But these weren’t pirates. Nor outlaws. Not even a forgotten cult. They were orcas.
For decades in the nineteenth century, along the southern coast of Australia, a pod of killer whales worked in co-operation with human whalers in Twofold Bay.
They didn’t merely follow the boats or scavenge from discarded carcasses. They signalled. They herded. They hunted alongside the men. And at the centre of the story was one specific individual, a male that became known as Old Tom.
The Signal in the Bay
From the 1860s until the early twentieth century, shore-based whaling was integral to the small town of Eden.
Unlike the vast industrial fleets that would later dominate the Southern Ocean, Eden’s operations were small, open-boat enterprises run, at least to start, by a single family – the Davidsons. What made their station remarkable was not its size, but its partnership.
When migrating humpback or southern right whales entered Twofold Bay, the orcas would drive them toward shore. Old Tom, recognised by his tall dorsal fin, was known to swim to the mouth of the Kiah River and slap his tail against the surface — a deliberate “flop-tail” that alerted whalers to the presence of a whale.
Men would heed this signal and scramble into their boats. The chase would begin. And a significant ritual became an anchor to the partnership.
The arrangement became known as the “Law of the Tongue.” Once a whale was harpooned and secured, the carcass would be anchored overnight. The whalers would leave the lips and tongue, which are rich in blubber, for the orcas. The rest would be processed at the try-works.
This is important, as it clarifies the partnership as not one based on sentiment. It was mutual advantage.
Old Tom
Old Tom measured around 22 feet (6.7 metres) and weighed an estimated six tons. Distinctive wear on his lower teeth suggests he frequently gripped tow ropes during hunts. This behaviour was allegedly recorded by whalers who claimed he would sometimes take the line in his mouth and help pull the boats.
At other times, he reportedly clamped onto the rope fastened to a harpooned whale and allowed himself to be dragged through the water, an act the crews described with something like affection. Yet, a later incident of what seemed like a playful tug of war notably loosened his teeth.
He also notably returned season after season.
The documented co-operative hunts largely ceased by 1901, following a series of disruptions. One member of the pod, known as Typee, was shot by a local after becoming beached in the shallows. In the aftermath, Indigenous Australian whalers who had worked with Davidson’s crew withdrew from Kiah Inlet. At the same time, global industrial whaling expanded dramatically, and baleen whale numbers began to decline.
The ecological and economic balance that had sustained the alliance fractured.
No baleen whales were recorded in Eden after 1926.
Old Tom, however, continued to return. Often alone.
On 17 September 1930, his body was found floating in the bay. His skeleton now hangs in the Eden Killer Whale Museum, suspended in quiet testimony to a strange chapter of maritime history.
The Solitary Return
Orcas are deeply social animals. They travel in stable, matrilineal pods, maintaining lifelong bonds and passing hunting traditions across generations. Despite the folklore surrounding Old Tom, males do not lead pods. Solitary individuals are rare.
The image of Old Tom returning alone to Twofold Bay has unsettled observers for decades.
Local belief holds that the rest of his pod may have been killed further north, possibly in Jervis Bay, by Norwegian whalers unaware of the cooperative history in Eden. Elsewhere along the coast, fishermen and whalers often regarded orcas as competitors and retaliated with bullets and harpoons.
The “Killers of Eden” were never universally protected. They were tolerated, while useful.
When shore-based whaling declined after 1901 and industrial fleets reduced whale populations further offshore, the ecological conditions that had enabled the cooperation disappeared. And the behaviour vanished with them.
Cooperation or Strategy?
It is tempting to romanticise the story. Man and predator working side by side. An interspecies pact honoured through ritual.
But modern research offers a quieter explanation.
We now know that orcas exhibit:
Cultural transmission of behaviour
Specialised hunting techniques within pods
Long memory and social learning
Adaptive exploitation of predictable food sources
The Eden pod was not acting out of loyalty in a human sense. Nor were they mythic collaborators. They were intelligent apex predators exploiting a reliable opportunity.
Orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family, which is significant because bottle-nosed dolphins in Laguna, Brazil, have developed a similar, near century-old partnership with local fishermen. They signal with tail slaps and head nods when the men should cast their nets, as the pod herds the fish towards shore.
The “Law of the Tongue” was not a moral contract. It was strategy.
When overhunting reduced baleen whale numbers, and when industrialisation changed the rhythm of the bay, the strategy no longer worked. And so it ended.
The Name That Lingers
“The Killers of Eden” remains a provocative phrase. We can’t but help associate the name Eden with a place of original innocence. And killer is the name we give all deliberate predators.
Yet the title reveals as much about us as it does about them. We were the ones that christened them killers, whilst we were killing too.
Perhaps what unsettles us is not that orcas hunted alongside humans but that they adapted so fluidly to our violence. That they folded themselves, briefly, into our industry.
And when that industry collapsed, they did not mourn the contract. They adapted or vanished.
There is something more grounded in that. This story isn’t about myths, monsters, or miracles. It’s just two apex species intersecting, for a moment, in a fragile ecological alignment.
And when the balance broke, the sea closed over it.
If you enjoy reflective explorations of the uneasy boundary between humans and the wild, my novels explore similar terrain, where co-operation, fear, and instinct are rarely as simple as they seem.
In the winter of 1915, the settlement of Sankebetsu, in northern Japan, was already under strain.
Snow lay deep across Hokkaido. Food stores were thin. Travel was difficult, sometimes impossible. For the people living at the margins of cultivated land, winter was not simply a season — it was a test of endurance.
What went largely unconsidered was that the same conditions applied to everything beyond the settlement’s boundaries.
The forests were locked in ice. Natural forage was scarce. Prey animals were weakened, dispersed, or absent altogether. The winter that pressed hardest on human communities was doing the same to the wildlife around them. But at the time, this was not a connection people were trained to make.
Ecology, as a way of thinking, had not yet entered the conversation. Hardship was viewed as a human problem, unfolding against a largely static natural backdrop. The idea that animals might also be responding — adapting, learning, and changing behaviour under pressure, was rarely entertained.
It was in this context that the Sankebetsu incident began.
A first encounter and a dangerous assumption
The bear’s first appearance was not dramatic in scale, but it was decisive in consequence. In December 1915, a large brown bear entered the settlement and attacked a woman working near her home. The encounter was sudden and close-quarters. She was killed before any effective intervention could be made.
The bear did not linger. After the attack, it retreated back into the surrounding forest.
That withdrawal shaped how the incident was understood.
Within the settlement, the prevailing belief was that the animal had been startled — that the violence was reactive, not intentional, and that the danger had passed with the bear’s departure. The incident was treated as an isolated tragedy rather than the opening stage of a larger threat.
No co-ordinated hunt followed. No sustained effort was made to track the animal’s movements or assess whether it might return.
