WE WERE RUNNING through the woods, so fast that the trees were just blurred shapes to fling ourselves between, around, through. The smell of the pack was everywhere around us in the trees. We ran together hunting something large that was crashing noisily ahead of us. The deer had forgotten all caution in the terror of the chase. Deer are always closer than we think, like slender brown ghosts, but this deer ran, trying to outrun us. It was no longer a ghost, but a desperate speed to escape its fate. We were fate on four legs, furred, tongues panting in the summer heat with the scent of pine everywhere so that the deer’s scent was intermingled with it and the scent of the other wolves. The push of our bodies against the ground, the crashing of the deer as it made another mistake. I could feel, or smell, the far wolves circling it, cutting off its escape. It turned and came running toward us but the entire forest smelled of wolf; the deer didn’t know where to run. We ran toward its panic and knew soon we would eat, but first there would be blood, death, and it would not be ours.
Then there was another smell in the forest; it wasn’t us, it wasn’t the deer. We ran for the deer, because whatever it was, it could not have our prey. We had worked hard for this deer, it was ours. Tiger, I smelled tiger, and the moment I thought I, not us, not pack, but me, the dream changed. Richard and I held hands on the edge of the forest, a bigger forest than still existed in Missouri. There was a grass-filled meadow decorated with wildflowers and sunlight. The grass was taller than my waist and it moved not with wind but as if something was moving in it. I thought it was one large animal moving toward us, and then it seemed to split so that the grass moved in three paths. I smelled tiger again, closer, and then it was like the wind shifted and brought the scent of . . . rat, but the stirring grass was too big for an ordinary rat.
Richard’s hand tensed in mine as the grass parted and a huge golden tiger glided into view. It was bigger than any ordinary tiger, big enough to ride on like a horse. The grass parted again, and a huge rat almost as big as the tiger stepped into sight. It was black except for one paw and a spot on its chest that looked almost like a star. It wasn’t just a rat, it was my rat, Astro. In real life he was the size of a normal rat, not this monster size. He didn’t even live with me but stayed with the wererats in their inner sanctum, their place of power, so what was he doing in my dream? He looked at me with his black, button eyes, showing brown in the strong sunlight.
The grass stirred again, and a monster-size hyena stepped out into the sunlight. It looked made of gold and bronze in the bright light, because the sun was sinking downward. I reached out my hand toward the hyena and it came to me like it was a pet. Its short fur was rougher than I’d expected, but the moment I touched it I felt better, safer. The gold tiger came to Richard’s hand; he rubbed it behind one ear, and it chuffed for him in a rolling, friendly sound. I scratched the side of the hyena’s face, and it made a low almost mooing sound, if a cow could growl in a friendly way . . . I’d never heard any sound like it before, but it was a good sound.
The giant rat that looked like the one that had chosen me sat up on its hind legs to look out over the grass, and then it was suddenly smaller and vanished into the grass. That was all the warning we got, and then the lion leapt onto the hyena. The growling moos turned to high-pitched chittering screams, the lion’s roar like a deep bass death drum.
Richard grabbed me and tried to pull me back from the fight. The gold tiger tried to stand between me and them, but it was too late, the monstrous beasts rolled over me. A massive claw caught my outer thigh; the hyena’s teeth missed lion and caught my shoulder in a crushing bite.
I woke screaming in the back of the car to find that the nightmare wasn’t gone, it was inside me. My inner lion and hyena were having a fight to the death inside my body where they couldn’t escape, and neither could I.