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In the time she had spent with the dogs she was thinking ever more as "The Scientists," the tigress almost missed the departure of the hunting party. It was still early in the morning, but many of the wolves had already ranged far into the jungle the previous day and had brought back enough information to form a likely search route for possible prey. Furthermore, the Labrador whose name the tigress still didn't know - nor did she much care whether or not a particular animal chose to adopt a name. What were noses and anal glands for anyways? - had gone to the simple expedient of recruiting one of the former proto-packs for the lead hunting party. The Beta, a quite large timber wolf whose scars marked him as a quite experienced fighter and who was only just passing out of his prime, led the group of seven others, all lean and rugged looking as well; although one of them was technically a coyote and hardly half the size of Beta. It was a possibly dangerous move to give the closely knit, and obviously ambitious, group so much anonymity, but on the other paw, it got most of the possible trouble makers out of the camp as well.

The tigress only just caught the Beta and his wolves after he had sent his scouts ahead into the jungle. "Wait!" She called in what she hoped was a commanding tone of voice despite her vigorous panting. Cats were made for short bursts of speed and while the meadow was fairly small overall, it was no trifle to pass over full tilt. Her hamstrings were aching by the time she reached the party, all of whom were staring nervously at her relatively gargantuan form, and she knew this would not be the first time she would regret the lifestyle she had been forced to live in the lab which, unfortunately did not include a lot of vigorous exercise. "I'm coming with you." She managed and was even fairly gruff with it.

The Beta looked her over once and then shrugged, whether he didn't see the point in fighting about it with a 550 lb tiger or truly didn't care, the tigress couldn't tell. "All right, you can take point, but I don't think we'll find anything big enough to need your help though. So far there hasn't been a single rabbit turd reported anywhere near the camp."

The tigress avoided any looks of incomprehension, to do so would put the beta in a position of power over her, no matter how slight and that was contrary to her purpose here, but still it was hard when she didn't even know what the term "point" referred to exactly. She deduced it must be somewhere in front of the formation and most likely a position of leadership; that was definitely not where she wanted to be to learn how to hunt properly. But she rolled with it, "That's not the way it works. I'm going to hang out and do my thing and if I need any of you to clean up afterwards, I'll holler. Got it?"

"Whatever. If that's what you gotta do then do it." Remarked the Beta with another shrug. He seemed remarkably placid for one who had had a very real opportunity to become Alpha of a pack of over thirty wolves and assorted dogs. "We already sent out the scouts. We need to get moving before they get too far ahead." He said simply and then started moving without a second look at the tigress; he might have had a death wish acting so blithely around her, but she didn't think so. The big wolf would bear watching.

It was as the tigress was beginning to move through the trees that a second unexpected visitor joined the party. The tigress raised one white furred eyebrow as the lab, the new Alpha bounded up to her. "Don't leave me behind!" he was shouting.

The tigress saw the Beta make a snarl out of the corner of his eye, but otherwise he maintained his composure so close to the 550 lb cat. "I see we have another guest" he said mildly with the barest of strains on the word "guest."

The lab, when he caught up with them, hung his head panting; the females also liked to hang out in the foremost regions of the meadow, closer to the beach. "Where are... you going?" he asked, lifting his head up long enough to stare pleadingly at the tigress.

She would very much have liked to reply, "What does it matter to you? I go where I please." But in front of the others, especially the most unruly of the bunch, she needed to keep up at least a semblance of appearances. So she said instead, "I'm going hunting in the jungle. What are you doing here?" But even as the words left her lips she saw the expression written on his face. He was afraid to be left alone, even with the rebels gone out of the camp on what might be a two or even three day hunt.

The Beta apparently lost his cool for at least a moment at the sight of the usurper of the title that might have been his for he stepped forward a little and said, "Yes, what are you doing here? Don't the females need attending?" This immediately brought out chuckles from his comrades and the tigress simply could not let that slide.

She stepped heavily between them, slamming a paw down onto the bare black soil and glared at the Beta. She snarled with a mouth full of fangs longer than the digits of his paws and hissed in a way that did not need the common tongue between the former lab animals.

The lab had recovered enough by now to remember the role he was supposed to be playing. He stepped to the tigress's side and said, "It's unbecoming to insult your Alpha. Apologize."

For a moment, the Beta looked like he was going to refuse - in which case, the tigress would have been more than happy to have a fresh serving of liver before the hunt - but he lowered his head and said in a sincere enough tone, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't speak so." The eyes of his companions were hard, but now the object of their attention was the Beta and the weakness he had shown to the soft yellow Labrador; and in canine society, weakness was weakness despite the logic behind not resisting with a 500 lb tiger right next to you. The Beta would undoubtedly have to either answer some harsh questions or whip his team back into order with the tooth and fang later today or tomorrow; the latter was much more likely.

The tigress allowed herself a moment of satisfaction, reinforcing the lab's rule and thereby causing a disturbance in their unity before leaving might prove to be a good thing in the long run. However, the lab still apparently thought that he was coming for he was already walking forward into the stalled group. The tigress reached out and lightly squeezed the lab's tail between her digits and the wide pad on her palm. He turned around and she said quietly, "You should stay here, the jungle isn't the right place for you."

"But-"

"No." interrupted the tigress. She wouldn't allow this conversation to become more animated, not when wolves' hearing was so acute. "Stay here and keep the order. You were doing a good job this morning without me."

The corners of the lab's mouth lifted and he beamed up at the tigress. She flashed him a grin that actually wasn't false for once and turned into the jungle. The lab watched her until her stripes vanished easily into the foliage and turned back into the meadow.

They set out at an easy trot that the tigress had no initial difficulty with as the party marched through the jungle in a staggered, yet clearly organized formation; the inexperienced tiger kept generally to the rear and middle of the group so she could better see what they were doing. As the day wore on however, and the wolves never seemed to tire or slow, she began to appreciate the tenacity and stamina of these feral canines who were still quite wild and capable despite generations of genetic testing and experimentation. They traveled in the direction opposite the one that the tigress had initially come from, leading away from the small mangrove forest. The plan, the Beta told her in response to gentle prodding as they walked, was to travel around the local spur of the mountain and, hopefully, come into deeper jungle at the heart of the island.

"There is nothing," he said, "anywhere close to the shore, no tracks or even scat to speak of. No one even smelled anything. I think that our best bet is in the deepest, darkest jungle since it's clear that nothing much hangs out near the shore."

"Except the ants." The tigress added contemptuously. Indeed, it seemed that the only things moving under the boughs of the great trees which held up the canopy were the ants. Mounds were prolific in the underbrush though only a few seemed active. Long streams of the black fuzzy things traveled in lines to and from the narrow openings of the cone-like structures, nearly all of them carrying bits of leaves down into whatever subterranean collection pit they had dug; the tigress really didn't care, though she took pleasure in stomping as many of them as was prudent during the voyage. It was a little later that the she-tiger remembered something the lab had said when she first pinned him down and had been perfectly ready to sink her teeth into his plump abdomen. "You said that no one found any sign of food? The Lab said that he saw a horse."

The Beta actually paused in midstride and cocked an ear in thought. "Oh yeah, I heard something about other survivors."

"Other survivors?" the tigress asked earnestly. This was the first time she'd heard anything about that.

"Yeah, well it makes sense, don't it? If we got off the ship some of the other ones should'a gotten out too. Heh, though I don't think any of the hundreds of mice we were carrying would have survived the ocean."

The tigress cocked an eyebrow as the two of them resumed motion. After a little bit, she picked up the thread of conversation, "How many other kinds of animals were there on board?"

"All kinds, or so I've heard." Replied the Beta wolf, "The humans didn't take us wolves out of our cages much. 'Imagine it's the same for you. No, I heard from a German Shepherd who used to be pretty much one of the technician's pets. He said they were trying the procedure on lots and lots of species to see differences in how well it worked."

The tigress wondered if she had already met this knowledgeable canine this morning. It made sense that he hadn't said anything, she hadn't asked and they, all of them, were too busy discussing the mysterious Manna. "Well..." she said, "If there are other survivors, then we'll have food, at least for a while. Assuming there is more than one horse on the island."

The Beta looked up at her with a startled expression. She waited for him to say, 'You don't mean...' but it didn't come. He just looked back down and forwards and issued some orders to straighten up the line.

That morning, the tigress, remaining as she did with the main group, did not learn terribly much about tracking prey. For the most part, they were traveling as quickly as was reasonable with only infrequent pauses to sniff the base of a tree or scan softer ground for tracks; and each and every time the wolf in question performing the examination shook his head in the negative. Although the main group was where most of the strength of the party was located, the tigress managed to extract, not too overtly, that the most important part of the formation were the scouts ahead of them.

Every twenty minutes or so, a wolf, as directed by the Beta would jog forward to meet with one of the three scouts and then would either replace him or relay his message back to the Beta and the other members of the main group in general. Thus, every hour, each scout gave a report of the terrain - which the Beta seemed to be building into a reliable mental map of the island while the tigress had slightly more difficulty due to trouble visualizing the landscape she hadn't seen herself - and of possible leads concerning prey - of which there were none. The rest of the morning past uneventfully with the great cat trotting in the back of the group and learning more about canine social dynamics - which would be useless to her once she ditched the mangy mutts - than actual hunting. That is, until the party past around the tip of the near spur of the mountain and began to turn north again after the trek southwest from the meadow.

The maneuver might have caused some confusion, especially if the wolves had been as inexperienced at the tigress, but they all had known the planned route at least to the mountain spur and there was the convenient landmark of the mountain itself always to the right and looming over the tree tops... at least when it was visible through the canopy. Still, the Beta wolf sent three runners out all at once when the craggy cliff side of the spur was high above to the right of them to make sure that no one continued trekking off in the wrong direction; which was especially easy now as the jungle had indeed grown more dense than the tigress had ever seen it. The beach-ward side of the spur, as the tigress thought of it considering that they came from "The Beach," was a rolling slope, rocky, but choked with grass and small shrubs. The other side, however, was an almost sheer cliff. The black, volcanic rock was exposed where it was not draped in vines and moss. While the side of the island the canines had chosen as home consisted largely of high grassy fields with sheltered forests and jungle, it seemed that most of the island's rain fell on this side of the mountain for the jungle grew dense. The tall species of trees the tigress had encountered on the far north side of the mountain before her trek south were more prolific here, almost blocking out the sun and clustering close to the cliff side; somewhere ahead the tigress heard a waterfall.

When the messengers came back, the tigress saw that this time, none of the scouts had opted to be replaced. "The teraign is difficult ahead." Said the one from the middle scout.

"Impassable at the base of the cliff" chimed in the runner for the far right scout. "He's trying to hold position, but he's being forced to the west."

The runner for the far left scout, and the only one the tigress noticed that had not asked to be relived during the whole trek so far. "Coyote says his path is passable but almost totally water logged." Which made sense considering the runner was dripping from the legs, belly and chest. "He's looking for more solid ground further east of his position."

"He's not likely to find anything but more trees and damned vines if our forward scout is correct." Said the Beta. He took only a moment to issue new orders. "Go to 119 and 211 and tell them to backtrack and turn west. A little water never hurt anyone."

The tigress moved out with the rest as the two runners dispatched. She was inclined to agree with the Beta, as a tiger, she enjoyed a nice swim every now and again, but she was not particularly thrilled about once more becoming mud splattered and dirtied beyond recognition in some sludge filled swamp. She was brooding over the thought when an idea struck her. She went forward to the Beta wolf, "Hey, aren't you going to send someone to this Coyote fellow?"