This response was not careless so much as culturally conditioned. At the time, apex predators were often viewed as opportunistic but fundamentally avoidant of humans. An animal that fled was assumed to have learned fear.
But this assumption rested on a misunderstanding of how predators learn.
An animal that kills and escapes unharmed has not seen that behaviour punished. It has been reinforced. The boundary between human and prey does not harden, it weakens.
In retrospect, the bear’s retreat was not a conclusion. It was a pause.
Escalation isn’t chaos, it’s pattern
When the bear returned, it did not behave erratically.
It came back into the settlement repeatedly, moving with increasing confidence through spaces that had already been shaped by human presence. Homes were entered. People were taken from places that should have been safe.
One of the most disturbing moments came shortly after the initial attack, when the bear returned during a funeral held for the first victim. Drawn by human activity and the presence of food, it entered the area and killed mourners gathered there.
The violence was no longer confined to a single encounter. Over the course of one night, multiple people were killed in separate attacks. By the time the bear was finally stopped, five lives had been lost, several of them within hours of one another.
What is striking, in retrospect, is not the scale of the violence, but its consistency.
The bear did not flee after these encounters. It did not act randomly. It returned to the same settlement, exploited moments of vulnerability, and withdrew only when challenged. Each successful attack reinforced the same lesson: humans were accessible, and resistance was minimal.
This is the point at which many retellings introduce the language of madness or bloodlust. But escalation, in cases like this, is rarely chaotic. It is patterned.
Under conditions of prolonged scarcity, the bear’s behaviour reflected learning rather than frenzy. What appeared to the community as senseless violence followed a grim internal logic shaped by hunger, opportunity, and success.
Human hesitation, and a belated resolution
As fear spread through the settlement, so did uncertainty.
There was disagreement over whether the same bear was responsible for each attack. Some believed the animal would eventually move on. Others feared that a co-ordinated response might provoke further violence. Time was lost to debate, hesitation, and the difficulty of acting decisively in extreme winter conditions.
When a concerted effort was finally made to track the bear, it revealed just how unprepared the community was for such a task. Weather obscured trails. Knowledge of bear behaviour was inconsistent, drawn from folklore, fragments of experience, and assumption rather than strategy.
Eventually, a group of hunters succeeded in locating and killing the animal. The bear was identified as a large male brown bear, in poor physical condition. Its body showed signs consistent with prolonged scarcity. With its death, the attacks stopped.
The immediate danger to Sankebetsu was over.
But the resolution came only after multiple lives had been lost, and only once the cost of inaction had become undeniable. The bear’s death did not mark the defeat of a monster, but the delayed recognition of a threat that had been misunderstood from the outset.
The Sankebetsu statue and tourist site.
Then, and now
More than a century after the Sankebetsu incident, it is tempting to look for repetition — to imagine the same landscape quietly replaying its past.
That is not what the evidence suggests.
Brown bears still inhabit Hokkaido today. The species persists across much of the island’s forests and mountain ranges, and in some areas populations are thought to be stable or recovering after decades of decline. The region where Sankebetsu once stood is no longer a permanent settlement, and there is no indication that it has become a modern centre for serious bear attacks.
History, in this sense, is not repeating itself geographically.
What has changed is the broader context in which people and bears now coexist.
In 2025, Japan recorded 13 human fatalities and more than 100 injuries resulting from bear encounters, involving both Asiatic brown bears and Asiatic black bears. These incidents were spread across multiple prefectures and environments — from rural settlements to the edges of towns — rather than concentrated in any single location.
The pressures behind them are familiar: reduced natural food availability, changing land use, and expanding human presence in areas once less frequently occupied. Bears range more widely when resources are scarce, and humans now occupy landscapes that were once seasonal or marginal.
The relevance of Sankebetsu, then, is not that it is happening again in the same place. It is that the same ecological forces – scarcity, overlap, and hesitation, all continue to shape encounters between people and large predators, wherever clear boundaries erode.
The quieter truth of man-eater stories
The Sankebetsu bear was not a creature of myth, nor a symbol of evil. It was an animal responding to scarcity, learning from success, and moving through a landscape that no longer offered clear separation between forest and home.
Man-eater stories endure not because they reveal something monstrous about animals, but because they expose a recurring human blind spot: the tendency to see nature as static, until it reacts.
When prey disappears, boundaries blur. When boundaries blur, conflict follows.
The question is not whether such stories will happen again, but whether we recognise the conditions early enough to change the outcome.
There are moments in history that feel almost implausible. Not because they are exaggerated, but because they are so deliberately cruel.
For centuries, across parts of South and Southeast Asia, elephants were used as executioners (known as Gunga Rao in India). Not in myth or allegory, but as instruments of state punishment: trained, directed, and deployed to kill human beings in public displays of authority.
This was not a curiosity or an isolated practice. It was a system, and one that relied on the intelligence and obedience of an animal capable of learning complex commands, and on the psychological impact of seeing power made flesh.
What makes this history unsettling is not simply what happened, but how intentional it was. Elephants were not acting on instinct. They were taught. And they were used.
Where and why executioner elephants were used
The use of elephants as instruments of execution was most prevalent across parts of South and Southeast Asia, particularly in regions where elephants already occupied a central role in warfare, labour, and royal symbolism. Historical accounts describe the practice in areas including the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, Burma, Siam, and parts of what is now Vietnam and Indonesia, spanning several centuries and multiple ruling dynasties.
This was not an improvisation born of cruelty alone. Elephants were already embedded within the infrastructure of power. They hauled timber, carried kings into battle, and featured prominently in court ceremony and spectacle. Their size, intelligence, and visibility made them ideal symbols of authority; living embodiments of the state’s reach and control.
Public punishment in these societies was rarely private. Executions were designed to be seen and remembered as spectacles. They functioned as warnings as much as penalties, reinforcing social order through fear and inevitability. An elephant, towering over a crowd, calm and obedient, communicated something more potent than a blade or a rope: that resistance was futile not only because the state was powerful, but because it appeared absolute.
Beyond fear, the elephant also carried a deeper symbolic weight. It represented the futility of resistance itself. If the state could command and subdue one of the largest and most powerful animals on Earth, a creature capable of tearing apart structures and killing with ease, then the control of people was rendered almost trivial by comparison. Authority was not merely enforced; it was naturalised.
In this context, the elephant became part of a broader political language. Its presence transformed punishment into theatre, merging justice, domination, and spectacle into a single event. The animal itself did not represent chaos or savagery, but discipline… an impression carefully cultivated by those who wielded it.
How the system worked
Elephants were not used as executioners through instinct or provocation. They were trained deliberately, responding to commands issued by a mahout who controlled the animal throughout the process. Contemporary accounts describe elephants being taught a range of actions, from restraining a condemned person to killing them outright, depending on the sentence imposed.
