Maček
Cats | Fable 5
Soča hears the motorcycles three hairpins before he sees them.
Sound climbs Vršič the way everything climbs it, in patient switchbacks: throttle, fade, throttle again, each return of the engine note a little nearer and a little higher. He settles himself, gray and striped, onto the warm planks of the stoop and arranges his tail over his paws. The morning is hot past all reason for these mountains. Since dawn the heat has been working on the valley, pulling resin from the spruce, softening the tar in the bends until the air smells of sap and asphalt in equal parts. Light comes down through the larches in slats, and across the valley Prisojnik takes the sun full on its stone face, limestone gone white-gold, the scree below shining like spilled salt.
The pass belongs to Soča. The humans borrow it in daylight, and he grades their borrowing.
The riders appear on the low bend, two of them, leaned into the curve in matching grace, a small tricolor sticker on the lead pannier. They carry speed through his corner, but it is prepared speed; he can hear the difference. The engines never panic. The riders look through the bend to the place they intend to be, machines tipped to an angle that would spill a lesser pair across the stones, and the soft tar holds them because they ask it politely. Soča’s ears track them up and out of sight, bend after bend, until the sound thins into the high country. Competence. He respects it the way he respects the pine marten: completely, and from a distance.
The next engine is small and in no hurry. A Volkswagen Polo the color of old snow labors up the grade with every window down, music leaking, four heads inside, none of them older than the spruce saplings by the guardrail. The car is loud with languages. Italian from the front seat, German answering from the back, English laid across the middle like a rope bridge with everyone crossing at once. A bare arm surfs the airstream out the rear window. They take the hairpin so slowly that Soča could walk beside them, and no one in the car minds, because the mountain is only the excuse; the climbing they care about is each other. Their laughter doubles off the rock face and hangs there after they have gone. Soča files this away as a thing worth knowing.
Then the valley goes wrong. He hears it long before the bend, an engine with teeth in it, revs held too high and released too late. The car that appears is orange and low, windows tinted to black, built like a wasp. It enters his corner carrying far too much of the straight, and the tar, patient all morning, finally objects. The rear steps out. Rubber shrieks. Gravel rattles the guardrail like shot. Soča is off his haunches with his ears pinned before thought can catch up, claws set deep in the planks. The car snaps straight, gathers itself, and bellows on up the pass as though the mountain owed it the save. Behind that black glass, Soča understands, the driver never once saw Prisojnik. He stays standing a long moment after the orange has vanished, heart quick under his fur, tail telling the truth in wide slow strokes.
The heat resettles. The bees resume. Then, faint beneath the birdsong, comes a sound he has been waiting for without knowing it: the tick of freewheels, the creak of honest effort, two bicycles rounding the low bend at the speed of breathing. He knows these humans. Three houses up the hill, the pair with the vegetable rows and the tidy woodpile. He unfolds from the stoop and gives them one clear meow, pitched to carry.
They stop. They are the kind who stop. Cleats click on asphalt, and the woman crouches with her hand already out. “Na straži, Soča?” On guard, she means, and he supposes he is. The man leans his bike against his hip and finds the exact place beneath Soča’s chin, the one the tourists never find. Their gloves smell of sunscreen and metal and the long road behind them. Under their fingers his heart finds its old slow rhythm. They are the slowest thing to pass all morning, and the only ones, he decides, who have actually arrived.
Then they clip in, stand on the pedals, and go, taking the switchbacks the hard way, and the tick of their wheels fades bend by bend as the motorcycles did, only gentler.
Soča pours himself back onto the warm wood. The sun works into his fur. He closes his eyes and falls blissfully asleep.