The Beta shrugged, "Coyote may be small, but he's as clever as they come. I think he'll turn back around once the going gets too rough, or he'll met us if he falls behind. No need to tire out another young buck for something he's probably already figured out."

The tigress pressed the point however, "But it might cost us time if he decided to stick it out too long without knowing we decided to take his path. I could take him the message."

The Beta blew air out the side of his chops, "Hell, wha'ever floats your boat, Missy. Go take off inna' jungle if you want, like I say, I think we'll be lucky if we find some native rabbits or lizards or somethin'. If you bag the horse though, could you let out a hollah? We'll help carry it back to t'camp."

The tigress thought about assuring him that she was not going to take off into the nearly impenetrable walls of green and pale tree trunks around them, but thought better of it; besides she was more tempted to anger after being brushed off so easily by her indifferent host. Besides, if the scouts were the ones doing the real tracking, isn't that where she wanted to be? So instead, she just cocked her head pleasantly. "If I do, I will, but I'll pass along the word to Coyote along the way."

The Beta didn't respond so she wasted no more time and jogged forward into the greenery reducing her vision to the trees within a ten foot radius. About twenty feet in her leaping run, her front paws splashed into a half foot deep puddle, immediately soaking them and sending water and flecks of mud cascading down her white striped chest; it only got wetter from there.

It is much harder to track the scent of someone when you are half swimming through a stagnant forest half drowned in the runoff from the western side of the mountain, the tigress reflected later on as she trudged her soaked, mud slathered body through the veritable bog. She walked over tree roots and grasping underwater vines when the soft clay-like mud wasn't slipping between her toes. Where the trees weren't squeezed so tightly together that she felt like she was nosing through a devious labratory obstacle course where she was required to weave through poles, she had to plow her way through bushes, screens of vines or mats of grass that literally reached high over her head. It was past noon and the tigress had already given up on finding the scout, in fact she was just trying to find her way back to the main group, when Coyote found her.

She was pulling herself out of yet another shallow pool when she heard a masculine but rather high pitched voice call to her. "How you holding up, Miss Pussy Cat?" It asked, "You look a little lost."

"I'm doing just fine, thank you." The tigress said briskly. She wanted to snap back, but inside she realized that he could simply leave her lost in the bog if he wanted. To show that she wasn't completely without sense she added, "And you must be Coyote."

"Indeed I am, Pretty Miss" said Coyote though he still didn't show himself, "I was returnin' to my post when I heard all this splashin' an' cursin' round hereabouts. That got me a-wonderin' if there ain't no horse wandered in'a this here bog. But instead I finds you Pretty Miss. An' now I'm a-wondering what you're doin' over yonder all by youself."

The voice mixed flattery and general friendliness in with a deep cautious suspicion so thoroughly that the tigress was hardly even able to notice the latter. She still couldn't help but preen a paw where she saw when he called her "Pretty." Also, the fact that he was being cautious around a 500 lb tiger he had never actually met before was as sure a sign of intelligence as the tigress had ever seen. She answered back to the jungle, "I actually came out here to find you, Coyote. To... well, to tell you we were going to take the route through the bog instead of breaking through the trees closer to the mountain... I was with the main group you see." She just remembered to add, "I came up after the scout had already left."

"Sorta funny way to go about that, Pretty Miss. I was a-sketching a path 'round the edge o' the bog and you went'a jumped right in t'middle o' it." There was silence for a moment and the tigress grew afraid that he had left her when a small, skinny tan furred canine stepped out from behind a tree. What struck the tigress the most was the startling difference between his size and his voice, she had been expecting a canine perhaps only a little smaller than the great bulk of the Beta, but here, he was surely less than half his weight maybe even half of that; perhaps as little as 30 lbs. He looked like a typical member of his namesake, but he had the overlarge ears and eyes that frequently cropped up in the genetic manhandling they had all undergone. His chest was scrawny as well without much meat on his shoulders, but his hind legs were well muscled at least. Still the tigress thought she could blow him over with a strong enough breath.

Once Coyote had emerged, he continued to wax eloquent with his vaguely Creole accent, "I was told by m'runner that there was a mighty fearsome tiger with us in'a back. Dinn'ah tell me you was a lady though." The tigress wondered then if she was a male would Coyote have left her to fend for herself in the slimy bog; she also found it quite absurd to be talked to in such a way by one who was little bigger than a large house cat himself. He must have picked it up from humans at some point in his life. "A pleasure," it came out pley-sah, "to meet you. You can call me Coyote."

The tigress chuckled, "I already knew your name." She thought she could grow accustomed to the small canine's presence already.

"Well..." said, Coyote, "Knowin' someone's name an' bein' introduced ain' t'same is it." Coyote grinned as only a coyote can and gestured behind him with his nose. "I tink we should start walkin' before we gets too far behind."

The tigress shook and the air around her was filled with a showering cascade of water. Afterwards, her fur was dreadfully spiky and sticking out in all directions like a sick porcupine. "That's the best news I heard all day."

Coyote led the tigress out of the worst part of the bog to the rim of the impenetrable forest clustering up to the side of the mountain. There were still plenty of puddles, but for the most part, the ground was firm and only a little moist. And most importantly, Coyote, after jogging back up to the front of the party with the tigress in tow, resumed his scout's duties; and he wasn't a steel trap like the Beta when it came to talking or even just chatting either.

They talked a little about their lives back at the lab, not that there was much to talk about since they were both wild and exotic animals for lab studies and thus didn't get out much. In fact, they both had much more to say about the 24 hours they had been stranded on the isle. The tigress, however, didn't forget her purpose in attending her this expedition, however, and pressed Coyote about what he was doing and why at most every opportunity; he didn't seem to mind at all. It was such a relief to be away from the large group and be able to ask questions relatively freely without worrying about setting a powerful example for others. Of course, Coyote might blab, but then he had already seen how inept she was in simply getting lost in the bog, and the tigress had an idea that he liked to keep to himself for the most part, despite his expressive mannerisms.

Until sunset, when the party recollected itself to bed for the night, Coyote told her about finding her way, keeping from getting lost and lots of other practical information for keeping herself safe in the wild. It really was surprising the amount of information that was relevant to both a 30 lb coyote and a 550 lb tiger. She supposed that she would have learned a lot about tracking as well... except there were still none to be seen so far. That was one fact that weighed heavily on the otherwise easygoing manner of the smaller canine.

"There ain't t'blasted thing on this here island save us." He reported to the Beta while everyone was bedding down and setting watches. "It ain't natural."

"Maybe the island is poisoned somehow." Muttered a lean young wolf

"Maybe it's cursed."

"Enough of that!" barked the Beta sharply. "This place isn't cursed and as far as I know it's not poisoned either. Plenty of birds around for that matter."

"Not during the night." A particularly young grey wolf commented.

He immediately regretted it for the Beta charged and pinned the subordinate to the earth as easily as a swooping hawk. He had his teeth to the disruptive wolf's throat in the time it took the tigress to draw a breath. "Don't interrupt me when I'm speaking." He growled. Then he said more generally, "And no more of this doom and gloom stuff. Get some sleep. We're spreading out even wider tomorrow and covering more ground. Everyone needs to be alert for prey. I know we're all hungry but we have to work for our food now."

Heads went up and down in agreement. Even the tigress couldn't disagree. Even with the two dozen disks of Manna she had found that morning, it seemed a week since she had last eaten and the hunger pangs were coming with increasing regularity. She hoped she wouldn't have to eat one of her companions tomorrow.

That night, the dream was the same. If anything, there was a greater variety of flavors the island produced and her waking life's real hunger as she lay down to sleep only seemed to exaggerate further the depths of gluttony she was able to enjoy while she slumbered. She was also more lucid this time, there was less of a feeling of watching herself chow down on all of the vegetation she could get her paws on than there was of her actually doing these things... and she found that she enjoyed it. And why shouldn't she? 'It's just a dream.' She thought as she sank her fangs into a massive truck which had fallen because she had gnawed her way through the base of it, 'I've basically been starving since I landed on this island and even before that, I had to endure two months of half rations just because they considered me "too fat." What is "too fat" anyways? I should be the one to decide that, and besides they were the ones who over fed me for the mating program in the first place.' She sighed and lifted her muzzle away from the bleeding trunk for the first time so far in these series of dreams. She looked up at the sky; it was a wacky shade of lavender and clouds flew by in the shapes of ants carrying leaves. 'To think I could have had a cub of my own. I could have been a mother if I hadn't been selected to go and wound up here. What's the point of freedom when the only food here is in my dreams?' And for the first time, she felt despair at what had happened en route to America. She ate until she felt sick and the thick truck was gnawed away as far as she could reach in either direction.

She got up to move only to find herself held down by an irresistible force. And just like when the dream ended the previous night, she looked over her shoulder at her body. Only now the dream did not end. She saw that she had become an enormous cat, more obese than she had ever cared to imagine a cat could become. Her abdomen was a swollen sack of lard that flowed down across the imaginary ground of her dream, reaching all the way to her knees and a little beyond. Her chest sagged just as much and it seemed that all of her stripes had doubled in width. She was soft all over, acres and acres of her own lush and valuable fur stretching over an incredible frame. She was shocked of course, but she found she wasn't frightened, she was still perfectly aware that this was only a dream. So instead, she chose to enjoy it, she luxuriated in the sensation of her own terrific mass, sure it was annoying trying to get up, but she could roll over just fine, and the feeling of all that softness surrounding her was comforting... safe. She felt her face with her fore paws, having to lift up copious amounts of draping shoulder fat that got in the way of the movements. Her cheeks were swollen like a greedy chipmunk's, white furred jowls that sagged at the jaw. But rather than ugly, she thought they made her look regal. After all, only an incredibly successful animal could become this large. And with that came the thought that she deserved this too. Not just because she was a top predator, but because she made it all look so good.

Consciousness hit the tigress like falling out of a tree. She gasped and then her stomach growled piteously waking two nearby canines. She grimaced and clutched her midsection as she lay on her side as fresh pangs washed over her; she wished desperately that she could have fled back into her dreams of plenty. She might have tried too, had a white disk not caught her eye. When she saw what was unmistakably a disk of Manna, she opened her eyes wider in the pre-dawn gloom. As her pupils widened, the washed out colors of the jungle before the sun rose became clear. However, she hardly needed her night-clever eyes to see that scattered all about and even in between the members of the party were literally over a hundred round white shapes of the only food source so far discovered on the island. Her stomach growled again and sent her into motion.

She didn't stop as the others began to stretch and stir when she crunched the surrounding foliage while she foraged. Huger was her only driving force. She didn't care about the mysterious - and convenient - appearance of the Manna, nor the half understood properties of the "lipids" contained within each disk. She didn't even care that what she was eating was technically a fungus; it tasted like sweet marinated venison and then after the first two dozen or so, switched to roast pork. She worked quickly, her mouth to the ground like a simple minded grazer and snatching up the crispy delights, chomping them once or twice and then swallowing before grabbing the next one. It took a lot to even curb her appetite and in the purely primitive pleasure of eating, she had eaten fully half of the surrounding Manna (which was a little bit less than half of what had appeared due to the fact that she hadn't concentrated on the ones blooming in between the sleeping canines). She was only able to force herself to stop when she imagined the complaints of the others if they woke and discovered that she had eaten entirely the only so far food source that had fallen into their collective laps. She didn't particularly fear the outcome, what could they do to her after all? But she did want to minimize complications while they were out here by themselves; especially since she was in fact looking forward to another day spent learning with the fairly charming Coyote.