The methods varied by region and period. In some cases, executions were swift. In others, they were prolonged, calibrated to heighten public impact rather than efficiency. What united these practices was control. The elephant did not act independently. It waited, received instruction, and carried out the act as trained, sometimes stopping short, sometimes proceeding fully, all according to command.
This distinction matters. The violence was not the result of an enraged animal, nor of a moment slipping beyond human control. It was structured, rehearsed, and repeatable. The elephant functioned as an extension of the judicial system, its immense physical force made precise through obedience.
That precision was itself part of the message. The spectacle lay not only in the act of killing, but in the demonstration that such a powerful animal could be rendered compliant, predictable, and exact. Authority was displayed not through chaos, but through order.
Power, punishment, and political messaging
Public execution has always been as much about those who watch as those who die. In societies that employed executioner elephants, punishment functioned as a form of political communication, a demonstration of authority designed to be remembered long after the event itself had passed.
The elephant’s role intensified that message. Unlike mechanical devices or edged weapons, the animal was visibly alive, responsive, and controlled. Its obedience transformed violence into a display of governance rather than brutality. Order was not imposed through chaos, but through precision. The state did not merely kill; it commanded.
By outsourcing the act of execution to a trained animal, rulers distanced themselves from the physical act of violence while simultaneously magnifying its psychological impact. The elephant became a proxy through which power could be exercised without appearing impulsive or uncontrolled. Responsibility was diffused, even as authority was reinforced.
There was also an element of humiliation embedded in the practice. To be killed by an elephant, an animal associated with royal processions, warfare, and ceremony, inverted the natural order of dignity. The condemned were rendered small, powerless, and publicly subordinate, their fate enacted by a creature that symbolised the state itself.
In this way, executioner elephants functioned not simply as tools of punishment, but as instruments of political theatre. They collapsed justice, domination, and symbolism into a single act, reinforcing a hierarchy in which resistance appeared not only dangerous, but futile.
Methods of punishment and execution
Historical accounts make clear that executioner elephants were not employed in a single, uniform way. Methods varied by region, period, and political intent, and the elephant’s role could be adjusted accordingly. This flexibility was part of the practice’s power.
In some instances, elephants were trained to kill quickly. A single, forceful action, often involving the animal’s foot (the crushing of a victim’s head against a stone or wooden block was typical), was enough to end a life almost immediately. In others, the process was deliberately staged. The elephant might restrain a condemned person first, holding them in place while commands were issued, before carrying out the final act. The presence of choice and delay was itself a form of intimidation, reinforcing the idea that punishment was not only inevitable, but controlled.
More elaborate methods are recorded in certain historical sources. Elephants could be trained to tear apart bodies using their tusks, or to crush limbs before delivering a fatal blow. In some regions, blades or spikes were affixed to tusks to increase lethality. These were not improvisations, but planned variations and evidence of a system refined over time.
What distinguishes these accounts is not brutality alone, but intentionality. The elephant did not act unpredictably. Each movement followed instruction. Each execution demonstrated not rage, but discipline. Violence was administered as a process, not an outburst.
For spectators, this mattered. The horror lay not only in the outcome, but in the calmness with which it was achieved. The animal’s obedience underscored the message that punishment was procedural, sanctioned, and absolute, making it a function of governance rather than cruelty in the abstract.
The animal caught in the system
Elephants are not indifferent instruments. They are highly intelligent, social animals, capable of learning complex behaviours, forming long-term bonds, and responding to subtle cues from those they trust. That capacity and the very trait that made them so valuable to human societies, is what allowed them to be absorbed into systems of punishment in the first place.
The elephant did not choose its role. It did not understand the politics of justice, crime, or authority. It responded to training, repetition, and command. Responsibility for the violence enacted through it does not sit with the animal, but with the structures that shaped its behaviour and put it to use.
This distinction matters, because it forces the focus back where it belongs. Executioner elephants were not expressions of nature’s savagery, nor examples of animals turned monstrous. They were evidence of human ingenuity applied without restraint, of power seeking spectacle, obedience, and inevitability, regardless of the cost.
In many historical accounts, the elephant’s calmness is remarked upon as much as its strength. That calmness was not natural. It was cultivated. And in that cultivation lies the deeper unease of the practice: the transformation of a sentient being into a mechanism, valued not for what it was, but for what it could be made to do.
That this history still unsettles is not surprising. It sits at the intersection of dominance and delegation, where violence is made orderly and responsibility is diffused. The elephant becomes a mirror, reflecting not animal brutality, but human willingness to externalise cruelty, to embed it within systems until it feels inevitable, even justifiable.
With what is now known about elephant intelligence, it is difficult not to wonder what such roles may have cost the animals themselves. Elephants are capable of recognising individuals, remembering past events, and responding to distress in others. They are not unthinking tools, but sentient beings with emotional and social complexity.
Whether executioner elephants experienced fear, confusion, or psychological harm as a result of these acts cannot be known with certainty. Historical records do not concern themselves with the inner lives of animals. Yet the very qualities that made elephants so effective within these systems; memory, responsiveness, trust in human handlers, are the same qualities that, today, are recognised as leaving animals vulnerable to long-term stress and trauma.
If nothing else, this absence is telling. The suffering of the animal was neither recorded nor considered relevant. The elephant’s role ended when its usefulness did. That silence, viewed through a modern understanding of animal cognition, is itself a form of indictment.
This research surfaced while working on a piece of fiction, but it refused to remain there. Some histories resist containment. They linger, precisely because they reveal how thin the line can be between authority and abuse, and how readily intelligence (animal or human) can be bent to serve power.
Stories have always borrowed from the natural world, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
Movie Monday is a new, occasional series exploring where cinema, wildlife, and myth overlap: the real animals, behaviours, and biological truths hiding behind some of our most enduring screen monsters.
It sits alongside Monster Monday and Maneater Monday — different lenses on the same question: why certain creatures, real or imagined, refuse to loosen their grip on us.
We like to believe that cinema monsters are born from imagination alone… nightmares made flesh, conjured by writers staring into the dark.
But again and again, the truth is stranger.
Some of the most iconic creatures in film and fiction didn’t come from myth at all. They came from nature, from animals whose behaviours were already so efficient, alien, or unsettling that they barely needed exaggeration.
Filmmakers didn’t invent these monsters. They recognised them.
👹 Predator: insects, instinct, and a moment at 30,000 feet
The creature in Predator is often remembered for its technology: cloaking devices, shoulder cannons, thermal vision, ritualised hunting codes.
But strip all of that away and you’re left with something far older.
During early development, legendary creature designer Stan Winston was struggling to finalise the Predator’s look. While flying with James Cameron, he talked through the problem, and it was Cameron who suggested a simple, unsettling solution: give it mandibles.
