This
details the first time I met
Ela Shaviv, the feline border guard. I have since met her many more times, in
The first time I met Ela was the summer of 2000 in
Anyway, along I slogged, until I heard someone up ahead of me moving in the water and singing. The voice had an odd quality to it – an accent, yes, but the sound was rougher somehow than a human voice. I could not make out the words.
I crept forward slowly until I could see the outline of a head. It looked like a woman’s head, with long hair, maybe also with a bow of sorts. Odd for a hiker, I thought, but I kept quiet.
I still couldn’t make out any details, so I crept forward another inch or two. It would have been fine, but the bottom dropped out just in front of me. I went in over my head. When I jumped back to the surface, I was in the clearing I had just been peering into. A crunch in the brush to my right made my head turn. I saw what looked like a flexible tail snake out of sight through the bushes. Its disappearance was followed by a giggle.
I shook my head and moved to try the right, where the mysterious bather had disappeared. There was a sort of path where the bushes had once pushed against each other, and then grown up. I forced my way through this, and got scratched up while doing it. More laughter reached my ears. In a moment, I came to a small tree.
It had a set of very fresh gouges in the bark. As if something had just climbed up.
I looked up into the tree. It was probably strong enough to hold my weight, but there were no low branches for me to grab. I would just have to continue.
After another minute of slogging, back in the stream, I was able to pick out someone behind me trying to follow. I stopped, and after a moment’s delay, the tail stopped. I turned around, but was rewarded with a huge splash as a tailed blur leaped out of the water and into the bushes.
I shrugged and went on.
After yet another few minutes, during which my follower had rejoined me, I came to a clearing with a large rock just to the left of the inlet that I used. I dropped under the murky water and crawled over to the other side of the rock, where I could grab anyone coming through – or at least get a good look.
As I listened, the sound of water being pushed aside came ever closer. But just when I thought I should see a shadow on the water, the movement stopped and was replaced by a scrape. Like nails on rock. I knew at that moment that if whoever it was wanted to harm me, it now had a perfect opportunity.
I put my hands on my head and turned around slowly. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I saw certainly wasn’t it.
Against the bright sky, I saw the figure of a young woman in good physical condition. After a moment, though, I saw a tail that twitched of its own accord. Another moment, as my eyes began to adjust, and I saw a face unlike any human face I had ever seen. It was somewhat like a cat’s face, but wider, with a deeper jaw and stubbier muzzle – tipped, of course, with a pink nose.
Now that I could see her completely, I realized that that she was naked, and that her body was covered in short fine hairs that were white in front, grey everywhere else, and with pale blue spots over the grey fur.
Her eyes were an emerald green, with vertically slit pupils. Her hair was long and slightly wavy, a tricolor mix of the colors on her coat, that hung down to the level of her elbows. Poking through it were two triangular pointed ears, just like a cat’s, and her hair flowed around them. And I thought she was wearing a bow.
She smiled at me. “Hello there.”
I gibbered for a moment, before reacting. “You were following me!”
She grinned, showing her teeth. “You caught me bathing.”
Given the size and shape of the teeth I saw, I decided not to argue the point.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I was hiking. I could ask the same of you.”
“I was bathing. As I said.”
“Where are you from? How did you get here? Are there – “
She put up her hand and interrupted me. “I am not from here,” she said. “My father brought me here. And yes, there are more like me. Not many.” She spoke with a certain arrogance, as if the others she spoke of were not really worth mentioning.
“Your… father?”
“You have a father too, don’t you? So do I. Congratulations.”
“Really, what are you?”
“I am a snow leopard. A kind of big cat. I like it better in warm climates, despite my name.”
“As far as I remember, snow leopards don’t have blue spots.”
“Those are the dumb cats. I speak. Therefore I can be different in as many other ways that I want.”
I myself was dumb-stricken, until she asked me another question. Even so, I didn’t really hear her until she repeated herself.
“What is your name?”
“Ah… I am called Frederich. Frederich Davidsson.” [Note to the reader – this conversation was in Hebrew, so that’s “Friedriech Ben-Dav\xEDd”.]
Her eyes narrowed. “I can tell when you’re lying. You’re doing it now.”
