storm. But it wasn’t just a thunderstorm, of course. The anomaly in the sky was now much closer, thundering in the night with a vague outline that my nighttime eyes could just see – until they were temporarily blinded by the first flickers of cloud-to-cloud lightning, which boomed across the land to our ears most of a minute later. I already knew from Nocome that weather was but a plaything for a certain level of power in this land.

“So, you and them don’t get along-” 

“At the mountains where lightning strikes, they come,” the cat said, lowing and looking at me. In the night its pupils had swelled, though the eyeball around them was still a golden oven. “You are injured, and will be injured more as we travel, but you must not feed to heal until we have escaped this storm. They do not know our paths, but they can follow the path of a manitou that drinks blood.”

I had said that the cat sprinted between lakes before. “That’s not a sprint,” I said lamely, trying to deal with the rising pain which would be keeping company for a while, trying to speak in the beast’s mouth like Crocodile Dundee. “This is a spr-” 

The cat pinched me hard enough to keep me quiet. It was tracking the time between flashes and the rolling thunder as it ran to the next portal to its underworld, away from the surface where a thunderbird might strike.

The next lake to take us somewhere was a brief period of safety. The cat lingered in the unseen depths, and we spoke together. It sensed my pain and eventually lowered its psychic voice.

We and they rule this land, back and forth. What one decides the others would often decide on their own … but when one sees what the other does, there is disagreement.

Fucking politics.

I don’t know those two words, the great lynx replied. If we let a spirit live to walk free like you, the birds might kill. If we decide to kill, they might let that spirit go free. Just for spite, no matter the spirit. If the catch is big enough, they will want it.

So I’m on a big enough wanted poster-

Not you. Nocome. You are just her jar. The birds will want her, and you are easier to catch. We will rise near Deep River, and my brother will swim you faster to the Land with No Trees. But on the way is another mountain that can tremble.

Sinking deep again, we then erupted near Deep River, in sight of the provincial boarder. I looked up into the sky and saw no stars, only continuous lightning in a sky like broken glass.

A second storm from Calabogie! Child of the Eight-Ten, run to Deep River alone! Do not feed!