That single idea changed everything.
Designers have since acknowledged the influence of insects, particularly praying mantises, in the Predator’s face and posture. Forward-facing eyes. Mandible-like jaws. A head shaped for tracking and striking rather than expression or empathy.
Mantises already look extraterrestrial to us. They rotate their heads. They calculate distance. They dismember prey with methodical calm.
Even the creature’s voice reinforces this lineage. The distinctive clicking and chittering sounds were created by Peter Cullen, deliberately leaning into insect-like vocalisations rather than anything recognisably mammalian or humanoid.
The Predator doesn’t invent that fear. It scales it up, arms it, and releases it into a jungle.
What remains, beneath the tech, is an apex ambush hunter — something we instinctively recognise, even if we can’t quite place why.
👽 Alien: nature’s most efficient horror machine
The creature in Alien remains one of cinema’s most disturbing designs because it feels biological. Every stage of its life cycle obeys a logic — parasitic, efficient, and utterly indifferent.
That’s because it draws from multiple real-world inspirations.
One is the deep-sea amphipod Phronima sedentaria, sometimes called the “monster in a barrel.” This tiny crustacean hollows out gelatinous animals, lives inside their emptied bodies, and uses them as both shelter and nursery. It’s parasitism turned architectura.
Image Credit: Xavier Salvador
Then there’s the Alien’s inner jaw, eerily similar to the pharyngeal jaws of moray eels, a second set of jaws that shoot forward from the throat to drag prey deeper inside the body. Watching one in action feels like watching a design error, until you realise how brutally effective it is.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
The acid blood? That has uncomfortable echoes of the bombardier beetle, which stores volatile chemicals in separate chambers and mixes them only when threatened, releasing a boiling, corrosive spray with startling precision.
Even the facehugger carries a lineage. Its spidery grip, tail wrap, and underside anatomy closely resemble the ancient horseshoe crab, a creature so old it predates dinosaurs, and so alien it barely seems terrestrial at all.
Alien isn’t fantasy biology. It’s biology… refined.
🧛 Dracula: when bats became monsters
While working on Dracula, Bram Stoker encountered a New York newspaper clipping describing vampire bats – small, blood-feeding mammals that had been newly “discovered” by Western science and already framed as unnatural horrors.
They didn’t drain victims dry, as legend claimed. But they did feed silently, painlessly, and in the dark. They made small incisions, returned night after night, and relied on anticoagulants to keep blood flowing.
That was enough.
Stoker fused this real behaviour with Eastern European folklore, and suddenly vampirism became biological as well as supernatural. Dracula wasn’t just cursed — he fed, adapted, survived.
Once again, fear took root because it had a foothold in reality.
🦈 Jaws: the predator we misunderstood
Jaws didn’t invent the fear of sharks, but it magnified it catastrophically.
The great white shark is a powerful apex predator, yes. But it is also cautious, energy-efficient, and rarely interested in humans. Most bites are investigative, unfortunate cases of mistaken identity.
In Jaws, however, the shark becomes something else entirely: territorial, vengeful, strategic. It stalks specific individuals. It understands fear.
The exaggeration worked, all too well. The film permanently altered public perception of sharks, contributing to fear-driven culls and a legacy of misunderstanding that conservationists are still trying to undo.
It’s a reminder that when cinema borrows from nature, it doesn’t always give back responsibly. I am working on my own shark-based story, and will have to try and be as respectful as I can with the subject matter.
🍄 The Last of Us and the zombie ant fungus
The monsters of The Last of Us, from the video game and then brought chillingly to life in the HBO series, feel plausible because they already exist.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants across tropical forests. Once inside, the fungus alters the ant’s behaviour, compelling it to climb vegetation and clamp down with its mandibles.
Then it kills the host.
A fungal stalk erupts from the ant’s head, releasing spores onto the forest floor below, perfectly positioned to infect the next generation.
There’s no rage. No hunger. No malice.
Just control.
The horror of The Last of Us lies not in the fantasy of zombies, but in the quiet realisation that free will is not as secure as we think.
🪱 Tremors: ambush predators beneath our feet
The graboids in Tremors feel absurd, until you consider how many real animals hunt exactly this way.
Trapdoor spiders wait motionless beneath the soil, sensing vibrations before exploding upward to seize prey. Bobbit worms bury themselves in sand, striking with astonishing speed, sometimes slicing fish clean in half.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
Both rely on:
Vibration detection
Ambush rather than pursuit
Minimal exposure
The genius of Tremors is that it makes the ground itself hostile. The monsters don’t chase — they wait.
Which, biologically speaking, is often far more efficient.
🟢 Slime moulds and The Blob
Slime moulds aren’t fungi. They aren’t animals. They’re something else entirely, capable of learning, problem-solving, and forming efficient networks without a brain.
They flow. They engulf. They adapt.
The creature in The Blob exaggerates this into apocalyptic form, but the unease is justified. Slime moulds already challenge our definitions of intelligence and individuality.
They don’t hunt. They spread.
Why these monsters endure
The most effective movie monsters don’t break the rules of nature.
They obey them too well.
They feed, reproduce, adapt, and survive. They don’t hate us, they don’t even notice us! And that’s what makes them frightening.
Nature doesn’t need motivation. Only opportunity.
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From Suffolk harvest fields to moorland mist in North Wales, a fresh wave of “panthers,” pumas and dark-coated felids stirred Britain’s rural imagination through October and November.
As dusk creeps ever earlier, as hedgerows thin and fields lie fallow, the old hush seems to awaken once more. Reports of something alien abroad: black silhouettes crossing lanes, long tails vanishing between trees, sheep spooked under moonlight, and “pointed-ear” shapes in the gloom. Over the last few months, places like Anglesey, the Llŷn Peninsula, Suffolk and more felt alight with the possibility of something wild and unaccounted for.
Below is a deeper dive into British big cat sightings from the last two months: what was claimed, where and when, what evidence (if any) supports it, and what it tells us about why, in 2025, the British big-cat mystery refuses to go away.
Autumn’s Quiet Fields and the Whisper of Something Else
There’s something about late autumn in rural Britain: the harvest is over, fields lie bare, evenings draw in, and the countryside takes on a soft, half-remembered quality.
For decades, that seasonal quiet has offered fertile ground for whispers of something aloof in the landscape. Could it be wind in the trees, a deer moving in shadow, or something else? For many rural dwellers and folklore-hunters, it has always been the right time for mystery big cats to wander across a lane, disappear into a copse, or vanish beyond the hedge.
In October and November 2025, those whispers, as always seems to be the case in Autumn, became a little louder.