I shrugged. “Maybe your truth sense is off today. That’s my name, and I can prove it. I have my driver’s license, my military medical exemption, my birth certificate, my signature, and my friends who will back me up.”
She sighed. “Very well. I am called Ela.” She extended her hand, and I took it. Though her palm was wet – in fact, all of her was damp, presumably from swimming – I could feel a roughness in the balls of her hand and her fingers. On impulse, I knelt and kissed it. Surprised, she tensed her arm, and half-inch claws extended from the nail beds of her fingers. But she relaxed after a moment, though I released her hand rather quickly – almost throwing it back to her. Those claws could probably tear my throat out, or open an artery, without much effort.
I didn’t know what to say or do. I decided that I would go back home. I excused myself from her presence and then started back.
“Wait,” she called from behind me. “I’ll come with you.”
I waited a moment for her to catch up. Unlike my wading movement, she simply swam towards me, very smoothly, making small watery noises instead of my stolid splashing.
“I want to go with you. It’s been kind of lonely out here.”
I shrugged and said, “Fine. But won’t you attract attention?”
She smiled. “Just go ahead. I’ll be following you.”
I shrugged and slogged on. I noticed that her movements were barely louder than the breeze whispering between the leaves of the brush – only audible if I listened for them. And when I looked behind me, she was nowhere to be seen.
Eventually I came to a dirt and gravel trail that led off through the bushes, and about five hundred feet later opened into a parking lot with a small building at the corner. Just by that building was a bus stop.
I entered the building and opened the locker I had rented there. I took out a towel and dried myself off, and then ducked into the nearby bathroom and changed into dry clothes. Then I packed the contents of the locker into my duffel, returned the locker key, and went to the bus stop. There was a pair of on-duty soldiers there, along with a field medic from the Ministry of Tourism, carrying his M1. They didn’t glance at me when I ducked in and sat down. In fact, they didn’t notice anything unusual at all.
Whatever tricks Ela might have been up to, she sure was great at stealth.
This kept up on the bus that I took to
As I walked towards my small apartment in Zihron, I stopped and murmured, “Are you still with me?”
A grey-and-white blue-spotted tabby ambled out from behind a parked car’s tire and winked at me.
I shook my head and went home.
Once inside, I threw down my duffel and said, “You can do more than be stealthy, apparently.”
Ela rolled out from behind a chair and brushed herself down. “It’s true. I can be a cat when I see fit.”
I gave her a hard look. “Is that all?”
“No.” She smiled and stretched, yawning so that her tongue curled up. It was the tongue of a big cat, part of my mind noted – but she was still naked, so the rest of my mind dwelt on the way stretching made her body’s proportions change, the way muscles slid by each other under her skin…
I noticed that her belly was white, as was her upper body across her ribs and both breasts. The white continued down to her crotch and the insides of her thighs.
I tore my eyes away and shook my head. “Damn! Are you always naked?”
She looked at me, as if puzzled. “I have no need of clothes. My fur is as thick as I need it to be.”
I grimaced. Somehow I knew that was the truth. The best part of me was fascinated by the idea, but a small segment of my mind said, How much before you lose control? I shut it up.
In the meantime, Ela had gone off to explore. I noticed that when she passed the largely empty linen closet, she made a point of touching her head and her back to the edge of the doorframe. I got a bit closer – enough to get a whiff – and realized that she had just marked the closet.
A moment later, I heard loud purring coming from the room across the hall – my room. I stuck my head in. Ela had lain herself down on the comforter and then rolled herself into it, and had then proceeded to push and kick at it as she rolled around on the bed.
I stepped in and gave her a hard look. She met my eyes for a moment, but then she just rolled over and dropped off the bed with a thump. I strode over to the far side of the bed and hoisted her up, then tried to take the comforter away from her. We tugged and turned until my back was to the bed, then tugged some more until the seams of the blanket began to creak.
Suddenly she let go, and I fell half-onto the bed. Ela pounced on me then, pushing away the blanket and straddling me. Now this would not have been much of an issue – I would have just pushed here away – but this was just a little while after I had seen her stretch beautifully, and then she had marked the linen closet’s door. I wondered, in a corner of my mind, if that smell could be affecting my judgment.
