You might find this very short short story triggering: it takes us into the mind of a dying cat. But the sabertooths are all extinct and it seemed the best way to summarize the series. I have taken some liberties with geography and individual details such as gender and cause of death, but this is about the real 11,000-year-old sabercat whose restored skeleton you see above. Please note that the post ends on an optimistic note. I’m easily triggered myself and always try to balance darkness with light, having learned that neither one is permanent.
THE LAST SABERCAT
She stood on the big rock that she always used for this purpose, as her mother had done before her. She paused a moment and then screamed again and again into the growing light of dawn.
The stony cliffs around her echoed with a sound that we humans of the Holocene have never heard — part bobcat scream but with a lion-like rumble and something else that could only come from the throat of a cat whose cranial and long neck muscles are well adapted to the sabertooth lifestyle.
No answer. She waited a little longer and then screamed again.
She had had to do this intermittently all her adult life. Why, she did not know.
There had never been an answer and so she had never borne cubs.
Once, she had herself been a cub, denned in that cave over there that she now claimed as her own.
She had moved into the cave soon after Mother had gone hunting one day and had never returned.
Two brothers and a sister had survived into maturity with her. Then Mother drove off the males but allowed her and Sister to stay close by — until prey became scarce.
Mother had then chased Sister away and had come after her, too, but lost the fight.
Since then, until Mother went away, the two had orbited each other in this neighborhood, getting by somehow as seasons passed and the world warmed up.
Once more now she screamed. Then she became dizzy and fell off the foot-high rock right onto her injured right shoulder where the Big Short-faced Growler had slashed her with a claw last week as it chased her off a kill.
The pain was terrible. Just before passing out she thought she saw a group of strange sabertooths lurking in the brush and rocks around her, but they were not there when that same pain woke her up again.
She was all alone.
It had only been a scratch, really, but the little wound in her right shoulder began to fester in a big way. It became and still was an abscess that intermittently released its poisons into her bloodstream, making her feel very hot and weak.
She should go and hunt. That would make all the difference. Daylight was almost full now and prey would be moving around.
Her swollen shoulder throbbed but not as much as before, now that she had struggled up into a sitting position.
Also, a welcome numbness was starting to spread through her paws and legs.
If energy came along with this numbness, then she would go hunt.
But weakness came instead of energy.
She was very hungry.
Meanwhile, there was still some meat on the carcass of a rabbit that had hopped almost into her face one day last week — the first and last mistake it ever made during its short life.
She had been resting at the front of the cave then. There was water inside the cave, she suddenly remembered, and she was also very thirsty.
It was so hard to move, though.
She panted and rested in the warm light of a newly risen sun and would have stayed there longer, but a shout of monkey-like voices came to her very sensitive predator ears — not close but nonetheless disturbing.
She had heard such voices once before. They had been many and fiercely triumphant, the day Mother went away.
They had frightened her then and they frightened her enough now to bring her carefully to a standing position that she was able to maintain as she half-dragged and half-limped the hundred yards or so to the cave entrance.
The Monkey People had never come into this little box canyon, but if they did today, she wanted to be well hidden.
Into the cool darkness she tumbled, all the way down splash! into the small pool at the bottom of the slope.
The shock of cold water woke her up.
Splash! Splash!
She got back to dry land at the pool’s edge, and with feline stoicism, she curled up into a resting position as best she could and waited for the pain to go away.
Then she would drink.
Plink.
The sound of water droplets hitting the shallow pool was pleasant.
Plink.
She knew that she was soaked and shivering but, oddly enough, felt pleasantly warm everywhere but in her legs, which had no feeling at all.
She relaxed and began to dream.
Those dreams at first were Homotherium dreams because that’s the kind of cat she was.
Plink!
Today, for some reason, there came new dreams, dreams of other sabercats.
She growled and stirred, thinking that the strangers she had glimpsed before were now ganging up on her in this cave.
That thought brought her to full alertness but, no. There was no foreign sound and no stranger’s movement in here.
She was indeed alone — the last sabercat on Earth.
She closed her eyes and the hated Other came bounding through the cave.