October 2025: When the Reports Began to Coalesce
Scattered reports: South-East and West-Midlands chatter
Throughout October, a series of smaller, loosely connected reports emerged, from “panther-like” silhouettes glimpsed in the treeline, to late-evening growls heard by dog walkers, and paw prints in soft, damp ground after rain. Most came from local Facebook groups, community forums or specialist blogs, with genuine sparks of intent (some people setting up trail-cameras), but little follow-up.
The background: police logs and a five-year string of reports
Behind the anecdotal noise, there’s an institutional record: between 2021 and 2025, based on keyword searches for “big cat,” “puma,” “panther” and “lynx,” official incident-record logs from parts of southern England (notably Devon & Cornwall Police) list more than a dozen reports of large cats, described variously as “black panther,” “puma-like,” or “lion-sized.” LBC
Many of these reports describe animals jumping hedges, stalking rural tracks, or vanishing after being glimpsed in a vehicle’s headlights. In a few cases, officers attended the scene; in others the sightings remain unverified.
These official records, which are commonplace across the UK, add weight to public claims.
November 2025: A New Wave in North Wales, Anglesey, and the Llŷn Peninsula
Just as October’s reports began to settle, November brought a fresh uptick, this time centred on North Wales, Anglesey, and the Llŷn Peninsula. A different landscape, a different weather-tone, and for many, a compelling shift in pattern.
Anglesey: Fields, sheep, and pointy-eared cats (10 November onward)
A report on 12 November 2025 from a well known UK cryptozoology site, detailed multiple sightings across Anglesey including black cats with “long thick tails” and “pointy ears,” which were spotted roaming fields, skulking near sheep, or seen slipping along woodland margins at dusk. The Centre for Fortean Zoology
A post shared on social media described a “large black cat” near Newborough, walking through open land near the coast, with prominent pointed ears, a low slung tail and a long body. Locals, spooked, spoke quietly of sheep losses and nervous dogs. Facebook
The repeated descriptions (sometimes by more than one witness) helped give these reports weight. That said: “pointy ears” is a common reason sceptics dismiss big-cat claims, because in many big cats ear shapes differ, and “pointy” can be misleading in poor light or low resolution, and for many, suggests a dog and mistaken identity.
Pwllheli, Llŷn Peninsula: “Puma spotted at caravan site” (28 November)
On 28 November 2025, a local watchdog group for big-cat sightings, Puma Watch North Wales, published a report of a “large dark-coloured” animal, believed by a holiday-maker to be a puma, seen within a caravan-park perimeter near the town of Pwllheli, on the Llŷn Peninsula. Puma Watch North Wales
According to the witness, the animal was large, low-slung, and moved in a smooth, stealthy manner between caravans and hedgerows, so unlike a typical stray dog or cat. Given the rural coastline, sheep fields nearby, and limited light at dusk, the report sparked concern for local farmers and dog-walkers.
Further sightings in Wales were reported earlier in the month by the same site.
Where the wild things might be… or might not be
What stands out from both months isn’t a shift in geography so much as the familiar randomness that has always characterised Britain’s big-cat reports. Sightings scatter across counties and coastlines without forming any obvious pattern, a point often used by sceptics to argue against the idea of established or breeding populations. Yet for mystery-hunters, that same unpredictability is part of the allure – the sense of roaming predators that refuse to be pinned down, drifting through valleys, farmland and forest edges, appearing where least expected.
If nothing else, November’s reports show one thing clearly: the conversation lives on and people are still looking, watching, and waiting for a confirmation.
Patterns of Evidence: What We Know, What We Don’t
📌 What counts as good evidence
Clear video or photo, ideally with scale, timestamp, and context.
Multiple independent eyewitnesses describing similar features (size, tail, coat, gait, ears, behaviour).
Physical traces like hair, scat, paw-prints, kills… submitted for professional forensic analysis.
Consistent follow-up through camera traps, field-investigations, naturalist or police presence.
📉 Where the 2025 autumn wave falls short
Most reports (even the ones above) are from single witnesses, uncorroborated by photos or prints (I know how hard it it is to think about taking a photo in the moment, or how difficult it is to actually photograph and film genuine wild animals on a phone).
Descriptions vary (black panther, puma, “pointy-eared black cat”) which may reflect different species, or more likely, different interpretations of light, distance, stress or fear.
No public forensic confirmations this month: no DNA swabs, no carcasses, no verified predator-kill evidence.
That isn’t a rejection of the sightings by any means, but it does mean: as of November 2025, there is still no conclusive scientific proof of a sustainable non-native big-cat population roaming the British countryside, despite the very strong likelihood they are here.
Why the Autumn Spike Happens: Season, Psychology, and Landscape
Autumn has always been a season of shifting boundaries in the British countryside. As the days shorten and dusk arrives earlier, everything seems to take on a different shape. Shadows stretch longer than expected, hedgerows thin, and once-dense foliage gives way to bare branches and open visibility. This simple change in light and landscape can transform the most ordinary movement, be it a fox slipping between field margins, a dog cresting a hill, even a cat prowling along a fence line, into something uncanny.
The conclusion of the harvest season amplifies this effect. With crops cut back and fields lying open, the countryside becomes a stage with fewer props; anything crossing the land becomes more noticeable against the bare ground. At the same time, human presence in these spaces increases. Dog walkers, cyclists, farmers, hikers, and foragers tend to be out more in the late afternoon or early evening, right when the light begins to fail. Encounters therefore become more likely at a time when visibility is often at its best due to a lack of blooming foliage and leaves.
There’s also a psychological undercurrent to this seasonal shift. Autumn signals the approach of winter, a time when the countryside feels both more exposed and more remote. Folklore thrives in such in-between spaces. As mists gather and the temperature drops, we become more attuned to the uncanny possibilities at the edge of vision. For those already primed to wonder, whether through experience, curiosity, or the stories that circulate online, a shape in the half-light can ignite the imagination.
Together, these elements create the conditions in which big-cat sightings often cluster: a landscape laid bare, a watchful public moving through it, and just enough atmospheric tension to make the ordinary feel extraordinary.
Why These Stories Still Matter: Myth, Mystery and Wild Britain
art of the enduring appeal of Britain’s big-cat sightings lies in the country’s deep-rooted relationship with wildlife folklore. This is, after all, a landscape shaped by centuries of myths — from black dogs on moors to spectral deer in forests — and the idea of a hidden predator wandering the countryside resonates strongly with that cultural inheritance. Big cats, whether truly present or not, feel like a modern iteration of the same ancient impulse: to believe that something wild still moves out there, beyond the reach of fences and footpaths.
There is also a historical foundation to the fascination. The Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, which curtailed the private ownership of exotic predators, triggered a generation of rumours that owners had secretly released pumas, leopards or lynx into the wild rather than surrender them. This legacy, more than any single sighting, fuels the belief in escapees or small, scattered populations that might have survived in remote pockets. It’s not proof — but it’s plausible enough to keep the theory alive.