I didn’t have too much time to think about anything, though. As soon as she landed on top of me, her expression changed from one of play to… well, still a happy one, but perhaps victorious would be a better word. She ground on me for a moment, and then I pulled her down as she pushed off my shirt.
I woke up a couple of hours later, with Ela still on top of me. She had been watching me, I found, and she was taking impressively deep breaths as I opened my eyes.
Interestingly, though, she was dry. I was slick with sweat, but her fur was only damp where she had touched me. She was also very warm. I asked.
“I don’t sweat,” she said. “I cool off either by panting – as I am doing – or by bathing.”
I thought about that for a minute and then suggested that she might wish to shower.
She nodded happily and stepped to the bathroom. I heard the water running, and I stood by the doorframe and said, “Be careful with the water. The bills are high these days.”
“I can’t hear you. Come in and say it again.”
I stepped through the door, and she was there in the shower grinning at me. She asked me to hand her a towel, so I did, but as my hand came near her, I noticed that the water seemed too hot to shower in. It would have burned me, I thought. I pointed it out to her.
“Higher body temperature,” was her explanation. She shut off the water after a moment, though, and began to dry herself off.
I stood and watched her wield the towel. I was intrigued to notice that she gave her body at most a swipe or two with the towel, while she concentrated much more on her hair.
“Do you ooze out some sort of water repellant?”
She smiled. “Yes, I do. It gets me dry faster if I can just shake the water out.”
I shook my head again. “I would like to talk with you at length about this.”
“Fine,” she said. She gave her hair a shake and hung the towel up. Then she walked back to the front room. She avoided the chair, and instead sprawled out on the small couch.
I came in after her and sat down on the chair. I took a deep breath before starting. I was sure that something weird was about to be revealed.
I started by asking her, “Who was your father?”
She blinked. “My father is dead. His identity is irrelevant.”
Fine. “So how did you get to be out on the path when I was hiking?”
“I had just come back from some strenuous exercise, and I needed to cool off. So I decided to take a bath.”
“What kind of exercise?”
“Well, you know that in almost every part of the world, there is a local legend about the thing that looks vaguely human, but is actually some sort of ape, or big cat, or wolf. Especially wolf.”
I nodded. Stories of werewolves have been around as long as there have been men and wolves. Yetis had also proliferated similarly, and there was always the occasional tiger-man.
“All those stories are variations of the truth. When I said that there were more like me, I meant to imply that they were the roots of all the stories.”
My eyebrows rose and tried to climb up my scalp.
“Locally, there is a story of someone – a werecat – who has been skulking in the area. Rumor goes that this person stops whatever violent attacks are planned near her home. The security soldiers have occasionally found clues leading them to the paths used by terrorists on their ways in to attack.”
She paused to gauge my reaction, and I nodded. I was aware of the rumors.
She continued. “I am the one. I am an expert at stealth. People never know when I am nearby unless I want them to. I can follow gunmen or bombers. And sometimes I do lead soldiers to the paths, if I know that a group will be passing along it.”
“So.” That was all I could say. For the moment.
“A few men at the base nearest the stream that I live near put out friendship offerings now and then – usually just a canteen of water, but sometimes they put out weapons, water filters, bandages, or,” she giggled, “frozen fish in a cooler. I have occasionally been given rifle shells or helmets. As souvenirs, I suppose. I often spend time there in the tabby form that you have seen, but sometimes I visit in my real form. I usually let them get a glimpse of me. Now and then I wait till everyone in a barracks is asleep, and then I walk through it, without hiding. It’s gratifying to see the surprise on the faces of the soldiers when they jolt awake and see me, gliding through the darkness.”
“Why?”
“It’s fun. And it contributes to my reputation as a mythical being.” She rolled over and sat up a bit, and then looked at me hard. “Why I stop terrorists or vigilantes, is because I know the harm they do. My father was killed by terrorists. I will not allow murders to be committed when I can stop them.”
I guess this surprised me, as my next question was quite stupid. “Are you a citizen?”
She snorted at me. “A citizen? You suppose I just walk into the polls and vote? That would ruin the myth. Not to mention that I can’t vote while being stealthy.”
I shrugged, realizing how silly a question it had been. But I had another. “How did you get – How did you come to be? I have never heard of any real sightings, let alone interviews like you’re giving.”
