Pain.

Sharp pain.

But it was worse. Better now. Getting better.

Weak, though. Very weak. Need food.

Need something... Something urgent, important.

Something more important than life.

Something. Someone?

That didn’t make sense. He knew something was missing.

He rose, though his legs were shaking. He swiveled his head and licked his lips, trying to spot what was wrong, what was missing. There was something he couldn’t find, and it mattered deeply.

He growled in the back of his throat, a soft, questing growl that vibrated through his body. His body answered. He was in one piece, but something in his belly was still healing, still tender.

It would right itself. Eventually. If he ate.

Eat. Food. Meat. The thoughts were basic ones, repeating in a litany as he lifted his nose to the air and tested it, hunting for traces of that which would satisfy. But a difference scent filled his nostrils. A reminder. That important thing, what was it.

Cub.

His head raised higher. The cub. The female. The not-quite mate, because mates took care of themselves, and this one had not been able to. He’d killed for the female, shared his food with it. That made it his cub. Cubs were creatures you took care of. He sniffed the ground where it smelled like his cub. It was her. He knew the smell, he knew it precisely.

His cub had quick and clever fingers that reached all the itchy spots he couldn’t. His cub needed him. Wait. There was another smell now. It was next to the cub’s. Overlaying it.

It smelled like... bad. It was foul, soiled, dirty. Man. Bad man.

The growl rippled through his chest and his lips curled to a snarl. He sprang from the leaves and traced the bad smell to a place where there were no trees and the ground had been torn and pressed. Then it went away. Different scents filled this place. Scents of oil and gas. Machine scents.

Man has my cub. The fire banked in his eyes and the snarl widened to a full-throated roar. Man has my cub. No! Man cannot have my cub. Man dies.

The anger surging through him helped to make up for the weakness. He would hunt on the way, but where was the cub? Where was the man? An image came into his head: a path, a surety. He’d learned to trust these images and follow his instincts. They once kept him from man, steering away from houses and animals rife with man-scent. Keeping him from machine scents and their dangers that came without warning. Now it would lead him to the foul man. To his cub.

The weakness dissipated as he ran. The smells of the jungle had been getting more and more familiar, but there was a cacophony of smells and sights. Snakes slithered past, small minds unaware of threats, hunting prey.

He needed to eat, he knew it, but the cub needed him more.

He came to a cliff. It was a long jump, too far. He could smell the cave below him where he and the cub had stayed. He didn’t know why they didn’t stay there; it was a good cave, easy hunting. But to men there was always somewhere to go; they always needed to be on the move. And his cub was man, too. Though different from bad man he hunted now.

Now, he had to find a way down. He ran to the right because it was no different from the left. It seemed a long time before he found a defile that cut through the face of the rock. At that, he was forced to jump from stone to stone. He landed on a moss-covered ledge and his feet slid on the slick growth.

He started to fall. His front paws lashed out, claws raking the cold stone, his rear paws caught roughly on a rock stuck out in the debris of the cleft. He hung for a moment, far off the ground, weighing his options.

There was a tree behind him, twice his length away. With a snarl, he pushed off the rock face and twisted in mid-air, lunging for the tree. His claws sank into the soft wood, but the weight of his body and the momentum of his strike tore the claws in his right paw painfully, and he screamed in the pain and frustration.

Retracting the claws, he slid, jumping at the same time, down the bough, and rolled when he hit the heavy layer of dead leaves and rotting vegetation. A mouse bolted from the impact of his fall and he snatched at it. It wasn’t much of a meal, but he felt better for eating it.

The paw hurt.

The cub was good with hurt. The cub could do things that would make the hurt heal. But now, he was far from the trail. Finding the way down the cliff had taken too long, ranged too far, and he had to find his way back again.

He sniffed, trying to smell his cub, but the scent was gone. Even the scent from the cave, after days of sleeping with the cub, was too far to smell. He looked up through the hole in the trees and sought the sky. Through his whiskers he felt the air, and he knew that soon the rain would begin again. When the water fell it covered all smells, washed away all tracks. Hunting would be poor.

An image of a river flashed in his head. The river. Where he’d woken up after a long sleep. The river that smelled like a thousand little deaths and a million little lives, where something metal and filled with grease and oil waited under the surface.

He was having a double image again. It was confusing, but comforting, too. It was a memory, he realized, but not his, or rather not a memory of when he saw that water and the metal and the snakes that lived there.

It was the other memory again. The other memory that guided him, that held him back from hurting or killing. Sometimes. The other memory kept him safe through the complex labyrinth of man’s dwellings and kept man from hunting him. The other memory was trying to get him to his cub. The other memory didn’t much care what happened to the man who took his cub. The other memory roared vengeance.

He echoed it, roaring in challenge, screaming his frustration and his promise of vengeance of his own. He bounded in the direction of where the other memory told him the river was, where it must be.

He came upon a sound of water. It fell in a roar to rival his, and as he neared, it was his memory that he depended on. He saved the cub here. The cub was nearly torn apart by a distant cousin, all black and sleek and small. He’d torn the cousin, and let it slink away to die or heal.

It was gone now.

He knew how to get to the river from here. His own memory took him that far. When the flying machine came to his clearing, he ran through the jungle. The other memory told him that he was running out of time.

Then it told him to be silent as a grave.

He listened. This other memory, this other self, had been right too many times before to ignore. He moved under the leaves, the pain in his paw forgotten. He was hunting now. He slipped between shadows, through the heavy underbrush without touching the dew that hung on the leaves.

The cub was caught against a tree. Man was everywhere. Six of them, his other self told him, though the words meant nothing to him in this form.

His lip curled up over glistening ivory fangs. Bad man. Many of them.

He was hungry.