My Queen

In jaguars, melanism is due to a dominant allele. In leopards, it is negative. I didn't know what she was at the time, all I knew what that she was very large and supremely unafraid, dark as midnight with rosettes on her supple pelt an indigo darker again than that. Her eyes were peridot. She was the most magnificent thing I'd ever seen.

I was in Rajasthan, southern India. From my baptism in blood I had travelled far, and would travel farther still in search of the exotic and the familiar, the safe and the wild. I liked sparsely populated villages, and densely populated cities. I liked rural areas where the yield is low, and I had recently discovered that I liked jungle where there is nary a person to be found, and the eating is mammalian, but of different species. The humidity is held in by the blanket of canopy and the selection on offer is superb, if one can get one's taste buds around the unexpected.

Primates are my preference of course. They are on the whole too small for me to feel replete, but several langur monkeys in succession fill me nicely. On this particular day I had enjoyed an appetizer or two, and was looking forward to my main course. Gibbon is pleasant, and I had my senses on alert, wondering if one of the shy beasts would stray into my path.

Big cats are nocturnal, and my queen shouldn't have been awake. But just as I caught the faint aroma of something I wanted, I scented something else entirely, something tantalizing beyond measure. Fruit and plant eaters have their smell, carnivores have theirs. There was a carnivore, big and delicious near me.

Pushing through vines and palms I found her, tearing apart a boar. She knew unerringly that I was there and looked up, ears flattened to her head, fangs dripping with a mixture of her own saliva and the juices of the freshly killed animal beneath her. Her coat rippled with the splendor of her strength, and her eyes shone with the gloss of her readiness and will to counter any opposition.

Normally, I am feared. Urban humans are slow to pick up on the danger that I represent, their senses having been dulled by their removal from nature, but once they get a good look, they get worried. People who live in jungles are more attuned to the wild, and more in touch with their intuition, and they seem to scent me and fear for their lives, as well they might. Animals flee, without exception.

But she stared, a flat malevolence in her gaze. There was no judgement, no insight, just a blind instinct, an imperative. She didn't even weigh me up and assess the threat - she wasted no time and leapt at me, unsheathed claws seeking my flesh, jaws unswerving in their trajectory. She aimed to break my neck, as she would with any adversary.

I staggered beneath her, and she was heavy. I grasped at her, but she was fluid and slinking, spine bending impossibly, righting herself, flinging herself off, gathering herself ready, again. She had no fear, she simply saw me and obeyed the instinct that had seen her ancestors reign in this sticky, carnal, heated habitat for millions of years. She was lithe and relentless, seeking my throat like a lover who would not accept refusal. I had never been so in awe of a living thing.

It was a real fight - we were as strong as one another, as sure of winning. She could not acknowledge the possibility of failure, having not the imagination for it. I could, and possibly it gave her the edge. She was more suited to the environment than I was, being far more agile than I. But ultimately, I didn't want to kill her, I couldn't have borne it. Strange I could feed from humans and leave them in my wake, gasping their last breaths, but this queen was too majestic, too precious, too proud and too wild for me to contemplate taking her.

When I eventually held her underneath me, her eyes expressing no surrender, I had no choice, no option. She fought me as I bent her head back to expose her throat, she resisted and growled, and her majesty showed no diminishment. I thought her courage should never be dimmed or dulled, her unyielding spirit never extinguished.

Unlike her, I had no fangs. But my teeth were sharp, my jaw was strong, and I could bite as hard as I ever needed to. Even as I forced her neck to my mouth, sank into her pelt, she clawed at me and snarled. I felt the rumble in her throat while I made her mine. Well - she would never be mine - she was untameable. I made her wildness unending. I drank of her dark, dark essence, the beauty of the utter wild, and I infected her with the elixir I carry internally and had never bestowed elsewhere. I had never found anyone or anything I considered worthy, until my queen.

I left her there, lying amongst the rich, glorious lushness and damp, and I went on, on with my impatience and lust, my impulse and curiosity, on with my restless travels and travails, my explorations.

I would have stayed if I had seen one flash of recognition in those expressionless eyes, one sign that she acknowledged me and would continue to know me - but that wasn't the point. She was beyond, above and outside me - the finest and purest thing I have ever witnessed, sentient yet unhindered by sentiment, self-contained and utter.

It was many years later when I, itinerant still, heard stories coming from Britain of wild cats, though lions had been extinct in Europe for hundreds of years. Some windswept and inhospitable place called Bodmin Moor in England's southwest was the site where people were reporting having seen a creature, far, far larger than a domestic cat, yet possessed of feline grace. There were accounts of livestock found with broken necks and gougings from their soft parts. The tales continued, and continued. In 1995 a skull was found, and was determined to be that of a leopard. Fears were allayed, as it was thought the mysterious and impossible predator was dead and the talk stopped.

But the slaughter didn't. Killings were still reported, though quietly.

I don't know how she got there, my queen, but I suspect that that is where she is, for now. It is said that during the sixties it was the fashion to have a pet cheetah, or tiger, until laws were passed against such practices. Not knowing what to do with the animals, the irresponsible owners set them free. By the nineties, the felines would have all been dead, there being insufficient of them to breed, but still the occasional article appears in newspapers. Undying and ageless, my queen reigns over a bare place and will need a new home soon, to continue feeding, and she will need a new source. She will find a way.

Did Noah decide what creatures were to survive the deluge - did he make choices as to what he would carry? Dinosaurs became extinct because they were too big to fit in the ark, they would have sunk it. I played Noah and decided my queen would survive - I decided in a split second based on a raw emotion I felt and couldn't identify, and I have wondered since what it was. Reverence?

I don't need to see her again, because I know she roams, and can never be contained, never harmed. My wonder will ever abide. She doesn't want or need me, she has no use for company.

I brood, I contemplate, I agonize, I suffer, cast from humanity with no other society to accept me, living to hope and seek, always wanting.

She lives to live.

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Though chapter two, this is a prequel.