She smiled, a bit sadly. “If only it worked the way you think. No, my father was just as human as you. I never had a mother. You could say that every time someone creates a work of fiction, that fiction is real, on some level. The same is true for us. My father did not ‘father’ me in the sexual sense; he created me.”
I could not reply to that statement.
“Humans have been creating fiction ever since the first ape wished his life was different. The universe is filled with fictions. Most are relatively weak, but someone who creates something that he truly believes is real, it becomes real. At least for him. If he did a really good job, and other people start to believe, then his creation becomes fully real, and can leave him and go about its own business. Like me.” She sighed. “My father was an excellent illustrator and writer. He created me when his fiancée was killed in a car crash while bringing her cat to a veterinarian. On a whim, he decided to combine them – I could also say combine us, since my essence – my soul, if you will – is made up of the way he perceived both the cat and his fiancée together. As a result…”
She looked down. “But I am not really a complete creation. As I live, I notice that you humans seem to be tuned in to something that I can’t hear. Though my physical senses are more acute than yours, I feel that I lack something. Humans have a much greater capacity for empathy than we creations do.” She shook her head, now staring at the floor. “Maybe it’s like the golem. There’s some part of a human soul that even the best artist cannot reproduce in his creations. If the religions are right, then it is your Divine heritage that gives you a full soul, while mine lacks some essential quality.”
She looked back up sharply. “Some of us have believed that the way to remedy the problem is to kill humans. Whether that means simply murdering them, drinking their blood or sacrificing them alive to some elder god, they believe that it will give them fully human souls. Almost every story of an evil animalistic being that lurks, waiting for victims, is one of these people. My kind is a minority.”
“What do you mean, ‘my kind’?”
“Those of us who do good things, rather than attack humans in an attempt to gain humanity.”
“If only we had some among us like you.”
She grimaced in response. “In this situation, it’s… nothing can be done.”
“Really?”
“You could burn
Seems harsh, I thought. But I had been rejected for military service because of a knee injury. She deals with the perpetrators directly.
I decided to change the subject. “So why did you follow me after I scared you off?”
“I got tired of being a myth. I decided to reveal myself to you. It won’t matter anyway – no one will believe you really met me.”
I reflected that that was the truth.
“But more importantly, I wanted some interaction with another person. Someone who’s a match for me, instead of the small creatures that live near the stream. Or instead of sneaking around.”
“That’s all? No other reason?”
“Yes. Is there a problem?”
“But – we just – “
“I’ll admit, I’ve not gotten myself into the situation before. Mostly, if I want to spend time with a soldier, I find him when he’s alone and not likely to be disturbed. Then I’ll usually walk up to him as a tabby, step behind him, and change. Scares hell out of them at first.”
“At first?”
“I visit some soldiers more than once, depending on what I think of them. The ones who speak to me get second visits. The ones who look and rub their eyes, pretending that I’m just a hallucination – those I never approach more than once.”
“But what about today?”
“I’ve never gotten myself into someone else’s bed. Maybe that was a mistake. But,” and she smiled, “I think blankets are fun to play with. Plus, you’re a healthy young man. You certainly enjoyed it.”
Reckon I did, now.
Ela stayed the evening with me, part of it just spent with the two of us leaning against each other on the couch. I was fascinated by her feline attributes and her fur, and I found myself stroking her face, her ears and her tail. She was fascinated, I think, by the experience of being close to a real human who had time to spare, unlike the busy soldiers she usually visited. She purred, and I will point out that if you think a tabby’s purring is loud, it’s got nothing on Ela. She is twenty times the size of an ordinary cat; her purr is thirty times the size. As I stroked and scratched, the vibration coming from her chest relaxed me, and I started to doze off. I lay back, and she moved with me, until I was sprawled on the couch, and she was curled up on top of me.
I must have fallen asleep, because I dimly remember her pushing herself up from the couch and stretching. She kissed me then, and I kissed back, but then I fell back asleep. When I woke up, the night had passed and I was alone. I wondered if the whole day previous had been some sort of crazy dream… until I found the long, grey-blue hairs on my shoulder.
I poured out a dish of cream and carried it out to the front porch.