"I want to sleep," I said.
Mother took me to her bed, as she had done when I was small. She laid out a clean white nightdress. I stripped out of my clothes and put on the gown, wincing with the effort. My body ached like a rotten tooth, but the weight of the gown was heavy and soothing.
I crawled into the safety of clean white sheets and mother blanketed me in a thick quilt. She stoked the fire and I began to warm. Then I rolled onto my side and slept. Mother took her place in a chair at the head of my bed. She murmured spells. Days passed. Always I felt her there, spells spinning from her lips like soft banners that circled around me and sealed me off from the outside world.
I wandered in dreams. My bare feet padded over the soft decay of the forest floor. The trees flexed and sighed in time with my breath. Vining undergrowth, lush and verdant, snatched insistently at my ankles and the hem of my gown. In the canopy, a golden oriole erupted into a fluting stanza. Robins and chaffinches joined the song. Peace.
My peace there lasted for the eternity of a dream. My body changed. I became part of the forest, a small, soft, quiet thing grazing, bathed in the dappled light of Tatarian maples and birches. Living in time with the forest and seasons.
Then one day pall of fear rolled over the forest, and a suffocating silence fell. For days and days no breeze stirred and the trees seemed to be closer. The weather turned and became hot and oppressive. Then, a hunter appeared at the corner of my eye. My peace was broken. As he moved closer, I knelt down on my spindly legs and hid in the undergrowth. The hunter stalked forward. The forest changed. It opened and stretched around me into a wide plain. I sat still, hidden by the veil of my spots, alone and frail, rooted in terror. Eternity stretched as I listened to my heartbeat—swish, swish, swish—but the hunter did not see me.
My body morphed. Silently, I grew. My wide, brown eyes shifted, narrowed, and migrated from the side of my head to the front. My gaze became sharp and focused. My sweet, black nose stretched and grew into a broad muzzle to make room for my sharp new teeth. My spots darkened and stretched into dangerous inky stripes. My new coat burned with black and orange.
I elongated myself into a low-slung prowl. Smooth and enormous, I rippled with power. My claws, like daggers, tipped out of paws bigger than the hunter's hands. My heart was steady—tatung, tatung, tatung. Now the hunter, so assured of his role, looked small and smelled like salty flesh. I watched him through slits in the rustling grass, and shifted into a dance of quiet swaying tension.
The hunter's brown boots entered my line of sight, 10 feet away, the length of my body. I sprang. I felt everything in that moment: felt the veldt fall silent, felt other animals still themselves and watch, felt them thrill at the shift in fortunes.
When my claws and teeth tore into his body, I shivered with pleasure and ripped his meat from his bones as he kicked and screamed. His long rifle flew from his hands and lay unspent in the grass. My white teeth sank deeper and deeper into him. I thrashed, and shook, and clawed. Hot, coppery blood filled my mouth in gouts that I dlapped from his ruined throat. I didn't toy with him, didn't leave him a shred of hope that he could escape. I did not have the soul of a man. I was all animal hunger. I ate him up, growling and gorging. Ferocious and triumphant, I was reborn.