For rural communities, the possibility of having such an animal nearby carries a mix of fear, irritation and reluctant awe. Livestock losses, nervous dogs, or strange prints in soft ground can lend weight to speculation. And for those who walk the land at dawn or dusk, the idea of sharing space with a creature that shouldn’t be here adds a quiet thrill.
But beyond the practical and historical, these stories matter because they remind us that mystery still exists in a world that often feels over-mapped, over-explained and over-connected. The silhouette on a hillside, the rustle in a hedge, the long tail disappearing into the dark — they hint at a Britain where the wild isn’t yet gone, only hidden. And whether or not big cats truly roam our countryside, the belief in them offers something rare: a reminder that the world still holds room for wonder.
I checked police-disclosure logs from forces who publish big-cat incident records (e.g. Devon & Cornwall). Devon and Cornwall Police
I referenced background research and historical context on British big-cat folklore, escapee theory, and prior documented sightings/escapes based on my own knowledge.
Caveat: I have no access to private camera-trap data, forensic lab results, or police log details beyond publicly disclosed summaries. The piece remains a synthesis of publicly available reports and claims, filtered for interest and plausibility.
The Mystery Lives On — For Now
As November 2025 draws to a close, the tally of big-cat reports has grown. From Suffolk to Anglesey, from fields to caravan parks, from hushed farm corners to public Facebook groups.
We are left with a mosaic made up of handfuls of sightings forming patterns, trending northwards, clustering in rural and coastal zones, surfacing at dusk.
For those who love the wild-edge of the British countryside and for readers of eco-thrillers, wildlife-watchers, or just the curious, those patterns matter. They remind us that beneath the tame green fields lies uncertainty. That despite fences and lights and human ink and paperwork, nature, or at least the idea of the wild, is still slipping through.
Walk the hedgerows at twilight. Keep a torch handy. A sharp eye. A steady hand on a camera. Because sometimes, the most compelling truths hide in plain sight, as a silhouette on a November road, or a long tail slinking behind a hedge, might just prove to you.
If nothing else, the mystery remains alive and hopefully well, and left alone.
Luke Phillips is the author of the eco-thrillerShadow Beast, which explores the myth and mystery of Britain’s big cats.
What Might Come Next — For Readers, Watchers, The Curious
If you see something:
Use a phone or camera to get photos, video if you can (and safely).
Try to note scale; are there hedges, gates, known objects in frame that can help judge size?
Record time, date, weather, location (village, nearest road/farm), direction of movement, behaviour (walking, stalking, fleeing).
Share with groups like Puma Watch North Wales (if in Wales), Rick Minter at Big Cat Conversations or local wildlife / community pages. Even if nothing comes of it, each data point adds to the bigger picture.
Stay safe, especially if livestock are nearby. But also aware: many “big cats” reported in the UK probably remain domestic or feral cats mis-measured in light and distance.
I like to keep a lot of visual references and trinkets of inspiration around me when I write. Dotted around my workspace are various Schleich dinosaurs – Carnotaurus and T. Rex have prominent places (what can I say, I like predators!); and a selection of plush toys including a sabretooth, Nessie, and a black jaguar cub. Then, there are black jaguar and black leopard models, slightly overshadowed by the huge ‘stray cat’ Smilodon from Rebor.
On my desk is a selection of teeth and claws. Some are real, whilst others are museum replicas. I have megalodon, great white, and mako teeth that are all the genuine article, as well as two other fossil shark teeth I’ve never been able to identify 100% (found on a beach on the Isle of Sheppey). Incidentally, the great white tooth was found on a beach in La Jolla, California.
My desk collection of modern and prehistoric shark teeth.
Among the replicas is the tooth you see in the picture below. It’s a cast of a canine from Homotherium. Also known as the scimitar-toothed cat, this was one of the most widely distributed sabre-toothed predators to have existed, having roamed North and South America, Eurasia, and Africa.
Sabretooths are featured in my books, and I’m often asked why I didn’t choose Homotherium as the species that ultimately plays a major role in the ongoing storyline. There’s a couple of reasons, but first, did you know how many different sabretooths there are to (hypothetically) choose from?
Homotherium belonged to the Machairodontinae (meaning daggertooth) sub-family within the Felidae (true cat) family of mammalian carnivores. Like all in this sub-family, they are most known for their enlarged maxillary canines. In almost all cases, these protruded from the mouth on either side of the jaw and were visible even when the mouth was closed. But, in the case of Homotherium, it’s likely that despite having relatively large canines, they would have been hidden by the upper lips and lower gum tissues, just like in modern big cats. This was just one reason Homotherium didn’t make the cut. I needed a sabretooth that could be recognised for what it is – despite Homotherium’s convenient European fossil record.
A museum replica of Homotherium, alongside a skeletal reconstruction.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Homotherium didn’t pack a punch though. They were about the size of a male African lion. And not only were its teeth designed for slashing, but also a powerful gripping bite capable of delivering deep puncture wounds.
Joining Homotherium in the Machairodontinae is also Amphimachairodus (thought to be some of the earliest sabretooths to inhabit Europe); Lokotunjailurus (think a long-legged, more gracile lioness) was known from the Miocene epoch across Kenya and Chad; Nimravides – a tiger-sized sabretooth that appeared in the late Miocene and has been found exclusively in North America; and Xenosmilus.
If you’ve read my books, you’ll know why I’ve paused there. Xenosmilus was big, even for a sabretooth. In fact, only Smilodon (who’ll we’ll come to later) was noticeably larger in terms of mass. Yet it stands out among others in the sub-family for other reasons.
Before Xenosmilus was discovered, sabretooths fell relatively neatly into two categories. Scimitar-toothed cats, like Homotherium, had mildly elongated canines and long legs. Dirk toothed cats, like Smilodon, had long upper canines and stout legs. Xenosmilus broke the mould. It had short, muscular legs and a robust body – yet its canines weren’t as pronounced. And those teeth were different in other ways too. All of Xenosmilus’ teeth were serrated, and its top teeth aligned with the bottom in a way that enabled it to concentrate its bite force on two teeth at a time. This is where Xenosmilus gets its name – which means ‘strange smile’. The unique way that its canines and incisors operated together in biting, also led to the moniker, ‘the cookie-cutter cat’.
The skull of Xenosmilus also features a pronounced and significant sagittal crest compared to others in the family. This meant it had phenomenal jaw strength and bite force, thanks to the muscles that would have been attached here. Together, these features have led to the theory that Xenosmilus adopted a bite and retreat hunting strategy. It would use its formidable teeth to inflict a deep wound, then wait until the prey was incapacitated. The peccary bones found close to the two type specimens indicate not only a liking for pork, but also that the species may have hunted collaboratively.