She managed to stop herself from gorging, even though she felt like she could have easily taken the other half of the circle of Manna that had cropped up around them during the night. However, there was still only half a circle of white sprouting disks when dawn's first rays came and illuminated the sleeping site, so it was pretty obvious how much more food there had been and also, as much as the tigress tried to wipe the evidence from her chops and paws, who had gotten the lion's (or in this case, tiger's) share of the goodies.

There was grumbling, of course, there was always grumbling when food was a limited resource, but there was sufficient Manna for each mouth to have a dozen or so disks. There was also, of course, some disparity, the Beta took just over two dozen while the much smaller Coyote claimed he was comfortable after only six - even after the tigress's own insistence that he get more than the average ration.

The tigress was still trying to push four gathered disks on Coyote where he had made camp off to one side of the little gathering when he said unexpectedly, "Gosh, girl, how many 'em things you eat 'nyways?"

She would have snapped back that it was none of his business, but she had grown to honestly like his company, and in more than just the cold business relationship she had with the Labrador back on the beach. "I guess..." she hesitated, "I might have taken more than my fair share."

"Well shoot. Dem crispies must'a been piled up on'a your side o' the ring. Your tummy looks plenty full from down here." Said Coyote. The small canid grinned and lifted a paw to gesture vaguely at her abdomen.

She didn't have any idea what the pint-sized canine was talking about, so she turned her head around. At first she didn't see anything and then she did notice a certain roundness behind the ribs, at least compared with the previous day. She left Coyote with only a few pleasantries while the Beta was still going over today's route in detail with the others; today, almost all of them would be out of direct sight with each other except for their partners directly to the right and left in the line (of course that didn't matter for the tigress who planned on shadowing Coyote again). She slithered behind a tree and leaned her back against it, feeling her midsection. The fifty-ish disks that she had consumed were a small dense ball high under her ribs, but she could tell right away that what Coyote had seen was not simply the result of this morning's binge. It was difficult to believe, given the fact that she had been worrying about starving to death ever since she had first gotten lost in the woods, but she was definitely plumper, if only by a marginal amount. In fact, she could only tell for certain by pinching the loose skin around her tummy and on her ribs; goodness knew that test had been performed frequently enough back in the lab after her proposed mating had been canceled. She didn't know what to make of it, but the eerie memory of her dreams the past two nights cropped up again unbidden.

The Beta let out a long howl that punctuated the quiet of the morning before the birds returned to the island from wherever they disappeared to at night. She heard then the shuffle of paws as the party began to spread out into today's wide ranging search party. The tigress quickly got to her paws to avoid getting lost today. She stowed the troublesome thoughts away in a corner of her mind, after all, a couple of extra pounds wasn't going to kill her... at least not with any lab technicians around.

Coyote took a forward position of the party as they swept the jungle from east to west, south of the great mountain itself. The tigress still did not want it particularly well known that she was tagging along so closely with Coyote, and so far, the little tan furred canine had not seen fit to enlighten any of the others of her own particular weaknesses. She went forward in his wake, but a little off to the side, seeming to make her own trail. She waited until the pack had spread apart to the point where only two other wolves were visible before jogging forward to meet the small but cunning canine.

The jungle was much less rugged (not to mention dryer!) south of the great central mountain. That made the going easier and faster, even if it seemed much more private with the wolves so sparsely placed. In fact, the forest here was much like it was east of the mountain and north of the meadow where the rest of the canines now shelter where she had first encountered the Golden Lab. The only real difference was the lack of clearings which had dotted the eastern jungle and more pervasive moss; heck even the ants were the same here, still clipping leaves with tireless industry.

The birds returned about an hour after the sun had risen, all in a great colorful cloud of shrill screeches and calls. She only heard them for the most part, but from what she could see through the scant holes in the dense canopy, it looked like the birds took refuge on the mountain itself at night. Coyote licked his chops when they came with their whooping calls as they set up the more typical background noise for the jungle.

"If we can't find no vitils on this here island, we're gonna hafta figure out'a way to catch a few o' 'em flyers... or rats if there is any..." said Coyote as he placed his forepaws on the trunk of a tree and looked longingly up into the canopy.

"Rats?" the tigress grimaced, "Rats won't do much for me, my small friend. Neither with a few bony birds that never come within 30 feet of the ground."

Coyote dropped back down to the ground, scratching the tree bark as he went to mark their route. The tigress almost laughed at the shallow trace marks.

"Here let me..." the tigress grunted as she lifted a paw and rent four long furrows into the wood of the tree, "Now that'll last a long time."

But Coyote didn't seem impressed, he only grinned. "Yeah, sure will. Years prob'ly. But... the t'ing is, the scent is more 'portant than th' marks and that lasts plenty long enuff for scoutin'. Whatchu gonna do if you's livin' here long enuff so that all the trees is marked up?"

Coyote was the first person since her own mother that was capable of making the tigress feel chagrinned; she wasn't quite sure if she liked it or not. "Once again, I bow to your teachings, Sensei." The tigress mocked, mimicking a movie that was left on one night in the employee lounge; she had listened to it four times before it was finally shut off in the morning.

Coyote looked perplexed, but added, "Well you shouldn't feel bad about stuff you ain't had the chance to learn. My pa' was caught Wild and Free an' taught me everythin' he knew in case I ever broke out my cage too; I t'ink he was smarter'n me in his own way. I know I look a little funny on account a bein' 'Firs' Generation' n' all, but at least Pa' knew what it was like to be out here an' free."

The small canine continued forward and sniffed at the base of a wide leafed plant. The tigress watched eagerly but he shook his head slightly, like all the innumerable times before. He looked a little despondent before looking up at her and saying, "'Sides I don't know that you'll be around long enough to mark up all 'em trees." The tigress looked quixotically at the much smaller canid before he continued, "Sorry as I am to tell you Pretty Miss, if it turns out there's nothin' to eat on this island 'sides rats and dead birds, only small guys like me are gonna make it."

"There's horses." Reacted the tigress instantly, though she knew only of one horse for sure on the island.

"Yeah, I heard about it too." Said Coyote seeing through the maneuver, "But even if you found it? How long would that keep ya?" The little canine snorted, and the tigress was shocked at this turn of the discussion, she didn't want to talk about such things, not yet anyways. "What, you gonna live off them crispies? How long'll it be before me or one o' th'others starts lookin' tasty?"

"I wouldn't eat you!" exclaimed the tigress, but as soon as the words were out, she knew it was false. If she was hungry enough... well a cat comes first in her own heart.

Coyote turned his snout away, "Tha's mighty sweet o' you, but I know better. Part o' me thinks it'd be best to leave you here onna this side o' the island so you's won't go and hurt my friends back on da beach... but that wouldn't be right neither, no sir."

The tigress stepped forward, and the tiny 30 lb canine stood solidly against her far superior mass, "Listen, it's not going to come to that because we're going to find something to eat." The tigress was thinking that she couldn't lose her valuable instructor, but at the same time she knew it was more, she didn't want to lose her only friend either. "Besides, I think the... crispies as you call them keep one better than you might expect. Between them and the two dogs I ate yesterday - after they attacked me first!" she added at Coyote's stern glance, "I've actually gained weight." She said while reaching back and patting her midsection for emphasis. "I'm not going to starve to death today, or even this week and I promise, I'm not going to eat you." She held up a paw with two digits crosses, another human mannerism that had rubbed off during her youth.

"Fine 'nuff" said Coyote simply.

Before they could begin their endless trotting through the jungle, however, there came barking from ahead and to the south and then a thunderous crash that sent the birds fleeing in all directions. The noise was so loud that it shook the earth under the tigress's paws, and despite herself, she was terrified; her hair stood on end and she felt like running away. She would have too, except for the knowledge that she would be lost on the strange half of the island far from anyone else, that... and the desire not to be parted from Coyote.

Coyote looked dumbfounded, but not panicky despite his diminutive stature, "Wha' the heck you t'ink that was?"

"I'm not sure we want to find out," said the tigress thinking of guns, cannons, whirring chainsaws and all the horrible loud and dangerous things humans made.

There was still more barking and baying from at least two other members of the pack. There was another huge crash, closer but more to the north now. It was accompanied by a heart rending yowling that died off rapidly.

"That tears it." Said Coyote tearing off towards the thunderous noises. "Follow me if you're anything more than'a house cat under all tha' fur n' bulk."

The goading, especially the term "house-cat" got her feet moving before she had fully made up her mind and she leaped off into the underbrush. It didn't take long to find out what was causing the commotion.

The scattered barking soon became a terrific trumpeting as the pack focused in the sound crashing through the jungle. As she got closer, the tigress heard that the noise was continuous, punctuated by the great cataclysmic booms that she realized was snapping trees when she saw the wavering in the canopy the next time it happened. 'It's something moving through the jungle.' She thought as she panted and ran, hopping lightly across the forest floor, 'something big.' As soon as she realized that it wasn't human in origin, not unless a bulldozer washed ashore, the tigress's courage returned and she plowed ahead, even leaving Coyote behind.

The tigress smelled blood and then came across the corpse of one of the eight wolves that had made up the expedition. She stopped for just a moment, the smell of entrails was strong and made her wrinkle her nose; the unfortunate wolf looked like he had been smashed flat even as she might flatten a fly. She pressed on, chasing after the mysterious thing that had flattened a 70 lb wolf. The noised stopped, which mildly concerned the tigress, but the path the thing had made was unmistakable. There was now fairly straight corridor through the jungle, stomped flat, anything that was smaller than a century-old tree had been smashed asunder and left in ragged splinters. The tigress tried not to think about what something that could break a 15 foot sapling in half without stopping could do to her. It didn't take long to catch up with the thing because it had stopped moving.

The tigress slowed down and focused on slowing her breathing. She left the trampled path and took a loop around to the east, downwind. At the end of the path was what the tigress first thought was a massive grey boulder. She sat down, still quietly and was wondering if perhaps a boulder had possibly rolled down the mountain somehow, though it seemed unlikely it could have rolled north towards the mountain, when the boulder exhaled.

The boulder, which was several times bigger than the tigress herself lifted its head and snorted out of wide, grey skinned nostrils. On its nose, the tigress saw the base of a circular horn, which had been shaved down: a rhinoceros. 'A rhino?! What the hell did those scientists thinking bringing a rhino on the ship?'

The crowd of barking had fallen behind her swift sprint, but it was gaining rapidly now that she had found the source of the terrible noise; she didn't need to see the blood on the rhino's feet to deduce who had flattened the wolf. Her instincts told her that this was not a prey animal, at least not while he was healthy, any attempt on her part to take him would only result in injury for her or worse... the same for any of the wolves hurrying behind, all of them outraged at the loss of one of their own. The rhino huffed again and got to its feet. She saw that the huge bull was even larger than she had thought as he began to trot back the way he had come through the jungle. The tigress didn't know what had caused the altercation, why the rhino was here in the first place, nor did she care. All she knew was that if the pack came into contact with him, there was going to be more blood spilled; possibly Coyote's.