Growl.
Plink!
It was just a dream, and now the shivering had stopped. She must be warm again, although she couldn’t feel it.
This time she entered into a deep, comfortable sleep when she closed her eyes.
Once more she met the long-fanged Other, but this time it was terribly afraid of her, as well it should be, young and strong and healthy as she was now.
(Plink!)
She didn’t like this cave any more and bounded up to the entrance, where Mother tried to stop her. Growling and full of energy, she shouldered Mother aside and ran out into the moonlight.
There was her rock. She leaped onto it and screamed with all her being.
(Plink.)
(A faint throaty growl came from the dreaming sabercat at the cave pool’s edge.)
This time, under the full moon, the call was answered.
Following that roar, a massive figure came into sight. Oh no! It was the Other.
Or was it?
That cat-like shape constantly shifted, taking first one form and then another.
Then it turned to go away. She screamed at it and it came back again.
This time, though, it looked very strange.
Plink.
Oh, here she was in the cave again, nice and warm, and without any pain at all.
It was like being a cub again, and like a cub, she closed her eyes and dreamed up some fun: a whole circus of strange cats with strange names — Lokotunjailurus, Amphimachairodus, Nimravides/Machairodus, Yoshi/Metailurus, Dinofelis…
Plink.
Here was the Other again, in this cave. She joined it and all the other sabercats, too, and altogether they made a Cat.
Plink!
What strange dreams! Here she was, the only cat in the cave.
She let her mind go blank, as blank as the darkness that now filled the cave, without a trace of the daylight that had faintly illuminated the cave walls when she came in.
She was dreaming again.
Now the strange figures resembled cats but plodded around on flat feet.
Some had very attractive sabers. Others reminded her of the conetooths that were thriving out in the real world beyond the cave, crowding her out of prime hunting grounds and killing off her prey.
She tried to growl and chase off all those intrusive strangers.
(Plink!)
(Faint sigh.)
The strangers did not go away but instead fascinated her with their unusual forms. One by one, they paraded past her, singing strange songs as they went.
Then one came over to her and licked her face over and over again, just as Mother did right after she was born.
And just as before, she got up, this time without any difficulty, and followed the stranger down a corridor in the cave that she had never noticed before, one that had a distant light at its end.
It was difficult to get her bones moving at first, but they seemed to flesh out as she neared the light.
Finally she was herself again, young, powerful, full of life, running in a sunlit green world filled with others of her kind.
And she runs there still.
Mauricio Antón, Figures 3.47 and 3.48 in “Sabertooth,” CC BY-ND-NC-SA 4.0
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A COMMENT
That was Friesenhahn Cave in what is now Bexar County, Texas, and that Homotherium was the last sabercat found in the fossil record thus far, per Werdelin et al.
Mauricio Antón, Figure 2.1 in “Sabertooth,” CC BY-ND-NC-SA 4.0
Alluvial sediments soon buried and preserved her (if it was a female).
We Monkey People eventually found the cave, restored the almost completely articulated skeleton, and now display this sabercat in a museum.
Was that the end of sabertooths forever?
Probably not, although we are unlikely to ever see one in real life.
Eleven millennia are not long, in evolutionary terms.
Evolution is slow and difficult. Millions of years have sometimes passed in between fossil records of sabertoothed cats or cat-like predators.
But mammals have evolved these apex predators over and over again for the last 40 million years and they probably will continue this trend.
Someday, a cat-like sabertooth will hear that weird scream, grimace, and then respond with an answering roar.
Their cubs will once more inherit the world.
For a while.
Featured image: skb8721 via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Every book and paper about cats, barbourofelids, and nimravids that I have ever read, but the only one directly referenced in this post is:
Werdelin, L.; Yamaguchi, N.; Johnson, W. E.; and O’Brien, S. J. 2010. Phylogeny and evolution of cats (Felidae), in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, eds. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 59-82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Disclosure: I am just a fan of paleoartist Mauricio Antón and have no personal, financial, or business connection with him. I just think that readers of my blog should know about his 2013 book Sabertooth and his blog.
Flight To Wonder 