It was these unique features that led to Xenosmilus playing the role it does in my stories. But we’re only halfway through the very top layers of the sabretooth family tree.
Xenosmilus skeletal reconstruction on display at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
A smaller, sub-group are the Machairodontini, made up of; Machairodus – meaning ‘knife tooth’ and who gives this little clan their name; Hemimachairodus – known from finds in Java and Indonesia; and Miomachairodus, known from finds in China and Turkey. They were large cats, similar in size to the smaller subspecies of modern-day tigers.
The Metailurini include Metailurus – a cat we know from only partial remains, but its elongated rear legs mean that it was probably an accomplished jumper. Others in the group include Adelphailurus, Stenailurus, and Yoshi – a species proposed to be quite cheetah like in behaviour. Because these species have only been identified from small finds, what we know about them is limited, but new details are being published regularly with study.
The exception in this group is one of my favourites – Dinofelis, whose name means ‘terrible cat’. There’s some argument that Dinofelis belongs to the Smilodon sub-family, but for now, they lie here. These jaguar-sized cats were powerfully built with prominent sabres and extremely robust front limbs. They were also widespread, with fossils found across the North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, from between 5 and 1.2 million years ago. It has also been proposed that Dinofelis preferred forest habitat and may have had a spotted or striped coat – like the modern day clouded leopard and ocelot.
Finally, we come to the best known of the sabretooths – the Smilodontini. These include the three sub-species of Smilodon, but also the family groups of Rhizosmilodon, Promegantereon, Paramachairodus, and another favourite – Megantereon. The latter may have been a direct ancestor of Smilodon and was jaguar-sized, but even heavier set with lion-like forelimbs. Despite this, they are thought to have been able to climb relatively well and take down prey as large as a horse. And unlike its relative Smilodon, who was limited to North America, Megantereon was found in Eurasia and Africa too.
Homotherium skull
Smilodon is not only one of the most well-known sabretooths, but also one of the most easily recognised prehistoric mammals ever discovered, thanks in part to hundreds of fossils retrieved from the La Brea tar pits. Its name means scalpel, or ‘two-edged knife tooth’. Its teeth are easily the most impressive of all sabres in terms of size and were tools used for precision kills. However, these formidable upper canines were relatively weak and fragile. They had stocky, bear-like bodies and are thought to have been ambush predators that preferred thick forest and vegetation as habitat. Again, we’re not sure if they were co-operative hunters – but it is thought likely that they lived in small family groups.
All the above sabretooths are part of the Felidae family – making them true cats. But they weren’t the only sabretooths out there. There are others, most of which fall under what are known as false sabre-toothed cats – including the nimravidae and barbourfelidae. These animals are part of the Feliformia sub-order. Again, if you’ve read my books, you’ll be familiar with that name in terms of hyenas and their fossil relatives. But it also includes animals like the Madagascan fossa, the binturong of Asia, as well as civets, mongoose, and meerkats. Cats too are part of this sub-order, and the false sabre-toothed cats are obviously more closely related than these others – but are still different from true cats.
As for sabretooths and their modern-day cat relatives, it’s thought that they shared a common ancestor from about 18 million years ago. But the family ties between the sabretooths themselves are quite strained too. For instance, Homotherium and Smilodon are probably more distantly related from each other than your typical house cat is to a tiger. But genetically, we can still forge that connection to modern day big cats like lions and tigers from studies carried out on fossil mitochondrial DNA. It’s more direct in species related to Homotherium, which is another reason Xenosmilus was a good fit on paper. It had the strength and size of Smilodon but benefited from being part of the larger sabretooth family, with more of a genetic tie (however slight) to modern big cats.
Xenosmilus skull – its name means “strange smile”.
As for would a modern-day big cat, like a jaguar, be able to breed with a sabretooth like Xenosmilus… we obviously don’t know. My conjecture is that as true cats, it’s technically possible and viable. There would no doubt be many unknown evolutionary and biological barriers to overcome, but, as a favourite fictional character facing similar concerns famously once said… “life finds a way”.
And whereas we’ll never be able to bring back a dinosaur from its DNA to find out what it might conveniently splice with, don’t be so sure when it comes to prehistoric cats. Their DNA – from cave lions to Smilodon, has been found and identified, and in some cases, even mapped. Maybe in the near future, just like in my books, we’ll be able to visit something akin to a Pleistocene Park!
If you can’t wait until then, you can discover how these cats and others play a role in my books here.
When you get to pick up The Daughters of the Darkness, (hopefully sometime in the next few months), and begin to weave your way through the story, you may be surprised to find the theme of active man-eaters a little surprising and out of place in a modern age. However, the truth is that predators haven’t stopped doing what they have always been capable of when the opportunity and right circumstances present themselves.
The statistics show that man is still very much on the menu. In sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 3,000 people are taken every year by crocodiles. 1,500 Tibetans are killed by bears. 600 Indians are preyed on by leopards whilst another 85 are taken by tigers. The king of beasts naturally tallies the most kills, with lions taking 700 people on average annually.
Some of them become revered and infamous. The Tsavo Man-eaters who feature in the legacy of the fictional lions of the book, were very real, as is the tigress in Nepal known as the claw. A lion given the name of Osama killed more than 50 people in Tanzania between 2002 and 2004. He was less than four years old and suspected to be part of a local pride that deliberately targeted humans. The story you will read is not as far-fetched as you think.
Another Osama, this one a crocodile, ate its way through 83 villagers in the waters of Lake Victoria before being captured in 2005. After sixty years of snatching victims from the banks, capsizing boats and even boarding the wooden vessels to find his prey, he now lives out his days as breeding stock for Uganda Crocs Ltd, makers of fine leather handbags.
Human-predator conflict isn’t restricted to the more far flung places of the world either. Hans Kruuk, a carnivore zoologist for the University of Aberdeen concluded that wolf predation on humans is still a factor of life for Eastern Europeans after a lengthy study of death records.
In the U.S, although rare, predator related death is a possibility too. Mountain lions take an average of one person every four years. Bears (polar, brown and black species combined) take to man meat about twice a year. Wolves barely register, with one human fatality every five years in the last twenty. Only a total of three fatal coyote attacks ever have been recorded.
The risk is minimal, and I do mean minimal. You are eleven times more likely to win your state lottery than fall victim to an American predator taken to a palate based on people. Death by dog is fifteen times more likely, and death by cow or horse 32 more times likely.
But there is one killer that just can’t even begin to be compared to – us. Americans kill over 3,000 mountain lions every year. In the last two decades, over 100,000 black bears have been killed in the eastern United States alone. About 1,750 wolves are culled or simply hunted across North America annually.