It was that last thought that stirred her to move. She couldn't sneak around the rhino faster than he could trot back the wide avenue he had created, so she leapt out of cover and darted up the convenient path ahead of the bull rhino. The mere sight of her flashing stripes, not to mention the fact that she herself was a much more threatening predator than a mere wolf, caused the rhino to charge. As she sprinted, the tree trunks darting by and leaves occasionally whipping into her face she didn't think it would be much of a challenge to outrun the bulky rhino, but then she had never actually seen a charging rhino except on television.

She darted around a small tree that had been left standing on the sidelines of the trampled path, but only a few seconds later, another titanic crash like an explosion rocked the forest as the tree snapped into a rain of splinters before the rhino's irresistible mass. The breath caught in the tigress's throat and as she felt the vibrations from the one person avalanche that was the rhino behind her through the soles of her paws; she began to think that this wasn't such a great idea. She didn't even think about the possibility of reasoning with the rhino, he might have undergone intelligence enhancement, or perhaps something else, she just willed her feet to fly over the smashed leaves and ground up pulp of tree trunks as fast as the could.

She was tiring, but hadn't begun to slow by the time she came back to the corpse of the dead wolf. There were three other's beside it, including the smaller Coyote. She shouted at she ran towards them, "Run! Run! Get outta here!" unconsciously slipping into Coyote's manner of speech. The charging grey juggernaut behind her convinced them straight away to follow her advice. The smallest canid hesitated for a moment, but did not choose in the end to flee in the direction the tigress was heading. Which was just as well as the tigress probably would have trampled him if he had gotten in her way. The pre-trampled path ended - or started depending on your point of view - just a little ways beyond and the tigress turned ninety degrees to the right, setting her dead west, hoping to lose the rhino. Her heart hammered in her chest and her lungs burned, cats were definitely not long distance runners, she couldn't believe the rhino had followed her so far.

The maneuver bought her a little distance as the rhino took a wide looping turn, but nothing more. She began zigzagging around the largest trees she could find and that bought her a little more, although almost half of them the rhino broke through with little resistance. Her blood was a roaring river in her ears and the Tigress knew it was time to try something different for the rhino seemed hell-bent on turning her into a $1000 rug. She glimpsed yellow shoots on her left and leapt, falling into a bamboo stand.

On the southern side of another spur of the central mountain, a broad stream fed a stand of tall and fast growing bamboo. It was here that she was finally able to find refuge. The bull, in his wrath smashed more than 20 feet into the dense forest that the tigress was only just able to squeeze into thanks to her limber spine. She squeezed and twisted in between the towering columns of bamboo, while the rhino pushed his way through. The tigress was afraid that he might simply keep coming as the bamboo, most of it over 100 feet tall, simply collapsed around him and his seemingly unlimited strength like he was wading though grass. However massive the bull was, however, the collective weight of the bamboo couldn't be matched by a single animal and he was slowed and eventually stopped while the tigress continued to worm her way deeper into the stand. The rhino roared in frustration - the tigress didn't detect any words in the purely animal outburst - and finally turned around before he was trapped in the fallen tangles of the fastest growing plant on earth. The tigress collapsed on the ground, twisted serpentine in-between the stalks, and allowed herself to feel relief at last. It was almost ten minutes before she realized that she had left her company and tutor far behind and was now hopelessly lost.

She waited an hour before heading south out of the bamboo stand. Her legs shook at first and didn't want to move her forward despite the fact that the overpowering male stench of the bull rhino had cleared out more than a half hour ago. The fact that she was now lost for the third time in two days was very dispiriting.

The water babbled softly in the brook that flowed through the bamboo forest. It's waters first cleansed her dusty pallet initially after the long chase and then led her free from the tangled labyrinth of towering stalks with a minimum of squeezing and twisting. It wasn't long however before thirst overcame her again and she stopped to lap water from the swiftly flowing stream of mountain water. Her belly rattled around, seemingly hollow despite the unfair portion of Manna she had taken that morning. The water helped, however, and she gorged herself with it until her belly bulged. It was only until she had almost made herself sick did the dryness in her throat dissipate; the tigress didn't think she had ever been so thirsty in her life... but then she'd never had to run for her life from a three ton bull rhino before either.

She poked her head only cautiously out of the bamboo thicket, wary for signs or scent of the rhino, but there was none. What the humans needed with a rhino, the tigress couldn't imagine and she cursed her ill fortune that the behemoth survived the sinking of the boat. 'What's next? An Elephant?' she thought ludicrously at first, but she flicked an ear and dismissed it; better not to tempt fate.

Her first instinct after leaving the bamboo thicket was to head back the way she came, however, she had learned already from Coyote that one's instincts weren't to be trusted until one was familiar with the territory. "Better to t'ink your way outta da forest when you lost, Girl. Keep a map in your head." Coyote had said. It was difficult remembering all the places she'd been, but she remembered at least that to the east, back the way she came, was the bog and that it was big; and she seriously doubted she could find the relatively fry path they had taken again. So when she was hiding deep in the thicket, she decided to simply walk the coast until she came back to the meadow on the east side of the island.

However, as she walked south with a belly full of water and all but sloshing as she moved, she recalled that she had come a long way west during her fiasco with the rhino. She looked to the west, but could see nothing through the dense trees. 'It might be faster to find the shore if I head south west first, even if it means backtracking.' She wasn't sure, but the idea seemed to ring with the sort of backwards logic of the things Coyote had been teaching her. Thus she turned her paws south-west practically on a whim.

It wasn't long, as the tigress strode through the greenery as quickly and quietly as she could, before she heard the sounds of the surf ahead of her. She was jubilant and almost started to run forward before she heard something that made her remember her caution: hoof beats.

The subtle staccato was more felt in the soles of her soft furry paws than heard. Like a distance thunder, the hooves trotted and her sensitive ears perked in attention. 'One thing's sure.' she thought wryly, 'There's more than one horse on the island.' She slunk down, cutting her profile almost in half and crept forward to see what she could see.

Like the canines, the equines had chosen a sheltered hollow in the surrounding jungle in which to camp, however, it was clear from the moment the tigress stuck her camoflagued nose though the fern leaves which concealed her, that the horse had created their camp with far more sophistication than the canines had been able to manage with their bickering. First and formost, it was only by chance that the tigress stumbled onto the camp. It was surrounded immediately by the rocky terrain which prevented trees from crowding and turning this spot into yet another section of the dense carpeting of jungle the island sported; it was inserted in between a high rocky rise to the north which was some off shoot from the local southwester spur of the mountain and a strange deep crease in the ground to the south and east (either a fault line or a collapsed lava tube in the tigress's opinion). The stream from the bamboo forest seemed to have followed her here as well. It ran just to the south of her position and partially into the campsite before falling off into the crevasse-like formation that led in the direction of the shore.

There were perhaps two dozen equines at the site, donkeys and mules were present, but mostly tall horses of either black or brown coloration. What was remarkable was that despite their size, the campsite occupied less than half the space of the canines back on the east side of the island had claimed. Sleeping nooks were close together, but well organized in a fan shape, even allowing for a generous space between the males and females, of which there was vastly more of the latter, the tigress observed. A latrine had been dug and the fact that she hadn't seen any noisome piles coming towards the camp implied that toilet duties were much more disciplined here as well. 'It's almost like they knew the instant they got here that they were prey items for people like me.' Thought the tigress, honestly surprised. She had assumed that, if there was a suitable prey population on the island, that she would get at least a couple easy kills before they got wise to the fact that they were being hunted. 'It's going to be hard assaulting this place with a pack from any direction except from the shore, and that means walking around in the open before getting there' thought the tigress bitterly. 'And if I just run in by myself from the jungle, I might be able to take one by surprise, but then what? They would herd together and drive me out before I could tear open the belly, that's what... still,' the tigress thought as a more soothing thought came to mind, 'There's plenty of them here, and they have to go out and forage some time. There will be opportunities for the patient hunter to catch them one by one.'

Despite that, however, the she-tiger might have been tempted to simply run out, leap over the crevasse and try to take one of the milling equines. Only the fact that the five or so gallons of water she had sucked greedily down her gullet less than an hour ago was still deadening her hunger let her stave off the carnage she might have inflicted. 'Besides, I know where they are now.' She thought, pleased with herself, the embarrassing incident with the rhino now a distant memory.

The tigress was wondering if she'd prefer a juicy hunk of loin or perhaps some tender brisket when the light breeze coming in off the beach suddenly stilled. A new breath of wind came in from the east, behind the hidden tiger. The heads of the present equines lifted almost as a single organism as the predator's scent was blown towards them.

It did not take the thought of what multiple hard hooves attached to half ton animals could do to her soft pelt to stir the tigress. She popped out of the shadowy ferns like the cool soil had turned into a hot plate and took off into the jungle. The pursuit, if any, was half hearted as the large feline fled north, not wanting to give away even a hint of the direction to her reluctant allies. When she was quite sure she wasn't being followed, she turned back on her trail and headed back south-east.

She crossed the stream from the bamboo stand and was yet again overcome by thirst. She thought that she'd be full to bursting by now and found it odd that she hadn't had to reliever herself yet. But the fresh mountain water, cool without the slightest hint of salt was so refreshing, it drove these troublesome thoughts away and she was soon on her way again. Before she reached the southern shore of the island, however, she heard a call that immediately took all of her attention. It was long, low and sonorous, with no thought at all to proper pitch: a wolf's howl.

She was dashing through the soft, yielding greenery the moment she recognized it. While it was certainly a good thing that she knew what direction to head in now, she was aggravated that at least one of the canines had chosen to reveal his presence; never mind that the horses would have almost certainly recognized the acrid and distinct odor of a big cat even if they hadn't seen her. More howls soon rose from various parts of the jungle ahead of her due east. Many were scattered, but there was a large central chorus just a little south of her initial trajectory and it grew as more members were drawn to it like collecting rain drops. She was almost on top of the out of tune, noisy band of mismatched voices when she caught the scent of blood on the air. Despite being distended with water, her belly gurgled and bubbled in anticipation of a real meal.

When she re-found her adopted canine pack she was both relieved and disappointed all at the same time. She was relived that she actually found them, pretty much intact, and that she no longer had to find her own way back to the camp and wait for the hunters to return with virtually no prospect of a meal. She was also disappointed since, with the scent of blood suffusing the air, she had been expecting to find that the pack had successfully made a kill while she was lost; instead, there was a piddling little puddle and a bit of cast off on some low lying leaves. Whatever had been here had clearly gotten away.

She padded up to the three howling wolves and even as she did, another misplaced member stepped out of the underbrush; neither the Beta nor Coyote were among them. She had no intention of waiting for them to finish their racket, however, and was tempted to roar loudly in their faces to silence them. However, she simply said loudly, "What's going on here?"

It took a moment, but a 550 lb cat is not a creature that you want to keep waiting, especially if you're only an 80 lb wolf. They seemed eager to tell her, however. One stepped forward and was immediately snapped at by the slightly bigger one on his right. The bigger one then glared at the third for a sign of challenge and only when none was offered said, "We found a cow!"

This island seemed to have no end of surprises, but at least this one seemed to be a pleasant one; a cow would offer only a fraction of the resistance of a stallion and offer perhaps twice as much meat if she was lucky. But still there was only a puddle of blood here and no cow. "... and it got away?" she ventured, though she couldn't imagine that the wolf pack would have much trouble with one of the bloated, slow creatures, despite its superior size.

"No, no. Of course not. The others are herding towards the meadow. Beta said it'd be easier than dragging it back."

