Beasts of New York | Page 7

to rest on the concrete, next to where a
heap of black things stood beside one of the caged little trees.
"Easy for you," Patch muttered. "You're a bird. You just fly away from
trouble."
But the sight of his friend perched casually right next to a sleeping
death machine, combined with the promise of food, was enough to
bring Patch down to the concrete. He scampered towards Toro as
quickly as possible, turning his head from side to side to look for
danger. He found it everywhere. There were humans both behind and
ahead of Patch, a row of sleeping death machines to his right, and to his
left he smelled rats. Many rats.
"This is it!" Toro said when Patch reached him.
Toro sounded as proud as if he stood before a hill of acorns as high as a
human, rather than a pile of huge, foul-smelling black things like
seed-pods, their shiny skins flapping like leaves in the wind. Patch

looked skeptically at the trickled heap of decaying sludge beneath one
of the seed-pods, and said, "You said there was food."
"There's food inside them," Toro promised. "Just go inside. That's what
the rats do."
"It's rat food?" Patch asked, horrified. Rats would eat anything, the
more rancid and disgusting the better.
"Rats come here," Toro admitted. "That's how I found it, I saw them.
But sometimes it's good food too. Once, right here, I found the most
marvellous seeds I ever tasted. They were wonderful."
Patch sniffed the air. He smelled bluejay, death machines, rotting
sludge and rats. He smelled his own fear and hunger. But there was
something else beneath all that. Like the faintest hint of wine in muddy
water, or a single musical note almost drowned out by a howling crowd,
Patch smelled something so delicious that his mouth began to water.
"What is it?" Toro asked.
"It's here," Patch said. He leaped up on the nearest black thing. Its
material had a strange slick feel, made an alarming crinkling noise
when he landed, and was so soft his claws tore right through it. Patch
jumped to the top of the pile of huge black seed-pods, and ripped open
the skin of the uppermost one with a few bites. The wonderful smell
was suddenly stronger. Patch hesitated only a moment. Then he dove
headfirst into the hole he had made.
It was so dark inside the seed-pod that he could not see. His snout
encountered dry fluttery things, wet sticky things, even hard metal
things. In his hunger he pushed them all aside, squirming deeper and
deeper, following his nose towards the smell that made him dizzy with
hunger. He found paper, like the newspaper with which his drey was
lined. He tore the paper open with his teeth. And inside he found a
whole mound of food like nothing Patch had ever tasted before. It was
soft, salty, and delicious. There was enough to fill the bellies of a dozen
squirrels.

Patch ate, and ate, and ate.
Until dimly, through all the debris that surrounded him, he heard Toro's
high, harsh cry that meant: "Danger!"

A Promise
When Patch finally found his way out of the seed-pod, Toro was gone,
and there were rats all around him. Some hid beneath the huge black
seed-pods, some scuttled in the shadows of the nearby mountain. Patch
knew from their smells there were at least a dozen of them.
There was another smell too, mixed with that of the rats. The very same
unsavory squirrel-smell he had detected in Silver's abandoned drey.
"What do you want?" Patch asked, from his perch atop the mound of
seed-pods. He was concerned but not yet frightened. Rats and squirrels
were neither friends nor enemies. Squirrels were bigger and stronger,
but rats were far more numerous. There were legends of long-ago wars
between the two species, but no squirrel Patch knew had ever been
attacked by rats. Squirrels lived aboveground, in the sun; rats
frequented the night and the dark underworld. Of course, squirrels
found rats disgusting and disagreeable -- but so did all other animals.
An unusually large rat climbed up to the top of a seed-pod. It was
almost as big as Patch himself. Rats usually avoided light, but this one
stood unafraid beneath the sun, and demanded: "Who are you?"
"I am Patch son of Silver, of the Seeker clan, of the Treetops tribe, of
the Center Kingdom," Patch said. "Who are you that asks?"
"I am Snout," the rat replied. "Why are you here?"
"I came to look for food."
"This is our food. These mountains are ours."

"Your food?" Patch asked, bewildered. There was no ownership of
food in the Center Kingdom, not until it had actually been eaten.
"That's ridiculous. It's food. It belongs to