The story you will read is fiction. The facts are very different. I hope you enjoy the book and find a new respect for our predators in equal measure.
In the meantime, if you need your fill of man-eating before the arrival of The Daughters of The Darkness, why not catch up with Shadow Beast first?!
When Peter Benchley wrote Jaws, he had no idea that he had literally created a monster. Not only did it become one of the biggest selling novels of all time, but it was made into a movie that became the first ever summer blockbuster, setting the trend ever since. What is interesting is that later on, Benchley became a committed advocate for shark conservancy, and stated that he would not be able to write Jaws based on what he had discovered about them since he first put pen to paper.
It’s important to realise that fiction is exactly that, fiction! Benchley also stated that he was no more responsible for people’s attitudes to sharks than Mario Puzo was for the mafia. Sharks do after all eat people, as do other things, whether we like it or not! In the real world man is the real monster, responsible for far more bloodshed and cruelty. But in our imaginations at least, nature has always been queen when it comes to our most primal of nightmares.
In Shadow Beast, another monstrous animal is at the heart of the story, as is my love of the Highlands and its amazing wildlife, including the endemic and endangered Scottish wildcat.
In the book you’ll find themes of conservation and re-wilding, but I wanted to do more than simply put these topics out there. I wanted to get behind them too. So with that in mind, I’ll be donating 15% of my February book sale profits to Wildcat Haven and the Save the Scottish Wildcat campaign. More details about their work can be found at http://www.scottishwildcats.co.uk
At the same time, I wanted to celebrate their work with some of my own, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to explore the origins of a character who makes a legendary entrance in the book. One-Eyed Tom, the wildcat.
The Legend of One-Eye
The world around him was bathed in the sepia glow of a night-long twilight only his eyes could see. Two silent bounds took him to the edge of the stream, where a flick of his paw fished the unsuspecting frog from the water. There was no pause to play or pounce tonight, and he crunched and gobbled down the still wriggling amphibian in quick, successive bites. Every sense was on heightened alert. Even as he ate, he glanced with furious purpose in the direction of every sound his pricked ears caught.
He moved off, checking his path and surroundings every few steps. He stopped at a favoured mound of brown, dead heather to scent mark the border of his territory that ran along the stream. His face crumpled into a silent snarl. An intruder had crossed the path and left their own musk lacing the crumbly soil. The big tom sprayed the area liberally with urine, then meticulously rubbed the heather and ground with the scent glands in his cheeks. He scraped the damp ground into a mush with his back feet and continued on his path.
The piercing, single scream made him stop in his tracks. His head snapped to a path to the left, heading deeper into his territory. He knew the rabbit warren that the path led to, and he now realised the purpose behind the intruder’s insurrection. Such blatant disregard to his presence and home could not be tolerated. He turned onto the path, hunkering down as he made his way along it with silent, shadowy focus.
The sandy soil veiled his approach by absorbing his footfalls in noiseless padding. He approached the ridgeline and paused at its top. This was where he normally watched and waited for the rabbits to emerge into the dust-bowl clearing in front of him. The slight elevation and cover of the heather-lined ridgeline was the perfect ambush site. He could see where the intruder had launched from the same spot, and his eyes searched him out, knowing he was close.
His hardened stare came to rest on a crouched silhouette on the far side of the clearing. As the hairs in his ears fluffed and expanded to elevate his hearing even further, he picked up the sound of crunching, crushing teeth. Then the wind changed direction, and a cool breeze brought the scent of death and the younger cat to him.
He yowled his intent, unable to contain his rage any longer. He barrelled forward, growling and hissing as he covered the ground in rapid, rippling steps. His snarl was answered by a quivering, spitting growl of savagery. His adversary stepped out into the moonlight, boldly meeting his gaze. But the big tom could sense the hesitancy, reflected in the curve of the newcomer’s back and by the way he half-sat on his rear haunches.
The big tom growled, flicking his tail back and forth in a maddened fury against the ground. The yowl in his throat built to a scream. The younger, smaller male answered with his own caterwaul of threat. The two wildcats stood almost nose to nose, their fur bristling on end and their muscles taught and ready for combat. Each stared into the mirrored savagery before them. The time had come.
In a sudden moment of doubt, the young cat tried to dash past his adversary, but the big tom was too quick. He rammed the off-balance intruder with his shoulder and a butt of his head, his rear paws lifting off the ground as he rippled into a pounce that sent four sets of extended claws and his flashing fangs through the fur and flesh of his screaming opponent.
The younger cat didn’t hesitate to answer the assault, clasping the tom’s head in the vice-like embrace of its front claws. As the big tom punched and pawed repeatedly at the intruder’s back and stomach, his adversary twisted round and clamped his jaws over his muzzle, now in a position to also slash away at the exposed flank of the big tom with his hind paws.
They clung to each other, growling, hissing and snarling through a pain that only fuelled their fury. But a lucky scrape of the young cat’s hind leg sent the big tom spinning backwards, releasing the intruder from his fangs. The young male raced to the ridge and sank into its shadow, pausing at the top to glance and glower at the one whose territory it had invaded. The older cat had already turned his back, knowing he had won the fight. He now nosed at the dead rabbit, ready to claim his prize as victor. The intruder was overcome with renewed fury, and launched into the air, his front claws reaching out for a deadly embrace. The big tom whipped round in a fearsome frenzy, saw his opportunity, and leapt too. His fangs found the throat of the young cat and he used his bulk and might to bring him to the ground. The intruder writhed in silent revolt as the pressure on his larynx strangled the life from him. His forepaws and claws rained flailing blows on his killer’s head, but it was to no avail. A last, limp cuff slashed across the big tom’s left eye as the young cat’s world went black.
The wildcat grimaced and spat, rolling in the dirt with the pain. He screamed in fury, searching out the path by feel as he howled his way back to the stream, blinded by his blood and rage. The big tom slapped and sucked at the water, ducking his head under as he occasionally did to fish. After some time, the pain began to ebb, and he wandered away towards a favoured hollow to rest.
The creature slunk into the clearing and nosed the dead rabbit, before slumping down onto the sandy soil beside it. It casually skinned its meal with a few gentle tugs of its jaws, and it swallowed the meagre mouthfuls of meat it provided. It rose again and padded over to the dead wild cat, a distrustful growl rumbling in its throat. It had come across the smaller cats before as a youngling and knew their savagery and flickering charge all too well. It knew better than to tolerate their presence. It picked up the dead wildcat in its jaws and disappeared back into the shadow of the waiting forest.
~
If you haven’t bought a copy of Shadow Beast on Kindle or in paperback, now you can get a great book and help what is very likely the most endangered cat in the world at the same time! Click on the link below to get your copy today!
The blog of author Luke Phillips 