The tigress nodded. She grinned internally, she had assumed that the lack of a carcass meant no kill, her mind hadn't even considered that they could herd the prey to the desired location. But then again, she hadn't really thought about transporting the carcass, she was primarily interested in just getting her fair share. 'They might not generally be the brightest bulbs in the shack, but they do have good community sense.' She had to admit to herself. "So what are you doing here howling?"

"Oh. We got scattered after the rhino attack, but we'd already agreed to keep a low profile ahead of time if that happened."

The third one that the current speaker had silenced with a glace spoke up, "I was with Beta. When we found her, the cow, I mean," The first speaker twitched like he wanted to rush the slightly smaller canine for speaking out of turn, but the tiger hunched her shoulders ever so slightly and he decided to not act on his impulse as senior present pack member. The smaller wolf continued, "He told me to stay behind and summon the rest of us still in the jungle." The wolf wagged his whole bottom in excitement, "That cow was so fat! We'll have good eating for the next week!"

The tigress almost snorted in amusement, 'Perhaps not that long when I take my daily shares.' She thought to herself as she turned in the direction of the blood trail. "Well, keep calling then. I'm moving out." And without waiting for a response she took off after the injured bovine.

Whatever else she could say about the frequently smelly, unhygienic and often dull canines she now found herself stuck with, they knew how to herd. They must have run her long, fast and hard because the tigress followed the trail nearly all the way back to the meadow where the dogs nestled before she caught up with the Beta. She jogged the entire way, as long as she could with her sprinter's musculature, past the evening and into the early night. It was full dark when she came to the kudzu covered forest with the giant trees where five lupine forms were dragging a massive carcass in steady rhythmic bursts.

It was cool and moist under the bough, but still her tongue was hot and red as she caught her breath after slowing towards the termination of the long chase she had missed. Her legs felt like jelly, but the great swell of the bovine's bloated midsection under its black and white hide, discernable even in the murk with a tiger's eyes, made her mouth water; she was indeed a massive specimen, both abnormally tall at the shoulder and enormously fat. 'Not only fat,' observed the tigress with growing awe, 'but double muscled. I bet she is well marbled' She almost shuddered with delight.

The cow's body was rippled with huge clots of redundant muscle built up heavily around her neck, shoulders and rump. It was certainly an unattractive feature from a purely aesthetic perspective, not to mention an evolutionary one since her distended rump, more than three times its normal size, severely hampered normal calving, but it did effectively double the high quality meat on the animal; which was all that the carnivorous feline really cared about. Just that would have made this kill an enormous boon, but this heifer also sported a great sagging gut that dropped the considerable distance to her knees and more. To that add the juicy adipose slathered across her rips and the gelatin-like brisket larger than a spring watermelon, and there might indeed be enough thoroughly glut not only herself but the rest of the pack of canines for the next week and more.

With the great tiger still catching her breath, it was the Beta who first spoke, when he noticed her that is, his vision in the dark wasn't nearly as good as hers. "Good, you're here, tiger. How about you push?"

The tigress didn't appreciate the insinuation that she was in anyway under his authority and she was about to tell him where he could stick his request - she rather liked the idea of "lightening" the load a little bit right here anyways - when another familiar voice spoke out of the shadows just beside the great kill.

"We could sure use some help from a biggun' like you, Pretty Miss." Said coyote. "Afta' the dumb heffa fell in da dark an' dun broke her neck, we was sure we wasn't gonna be able to pull 'er back to th'camp."

Her shoulders slumped as the fire went out of her, at least a little. And besides, it seemed reasonable to drag the kill at least to the edge of the forest where it could repose at least a little more gently in the shade. So she set her shoulders behind the massive, soft rump and pushed, leaning her full weight behind the carcass in time with the wolves' pulls. By the time that they all managed to bring the multi-ton carcass to the edge of the meadow, it was leaking blood from not only the wounds the wolves had inflicted on the tubby bovine's thighs and low slung belly, but from the fresh post-mortem bites they had necessarily made in dragging it here across the green carpet of the forest floor; the smell was overpowering. She could simply not resist herself, not with the scent of blood exciting the deadly predator within her and all of the succulent flesh practically calling out to her with a full day's hunger that had gone un-sated save by a few bits of fungus and about a three day's supply of water.

The cow's hide was so thin, her teeth ripped through it with the first bite, it was amazing that it had even been strong enough to support the creature's massive weight. The cow's thick blubber was still warm, luscious and sweet. The tigress hardly had the first chunk she had torn from the cow's midsection before she was ripping off a second, even larger hunk of pink lard. The other canines didn't wait for leave from the Beta wolf to dig in and make good on their namesake as the heartily devoured and chewed. Very swiftly everyone's mouths and throats were a new shade of crimson, all but one that is. Coyote was still hanging back.

It took a remarkable amount of food to make the tigress sit back down on her haunches and breath as deep as the massive clot of flesh under her ribs would allow. She was the first done, but she had also eaten the fastest, and the result of her feast was a gaping hole in the midsection of the recently deceased cow... and yet it was hardly a dent in the scope of the whole. She collapsed ungracefully onto her side and licked her paws of blood. She had eaten herself into near stupor and felt exceedingly lazy and at ease. It was then that she noticed little Coyote sitting by himself near the trunk of a close tree.

She sauntered over to him and promptly set herself and her distended abdomen down. "Hey, what're you doing over here? Go enjoy the feast."

Something didn't seem quite right with Coyote, but then he looked up and grinned, "What? A half-pint like me go in tha' circus? That cow aint goin' nowhere, an a little guy like me don't need much."

The tigress nudged him, rather more heavily than she meant to, with a heavy paw, "Oh go on, have fun, it's a night to be happy."

Coyoyte laughed, "Boy, Pretty Miss, you sure are cheery as a fox in'a hen house when you got a big ol' belly full o' food."

The tigress laughed and rolled over, purring loudly despite herself. She rubbed her own tummy with a paw, "Watch what you saw about a lady's figure, or I might decide I have room for dessert in here." Just then, she released an enormous self-satisfied belch and both the great cat and small dog began to laugh.

Later, when the tigress felt up to moving again, she wandered out into the midnight black forest which was more of a grey cast forest for her. Somehow, she managed to find her leisurely perch again. She belched again and then piddled enormously against a nearby tree before walking up the slight incline to sleep on the wide bough; the moss covered wood felt as soft as a pillow that night.

It was a long time before the tigress began to have what she now thought of as "The Dream." But when it came, it hit her hard and enveloped her completely; it was progressing. The forest wasn't edible this time, but what she experienced when she awoke into the dream was just as bizarre.

The tigress found herself high above the canopy of the forest, the carpet of green stretching out all around and hugging the sides of the tall mountain where the black rock was not to steep to colonize. Her perch was not an ordinary sort, in fact, as she padded across its white surface, sniffing the ever changing but always delicious scents coming up from underneath, she thought it must be a gigantic variety of the mushroom she had named Manna. She walked all around the circumference, but there was no way down that she could see. It wasn't long before she sat down in frustration. 'Certainly not one of my most exciting dreams.' She thought while she sat stranded high atop the giant mushroom. The sun continued to rise in the sky and the tigress realized that she was totally exposed to the harsh equatorial rays. She knew she needed to get down somehow. And as only in a dream, what she needed to do became obvious to her.

She padded out to near where she imagined the center of the disk to be. Extending a claw, she traced a circle on the thin white skin of the Manna disk, hoping it would be close to adjacent to the stalk. The sun beat down on her and she lowered her head and began to bite into the mushroom. Her mouth worked furiously to clear a path down through the disk to what she hoped would be the side of the stalk; the idea of simply digging down strangely did not occur to her. It wasn't long before she hit the orange meat of the shroom, this time it was like roast chicken. The orange, dough-like meat of the structure under her was dry, but she kept sucking it down, not even bothering to chew. Fist she opened a head sized hole and then she had to lower her paws in to dig deeper. She laid her chest down on the surface and stuck her head all the way down as she continued her excavation, the effects of which was not lost on her as she gratefully rested her belly on the floor and felt it spread appreciably across its surface. Like the dreams before, she never felt full or sick to her stomach, she just kept inhaling the delicious orange goo as fast as she could, its flavor changing every time she began to tire of its current one.

She had her shoulders down into the hole, her belly and hind legs supporting her above when she finally broke through. The thicker bottom crust of the Manna fell away as she pressed with her paws, and suddenly the forest canopy, still dazzling despite the shade provided by the mushroom was illuminated before her. She backed up instinctually, pressing her forepaws against the walls of her tunnel for support. Looking a little to her right, however, she saw that she had dug with perfect accuracy to the side of the narrow stalk. It was tiny in comparison to the whole cap, but it was still far from wisp-like and it was lined with sheaths of increasing thickness as it went down into the jungle canopy; it shouldn't be too much trouble to climb. However, as the tigress moved forward to reach for the stalk she immediately encountered another problem.

Her middle, bloated as it was from her activities, bulged around the hole, her soft striped hide brimming around the edges despite how she pulled and pushed herself. She came back up out of the hole and threw herself on her side before she could trap herself. She huffed a breath as she looked down at herself, just like before, it wasn't just her belly which had expanded. If she wasn't yet the impossibly obese mistress she had been in the previous dreams, she was still well on her way there. At least twice her normal body's weight rested on her frame, covering up any hint of definition on her shoulders and hips. Instead wide smooth bulges seemed to be the trend with a chest that matched her belly in sag if not width to boot.

The sun was still rising and the tigress saw nothing else she could do but try to expand the hole. The slight lapse in logic occurred to her, but she thought that she couldn't possibly match the width of the hole volume for volume. In that she was proven wrong. After increasing the size of the hole by 50% she tried squeezing through again, only to find that her flanks, though now incredibly blubbery, still wouldn't admit her. And again, with the persistence only available with the aid of dream-logic, she tried to expand the hole for her new, larger size.

Every time she made the hole larger, she seemed to be making progress, she was ever so slightly slimmer than the hole she had carved than the previous attempt, but again and again it was no use. Now the hole was more an oval which would have previously admitted three of her abreast; it was, however, inevitably too small. It was considerable work just shifting herself to the lip of the hole. The fat from her belly and thighs sagged down over her hind legs folded under her and her weight was such that she was reduced to crawling full on her feet like a kitten. It was another disappointment, but the tigress readily went back to work stuffing herself with the delicious orange filling; happily the thought that she was almost certainly no longer capable of climbing down the stalk did not occur to her.

After a few hours, it no longer seemed to matter so much about escaping from the mushroom; the sun had disappeared behind a thick bank of clouds long ago. In fact, the act of filling her gullet with the tasty orange stuff began to feel more like the desired goal rather than a means to an end. She ate and ate and her body continued to sport the results of her endless gluttony. So much of her belly rested on the mushroom now that it was impossible to budge, but she just kept on eating all the parts she could reach, skin and all. The fat bunched up around her head in massive rolls and her belly pinned her hind legs in its reckless expansion. Only the loud, yet muffled *Crunch!* managed to pull the tigress's round head up from the orange cavern she had carved below it. She tried to at least sit up, but her forelegs were no longer up to the task of even lifting her vastly widened chest. The fat of her neck drug along the "ground" as she turned her head towards the center of the fantastically large mushroom. There was another crunch as if something soft, yet sturdy were giving way and she had time to see the cracks emerge on the surface of the mushroom, spreading from the hole and other damage she had wrecked on the surface of it, before her own weight caused her half of the cap to fold down. The tigress tried to sink her claws into the mushroom when she felt herself sliding, but the surface was too soft and her own self induced bulk was too great to even slow her velocity. 'It's just a dream! It's just a dream!' she cried to herself, but the feeling of the white skin shredding under her claws, the slip of the skin as it slid the wrong way up the great expanse of her belly, and above all the falling sensation, it was all too real. She managed to grip the edge with her forelegs, and despite multiple tons of tigress hanging off the lip of the mushroom in open space, she stopped for a moment; though her arms still felt like they were going to be pulled out of their sockets. She hung only for a moment, however, before the thin, wafer-like edge broke off, and the tigress fell. She twisted with the instinct to right herself while falling, but her bulky torso had become so inflexible, the only result was a jerky spasm in her fat clotted body before she entered the forest canopy at lethal velocity.

The tigress woke with a gasp. The giant mushroom was gone as well as her muti-ton coat of fat. However, as she stirred, blinking away the gunk from her eyes, and saw the kudzu around her once again littered with even more of white caps of Manna, she became acutely aware that her layers of fat weren't quite as away as she thought. It was in the way she stretched. She could feel that extra softness all over her, minute in comparison to the incredibly vivid dream she had been having, but frighteningly drastic in the course of a single day.

Her belly had certainly swelled during the previous day when she had sucked down water like a camel and then even more when she gorged herself of the genetically altered beef cow. However, a lot of that swelling still hadn't vanished, her tummy was swollen beyond what could be explained away by still digesting beef. That certainty was made fact when she reached with a paw and felt that softness under her lush, dense fur; she had a real belly now, not simply a layer of fat on her abdomen. Despite the fact that her belly had expanded the most over the course of the night, there wasn't a place on her body where she couldn't pinch up extra folds of thick skin. She tried to calm herself, 'It's not a big deal. It's not like I'm huge, I'm only a little bigger than I was when I was getting ready to carry a cub. In fact this is probably a good thing, I'm in a survival situation here and it could be months before another meal like that comes along.' That last bit certainly had a ring of truth, but still... she had only been 18 lbs overweight when she landed on the island, now she was certain that she was at least 60 lbs over what had been considered "ideal" back at the lab (Actually it was 79 lbs, but then there were no scales on the island).

A low growling noise interrupted her disturbing, and more than a little vain she had to admit, thoughts and she started in surprise. There was no one around, not even the lab with his tiresome eager-to-please attitude. The noise came again, and this time she located its source: her own stomach. She snorted in amusement, and then the pangs hit her like a slap in the face. It didn't make sense, she had gorged herself stupid late last night with probably 40 lb of dense, blubbery meat, twice as much as she needed in a day. She shouldn't be hungry at all today and probably the next as well, but there it was, that hollow yearning in her abdominal cavity. She clutched her belly, thick and plump now with only a minor dip under the ribs, and grimaced. Then her eyes fell on the suspiciously innocent looking white disks that looked as though that had been placed on the log around her... perhaps for her. 'But why? And who or what could be capable of such a thing?' For these questions she had no answer, but the pangs stabbed her again and she gave in, lapping up the nearest disk of Manna with her tongue and biting down with a satisfying crunch. Chicken Pot Pie, she had only had that delicacy once in her life when she had been a kitten of manageable size and had had much more contact with humans; she had forgotten the taste. And so, despite a belly still half full with her late night's feast she proceeded to gobble up the crisps that reminded her of safer happier days and provided at least temporary relief for the protests of her newly heightened appetite.

It was impossible not to notice the increasing density of the clumps, the first morning, they had been widely scattered, only a couple dozen. When she had slept with the pack, there had been a thicker crowding of the shrooms and over a much wider area. Now, as she managed to at least tally the number of the devious little circles as she popped them one by one into her eager gullet, there was 48 disks that had settled or grown all around her, almost equal to the amount she had devoured yesterday despite having foraged over half of the perimeter of the camp. She belched lightly and had to admit that it was frighteningly easy to eat a huge quantity of these things. They hardly weighed on her stomach at all despite the number - also considering that each disk was not particularly small either - but at least her pangs had been sated for now.

Looking up to the sky for the first time, she realized that she had slept late. She debated whether or not to head back to the cow carcass, since that would be almost certainly where everyone would be heading now to get their share. But in the end she decided against it, she no longer trusted herself around food. 'I need to pace myself,' she thought as she trekked out to the meadow for the first time in two days, 'I can't go around eating 40 lbs of meat a day, not only is it wasteful, but when it's gone, then what? Live off my fat? A starving hunter is a dead hunter, Mother always said.' Then she decided that thinking about these things was stupid, 'It's not like I can't control myself. I'm not going to just tear into that carcass again on sight like some mindless beast.' And yet as she walked, her thoughts again turned to just how juicy and good that cow's rich blubber had been and her self confidence flagged.

When she got to the meadow, she found that it was indeed almost vacated, but not entirely. She saw first the strange striped dog with the missing tail carving strange diagrams into the trunk of a tree which was already liberally covered with overlapping lines and angles that was utterly incomprehensible for those of a rational - or sane - disposition; still it was a little frightening in a hard to define manner, like the spook stories her so-called cousins would tell her when the cubs had been mixed at the lab for "proper socialization." 'She's just crazy.' She told herself, 'They tampered too much with her brain and finally broke it, that's all, there's nothing more behind it.' Still the explanation sat uneasily with her and she angled towards the only other occupants of the meadow, which were happily two of the three members of her "Science Team."

The German Shepherd was gone, which was a shame since she had meant to ask him about the first sight of the horse on the beach, but the Border Collie was obviously enthused to see her, and the blood hound's sagging face seemed a little less droopy. But what held the tigress's attention, however, was not their expressions but their appearances; or rather how their appearances had changed. It was most noticeable on the skinny collie, or, at least, previously skinny collie. It was obvious that she had put on a great deal of weight. Where before she had had a narrow waist that seemed hardly sufficient for her intestines, now she had a real belly, though not nearly, the tigress had to admit, as large as the one she was now sporting. Where once her ribs had shown clearly, there was only a smooth covering, it was even visible in her face. The bloodhound's changes were less clear due to his loose skin, but his neck hung even more and in fatty clumps rather than folds.

"What's happened to you two?" she blurted without thinking, though in her heart she knew. The tigress was still clinging to the hope that her rapid gain was somehow only related to her gorge of cow the previous night.

"What do y-" started the collie, but then her right ear stood up as she realized what the tigress was talking about. Then she laughed. To the tigress it sounded like it had a nervous edge to it though. "Oh this." She said patting her newfound belly with her forepaw. "I forgot, you weren't here when we talked about it."

"Talked about what?" asked the striped feline urgently. It felt disconcerting that she should be left out of the loop when it was her who had been exploring these last two days.

This time it was the bloodhound - what was his name again? Brody? Bronson? - who spoke, "About how the mushrooms are making everyone fatter."

The tigresses spirits sank, she had been hoping for some logical explanation to explain away her mysterious gains, her mysterious hunger... her mysterious dreams and why she felt so... good when she thought of herself as a truly massive feline. They sank even lower when she recalled having ate over four dozen of the things hardly a half hour ago. She resisted, "How do you know?"

Both the collie and the tiger waited for a response from the bloodhound, but the black and white colored canine quickly filled in the silence, "Well... after you and the hunting party left, Me, Bruce and Einny decided to make a tally of how much of these things people were eating. We didn't know if they were toxic, like I said I thought there might be some sort of psychoactive component of the crisps, or whatnot. And besides we needed some sort of census anyways. You know we didn't even know how many of us are on the island, turns out there's 18 of us domestic dogs and 16 wolves, counting the eight that of course, and three coy-"

"Can we skip to the part where you found out about the Manna please?" interrupted the tigress.

"Oh very well. Even if you do insist on giving a simple mushroom such a dramatic name. Our initial tests gave us the idea that the caps represented a very dense food source. We had no idea until the next morning, but it became obvious that everyone who had eaten any amount of them had a substantial amount of weight over the course of the day and night. I immediately had my suspicions, but none of us wanted to jump to conclusions. It was Einny, though who noticed about the water." She shook her head nostalgically, "That boy can be very clever sometimes."

The tigress asked, "What about the water." But she felt that she already knew, given her strange overwhelming thirst and the fact that her output that day had a serious discrepancy to the amount she took in.

"Well, like I said, Einny noticed how everyone was getting up to drink much more often than the previous days. And While Bruce and I were discussing the fact that the mass of the mushrooms could not possible equal the increase in weight we'd seen in many people, Einny put forward the idea that the extra mass was coming from the extra intake of water. I of course had my reservations. Water you know is a polar substance and doesn't like to mix with non-polar solutions..."

"I don't think our guest wants a chemistry lesson, Betsy" said the bloodhound in his slow, deliberate manner. The tigress said a silent prayer of relief for the reserved canine.

"Oh... well, whatever might be the underlying chemical causes, one thing is certain. People who eat the mushrooms get thirsty, then they drink and they don't... well, put out as much as they take in."

"So it's just water retention?" said the tigress hopefully. Though she was unaware, she had begun lightly pawing at the concave dome of her belly.

Now the collie looked uneasy and she didn't meet the tigress's hope filled eyes, "The jury's still out on that, but from what we can tell... I don't think so. I think... somehow, it's real permanent fat." The tigress sighed deeply. "These things, Manna if you want to call it, are an incredibly dense foodstuff. Think of it like dehydrated food, you get a lot more out of it than it looks before you add water... only if our initial calculations prove true, we still don't have enough data to properly correct for error, one cap might equal the amount of energy contained in almost a pound of animal fat."

That horrified the tigress initially and again all those white caps flashed through her mind, in an incredibly long chain. But she remembered something else as well, "I've eaten a lot of those things and I certainly haven't gained a pound for everyone I've eaten."

The collie smoothly responded as if she were expecting the tigress to say just that, "Yes that threw off our numbers at first as well. In fact, we had come up to a number half that much before we did the census the second day and recorded how much weight people were gaining."

"It was thirty percent more per cap than the previous day." Bruce the bloodhound intoned.

She couldn't stop herself from asking the obvious question, "What does that mean?"

The collie replied, "The working theory we have now is that our body's are still getting used to the foreign lipids. It didn't know what exactly to do with them the first day so it passed out about half, but with successive exposure, our bodies are going to get better and better at processing it, which means more weight gain."

The tigress had had enough, "There has to be something we can do."

The bloodhound spoke, "Well, the obvious thing to do is not eat them." The tigress found it a little frightening that the thought hadn't come to her immediately.

The collie must have mistaken the look on her face for fear of starvation, "Or we can keep working the numbers and figure out how much is healthy to eat. The more time that passes, the better data we will have. In the meantime, fasting seems the best alternative, although most are having some difficulty with the proposal as most everyone has experienced a sharp increase in appetite as well."

"It's probably hormonally induced by eating the mushrooms as well." Said Bruce

There was silence for a moment as the tigress digested the things she had been told. The she said, "Don't you find that just the little bit odd?"

"Find what odd?" asked the slightly chubby collie brightly.

"That there is a mushroom that not only makes you fat but also makes you hungrier so you'd eat more mushrooms?"

"I... I honestly haven't thought about it like that. What do you mean exactly?"

The tigress snorted in hollow amusement that this collie could be so smart and also so blind at the same time; if the bloodhound knew what she was getting at, he didn't let on. "What I mean is, what if the purpose of the Manna is to make us fat?"

The collie guffawed in her squeaky voice, "That's preposterous! Mushrooms don't have a purpose, they just are."

The bloodhound, however, spoke on her heels. He prodded the tigress, "To what end?"

The collie looked sidelong at her compatriot. The tigress shrugged, "I honestly don't know. But I do know that at least some of the caps are not grown where they are, they look like they were placed

where they were. And also," she said with a savage glimmer in her smoldering orange eyes, "I have never once seen the mushrooms on the island where they haven't been surrounding us where we sleep. It's like an invitation to eat them. They arrive when the hunger pangs are the worst."

The bloodhound nodded silently, but the collie refuted. "Oh, you can't be serious... They're mushrooms." She said as if that explained everything.

The tigress growled softly and the fear that had lived within the collie that first day they met revitalized as the collie became aware again that she was a 40 lb dog speaking to a - now - 615 lb tiger. "Like I said, I don't know. I just think it's strange that such a bizarre series of events would happen with no purpose."

"There doesn't always have to be a purpose." Countered the bloodhound now evidently playing devil's advocate.

The tigress huffed a breath and left them. Though she wasn't completely sure when she had said so, she now knew that the worst of the hunger pangs had indeed passed. She felt calmer and more rational than she had when she had started speaking with the two science freaks, less like an... addict. She shuddered at the thought and resolved then and there not to eat anymore of the devious white crisps, not while there was fresh food available. The cow was, in fact, her destination, but not to eat; goodness knew she had had enough already. She went because she knew that that was where both the Beta and the Lab were bound to be and she needed to discuss what they were going to do about the other inhabitants of the island. As she walked, however, a small part in the back of her mind wondered if her resolve would be as strong tomorrow morning. (It was a shame that there were, in fact, no scales on the island. If that had been the case, the tigress might have noticed the 30 extra pound discrepancy between their numbers and the weight she had actually gained)

At the edge of the kudzu forest as the tigress had come to think of it, there was a great crowd of the four legged carnivores. It seemed apparent that the wolves and other wild canines of the enclave had already eaten, as they sat in a veritable pile either sleeping or chatting quietly. By the cow itself, there remained a slight hum of activity where the domestic dogs were still picking at the tender edges of the gaping red hole in the belly of the great bovine. Luckily the tigress had come at the end of the great feast or else she would have had much more trouble in finding the few canines important enough to be on her mind.

Predictably, the Golden Lab was sitting pretty with his aloof mate, however, the tigress inhaled in surprise when she first laid eyes on his yellow-white coat. Whatever effects the Manna was having on the tigress, it was obviously dampened by her 535 lb frame. Unfortunately for the new Alpha (who had actually been keeping an almost even tally with the tigress as far as number of disks consumed went), that wasn't the case for him. Last time the tigress had seen him, the Lab had been chubby at the most, a well fed pet dog if there ever was one; now, he was thoroughly rotund.

He was laying on the soft mat of kudzu covering the ground off to one side - she couldn't blame him, she would have been self conscious if she had ballooned so much in only two days - his head resting on his apathetic mate's own swelling stomach. 'At least she has a decent excuse!' she thought upon seeing him. She knew it was irrational, given what was happening to everyone, what was happening to her, but the sight of him, his belly rounder than his unfairly won spouse with a litter of pups in her tummy, irritated her to the core.

To be perfectly fair, the Lab's belly wasn't exactly round, it was more like a great pink-skinned slab not unlike the prodigious paunch the cow had sported before her un-fortuitous - and delicious - demise. The hollow behind his broadened ribs was shallow at best, continuing almost horizontally to where it disappeared under his plump, turkey-like thighs; his gender, or what remained of it, was totally obscured, pressed back between his thighs by the encroachment of his king-sized gut.

"Holy cow..." breathed the tigress audibly with a hint of a giggle. It still wasn't fair, she had hardly retained any trace of a slender figure herself, but somehow she felt that the lazy canine deserved an exaggerated response.

The Lab either didn't hear or was good at pretending. He lifted his head up off his mate's own distended stomach, his reaction once he saw who it was who had come calling wasn't feigned at least. The Golden Lab immediately became more alert and he struggled to his feet in a series of strained movements that would have been a single smooth action for any other canine here. 'Though not, perhaps for much longer...' thought the large cat with a small shudder.

"Where are your betas?" she prompted before he could greet her.

The lab tossed his head over towards the small hill the cow formed through the shadows of the surrounding trees. "Somewhere over there, sleeping it off. Bastards all ate before me."

The tigress was a little surprise at how seriously the soft, now obese, Labrador had taken his faux position as "Alpha" to heart. But it didn't matter. "That's completely unfair. Of course they should have let you get first picks. Everyone can see you're withering away."

The Lab eyed her sternly, which surprised the 615 lb feline even more, but decided not to make any reciprocating comments. Instead he just sighed, "Well... that is obvious and I'm not the only one. Something strange is going on on this island."

"I'm glad you pointed that out. I might never have figured it out otherwise." Said the tigress scathingly.

The lab sat down on his hindquarters, the tigress noting how painfully obvious it was that the lab's burgeoning gut made contact with the dark soil under him. "What is it that you wanted to talk to them about?" he asked and then added quickly, "If you can get them all gone today, I could make some real progress here."

The tigress almost sneered in disgust. It had become obvious that the lab wasn't a bumbling idiot, but whatever brain he had seemed only capable of wheedling and scheming in the most cowardly sort of way. Only in the vacuum of any real power could he manage to maintain control of those left behind. "What I have to say concerns all of us." Said the tigress sternly. "Go get your Betas and meet me by my tree, you know which one. And be quick about it!" she snapped.

The Lab's eyes lit up and he waddled away as fast as he could manage. The tiger grinned: it was good to get him nice and scared again.

It did only take a little while before the three wolves arrived one by one under the leaning tree on which she reclined lazily, regally. After the lab had shown up trailing the third and final wolf, and panting not just a little heavily for the errands and short hike, the tigress let them stew in silence for a full minute before speaking.

"As at least one of you knows, there are other survivors on the island," she paused for effect, "and not all of them are 2000 pound blobs of meat on hooves." She looked down to the large timber wolf who had accompanied her to the other side of the island and back. "You know about the rhino," there were looks of surprise from the other two wolves and outright fear from the plump Lab, "But when it chased me away, I found something else. Something probably more important in the long run than the rhino..."

She first had the larger Beta tell his side of the story. It turned out that the sleeping rhino had somehow passed through the first line of the staggered and thinly spread party. A yearling stumbled onto him, the tigress struggled not to picture the horrific flattened corpse she had passed that day, and stupidly started barking for the rest of the pack. "As if all of us together could take a 3000 pound pissed off rhino." He added regretfully. The bull had then charged and the rest was known better to the tigress than to any other. She recounted her own story, leading up to the bamboo grove and then her decision to "continue exploring" after she had recovered.

"...And that's when I heard them through the forest, a whole herd of horses and mules and such."

A fiery glow came into the timber wolf's eyes and a smaller Beta licked his chops.

She went on to describe their little hidden enclave, its defensive position and the number that she saw; she conveniently edited out the part where she was chased away.

The Lab's face sunk at the description, "But how will we ever get them if we can't approach from any direction except the shore?"

The other three all rolled their eyes. The one Beta who had actually left the eastern side of the island echoed the tigress's own thoughts on the matter, "They have to leave sometime to forage. Now that we know where they rest every night, it shouldn't be too hard to hunt them in the jungle."

"Not that it matters now." Piped up the smallest of the three who had fought for the title of Alpha, "that cow we had will last us a month. And who know... there might be more out there, getting fat on Manna."

"I seriously doubt that cow will last us a month," said the tigress distantly. Then she trained her eyes down on the four canines seated below her - 'Just like good doggies.'¬ - and said, "Hell," looking now directly at the Lab, "With him around it might not last the week."

The other three immediately broke into stumbling laughter, despite the fact that not a one of them was what might have been called "trim" any longer, and the Lab hid his face instinctually. He tried to hunch a little smaller - rather unsuccessfully. One just can't hide a gut that big - and looked pleadingly up at the tigress where she was seated on her throne above them. 'How pathetic' she thought, but decided postpone the second jab she had been preparing. So instead she pointed at the smallest Beta, "You. Do you have a name?"

The smaller grey wolf swallowed at being singled out from the little group. He seemed as a child again in the presence of the tigress looming above in the play of shadow and light of the canopy behind her, hardly one who could have rallied others to him in a bid for the sacred position of Alpha. "No. My number is Sigma-39"

"What do you think the chances of there being more cattle on the island?" asked the tigress; the Beta had already told her the night before that the cow they had herded up the beach was simply stumbled upon, stray in the jungle..

Sigma-39 simply shrugged, but then took a more respectful posture under the glowering eyes of the very large cat looming over him. "Me and my guys were poking around south of here yesterday and we saw some signs." The tigress could very well imagine what sort of signs, "Definitely more than one, but nothing fresh. They could have landed there the first day and be on the other side of the island by now."

The medium wolf, whose coat was almost entirely white save for speckled markings around his eyes and his grey socks, said, "Have you looked at these things? I'm surprised Tau-64 here got that tub to run so far before it broke its own neck."

"They all don't have to be that way," the tigress pointed out and realized that she'd been spending too much time discussing with her "Science Team." She did not want a two way stream of discussion here, not with the effective ruling body of every major predator on the island gathered.

The white wolf looked down and pawed at the ground, "I supposed not." He muttered

Sigma-39 spoke again, "I still don't see why that matters. We don't need to do anything until we run out of cow. Be that a month... or... heh... a week." He couldn't suppress a chuckle and a humorous look at the single bloated domestic dog present.

The tigress flashed her teeth in a deadly snarl that immediately killed all humor in the vicinity, "That's where you're wrong. We can't let anyone think they are safe on the island. We need to let them know that this is our island." She didn't speak loudly, but her words contained all the deadly assurance of a 615 lb cat behind it.

Despite that, however, a voice did rise to meet her when she had been expecting awed silence. "Do you think that's wise? Wouldn't it be better to keep quiet and strike them unawares when we need to?"

It was the voice of the Beta who had gone with her deep into the island and the one who had brought back the cow; with not a little of her own help, she reminded herself. She was stunned at first, and more than a little fearful that her lack of experience had finally shown itself. But one thing was certain, she could not show weakness, not here... and of course she would be free to change her "policy" later if she so chose. "Did I ask for a second opinion?" she growled fiercely and to her delight even the big Beta shied away under her wrath. 'That is a good idea though.' She thought to herself, 'Good thing he mentioned it. Better to strike from the shadows where they think they're safe than go riling them all up... That is if I can get these mutts to stop stuffing themselves with the damn Manna.'

She continued with that train of thought. "Good. But before we act on that, you all have something very important to do."

Now all four of them were paying close attention, the lab literally quivering at his hindquarters. "Nobody's to eat the Manna anymore. We all know what it's doing to us... him especially." She couldn't stop herself from pointing directly down to the wilting Labrador as the others snickered quietly. "No more mushrooms. We're going on an all meat diet."

The three Betas barked in agreement, but the Lab was too busy wallowing in his own self pity to notice.

"I want a fit fighting force!" the tigress stood now on her perch her voice rising, "Those damn equines aren't going to know what hit them!"

More barking followed and the smaller wolf even howled. The Lab, as ever the coward, edged slightly away from all the noise. The tigress slumped back down in the opposite direction, her back to the canines. They sat, looking confused as she knew they would and a few moments later she said, "You all can go now." Only after she had heard them all disappear - 'without a mutter or trace of backtalk' she thought smugly - did she allow herself a nice long purr.

The rest of the day was spent in celebration for the bountiful food source that had been driven practically into the camp and in a haze of sloth and inactivity. The three scientists continued their restless hypothetical chatter, counting their numbers and interviewing others for their census data. The tigress didn't know of how much more use they would be, even they admitted they were pressed against their limits without any access to scientific equipment of any sort. Still, they were amusing to watch them in their self-imposed and self-important missions as they flitted to and fro within the camp, always talking or drawing diagrams into the sand or carving them into slips of bark.

Everyone else had the right idea, as the tigress lounged in the shade at the edge of the forest... well almost everyone else. There was one other who was almost as busy as the science geeks. That strange, mismatched tailless freak of a dog. She would spend hours staring into space, but yet she never seemed to be at rest. She, with the ridiculous name of "Buttercup," also continued drawing her arcane diagrams into the trunks of nearby palms until the bases of her claws bled in which case one or more of her caretakers would come and drag her away unresisting and place her again in the sand. The tigress didn't know why her thoughts kept flying to this strange dog. 'She's just a genetic defect and there's nothing more to it than that.' And yet the tigress, the mighty hunter was eventually drawn to examine the drawings on the trees for herself.

It was just a bunch of crisscrossing lines and circles on a field of yet more vertical lines. The diagram went all around the trunk of every tree that was carved, all with patterns drawn over the evenly spaced vertical lines. 'Nonsense drawn by a lunatic and nothing more.' Dismissed the tigress. She turned to only to find the striped canine sitting in front of her with that blank stare, one eye green, the other blue.

She didn't know where the shiver of fear that crept up her spine came from and was ashamed that she felt it at all. It was as if this tiny mutt, hardly any larger than coyote, exuded some sort of twisted aura, it felt unnatural being around her. The tigress didn't say anything, instead moving away back across the meadow as fast as was appropriate.

Before she had passed, however, Buttercup spoke for the first time that the tigress knew, "They are what it sees."

The tigress just wanted to take off into the safe, normal gloom of the kudzu forest, but her curiosity overcame her, "What are what who sees?" she asked.

The patchwork canine continued to stare off into space. The tigress noted, while waiting for a response that this dog alone hadn't accumulated additional weight since landing on the island. When the little dog didn't answer, the tigress continued her way, but the instant she moved, Buttercup spoke again, "The One who is Many."

"Who the devil are you talking about?" pressured the tigress, turning to the seated dog still staring in the same direction she was when the tigress first saw her.

There was no reply.

She clenched her paws and felt like swiping the freak with her claws and putting her out of her misery; the thought was actually terribly attractive, no more annoyance at herself for being fascinated by her... and no more fear either. She actually raised her paw, but decided against it at the last moment when she remembered that she was in plain sight of everyone on the meadow. A part of her argued that they should know who's in charge, but it wasn't the dominant part. Something about delivering death onto an imbecile dog, even one as annoying as this one, rubbed her fur the wrong way.

She was about to go when Buttercup spoke for the final time. She said simply, "He will not make you happy."

The tigress snarled, strangely angry for some reason although she hadn't even understood what she was talking about. The words flew out of her mouth, "You don't know anything! You freak!" The tigress slashed out with a paw. It hit the sand right below the striped dog and kicked up a wave that all but bowled the much smaller canine over. Buttercup simply stood up, shook from head to toe and walked calmly a few feet away and sat down again on some beach grass at the base of a palm. The tigress walked stiffly away, glowering, partly because of what the strange dog had said, but also because a part of her said that she had been aiming for her body when she had suddenly encountered sand instead.

That night she dreamed again...

It was so vivid, the tigress did not, at first recognize that she was dreaming. She was in the kudzu forest, and it was dark. Nothing smelled of meat and there were no giant mushrooms. Thinking that she had just woken during the night, the tigress stretched and turned over on her wooden perch with the intention of going back to sleep. As she moved, however, she could not help but recognize the one element which had so far tied all her dreams together so far.

It was as she moved that the tigress became aware of her startling obesity. She wasn't quite as fat as at the end of her previous dreams, but that wasn't saying much. She could at least move... with some effort. Her weight had hindered her roll, so she lurched back onto her belly, which she could feel flowing out to sit at the edges of the wide tree trunk on either side of her. She partially lifted her forequarters and stopped at the extremely real feeling of her own weight. Despite not being so large as in her previous dreams, the physical sensation of the weight clinging to her had never been so clear, or so frightening. Her heart yammered in her chest, slightly irregular and at a rate more appropriate for running than for receiving a mild shock. The thought of moving from her perch atop the thick, and - thankfully - extremely stable tree trunk made her grimace.

And yet nothing happened. No bizarre scenario came into being as she sat there in the dark, held almost prisoner by her own body. After over an hour in the dark, deathly still forest with no sounds but the swaying of the canopy in the light, ever-present wind from the beach, the tigress began to fear that she might not be able to wake up. It was that fear that motivated her enough to move... it was still a massive effort.

As she pushed with her forelegs against the stubborn weight of her torso, she could feel her flesh rippling around her, drooping from where it had been spread out over the slanted tree trunk and it took most of her strength just to lift herself into a sitting position. Her wide torso caused fat to bunch under her forelegs while at the same time bowing out the curve of her back and spilling her gut across the floor. She couldn't even manage a normal sitting posture, instead slouching at an angle with her left thigh on the ground and her right leg stretched out. She was also aware of the way her belly pressed against the backs of her forelegs, strongest against the knees, but draping down all the way to her ankles. She didn't like the way her heart thudded in her chest and she knew instinctually that she was so fat she was endangering her health. 'Now for the hard part.' The thought grimly as she started to gather her strength for the hindquarters.

She had trouble just finding a position for her legs that would work. She had never given much thought to just getting up before and the first time she just tried pushing with her legs, she nearly flopped over the edge of the tree; ironically, her weight stabilized her and prevented that particular fate. In the end, she had to turn her hips around, placing her hind paws directly under her still earthbound belly and lift up. It wasn't as hard as she thought, but just standing there, panting lightly, her own weight was an uncomfortable burden for her paws and her thoughts began to turn to finding a new resting place within the immediate vicinity.

It was impossible to forget just how large she was even after she had carefully turned herself around on the tree trunk, the wood creaking ominously with every step, and set her paws to the leafy green turf. For one thing, her belly dropped down well below her knees, below even her digitigrades ankles at its lowest point and ever were her hind legs bumping into its soft yielding flesh as she swung them forward. Its mass was irresistible and had a huge impact on the way she moved; no more running or sprinting for this cat, it was all the tigress could manage to keep up a slow waddle, almost her entire torso rocking left to right, left to right, and she took her cautious, exploratory steps. It got easier, as she learned how to work with her own massive weight instead of against it, but already she was getting a cramp in her thighs and had to settle on the ground once more.

As she sat and groaned softly, unable to even kneed her aching, over burdened muscles, she had never felt so constrained and helpless in her life. And still there was nothing to be found in the dark, almost still forest; granted, she hadn't exactly gone very far. However, as she sat there, horribly aware of everything around her, wishing frantically to wake up and at the same time grieving for her old relatively trim body, she heard something. It was a subtle noise, a mere rustle in the leaves, but in the unnatural silence of the forest, it was as obvious as the clang of cymbals. She lifted her head in the direction of it, feeling gruesomely as blubbery rolls of fat formed behind her head and round ears.

When her hunter's eyes detected movement in the brush, the tigress clamored heavily to her feet - first walking up her forequarters then turning her hips inwards, squeezing her feet under her belly before the final difficult push - ever so slowly; she was beyond any sort of prey she couldn't sit on and vulnerable to anything with teeth that could outmaneuver her. But nothing flew out of the darkness towards her, in fact her eyes were drawn to the something in the bushes and ferns while it was still a distance away moving towards her; it practically shone in the dark under the forest.

Like a ghost, he materialized before her, only walking, but covering the distance between them in a remarkably short amount of time. His coat was like pure moonlight between the liquid velvet - dark as the mouth of the earth - of his many stripes. His smell was pungent, russet and undeniably masculine, it washed over her in waves; his paws were utterly silent, the only noise from the gentle rasping of the leaves as they fondled his sleek, muscular form as he passed. Despite his physical perfection, it was his eyes that enthralled her, a light crystal blue like timeless glacial ice; they penetrated as if into her very soul. Emotions she didn't even know were inside of her as a result of her isolation from the male of the species rose vehemently within her, such that she felt like she was drowning; no more all-powerful huntress was she, now just a kitten in his presence.

And then the embarrassment struck her like spear aimed at her heart. 'How loathsome and disgusting he must find me! The fattened blob that I am. No! No! Go away!' she screamed within, as she stood paralyzed while he approached swiftly. Somehow the possibility that she might fall and break her neck from her own colossal weight seemed a better alternative to being scoffed at by this rare and exotic avatar of male perfection.

When he reached her, a grin spread across his broad snout. The tigress's knees trembled under her with a real possibility of her legs giving out at any moment. 'Oh God, if he laughs, that will be the end of me.' She thought wanting to shrink out of sight, to vanish entirely; but it was too late for that.

Instead of laughter, the tiger drew a deep breath, tasting her scent with both nose and tongue. He cocked his head and his piercing stare suddenly grew softer and he sighed fondly. "What visions are taking me this night, that I should find a goddess in this crypt of a forest."

The tigress's rump fell to the ground limply and she clenched her teeth not only at the sheer loudness of the impact, but also at the audible slap of flesh against flesh and the resulting wave that followed, rippling up her body through her thick jowls and down again to the base of her tail. That time, the white tiger did chuckle, but only in affectionate amusement. The tigress was still speechless.

The tiger swept closer still when she had stopped wobbling, his scent making the tigress's head giddy. He placed a snow white paw on her thick, lumpy shoulder, "You are so beautiful, this must be a dream."

Despite how his strong scent was affecting her, the tigress was still not beyond all reason. She whispered, "You lie, but you are a very nice dream yourself." She leaned a little closer towards him, her head following the black striped specter as he walked around her to take in the full view; it was humiliating, true, but what could she do to stop him? (And part of her didn't want him to stop either).

"Nothing of the sort!" he looked momentarily offended at the accusation, but continued his perusal of her immense form; she really was a cow sitting next to his shining perfection, three, maybe even four times his weight, and a half foot shorter at the shoulder as the final nail in the coffin. "I could not imagine a more divine creature than you, My Dear." He finished his round by sitting closely in front of her, her eyes about at the level of his neck due to her slouching. His marvelous blue eyes looked down at her and he sighed once more, "That is why you must be a dream."

The tigress found his strange insistence more than a little disconcerting. Only the unnatural stillness of the forest reminded her that she was not awake; the feel of the soil between her paws, her own weight dragging at her, her own heart still beating too quickly... and his breath on her face. It was all too real, all too easy to forget it was pure fantasy. But as long as she remembered, she didn't see the harm in playing along, the initial shock of him was fading - a little - and her senses were returning. "Well, I have to admit..." said the tigress coyly now that she recognized the obvious desire in her guest's fictitious eyes, "I would doubt my existence too if I saw me. How could a tiger ever become such a fat blob?" She shook her neck for effect, its many folds wiggling as the heavy clotted fat within shook to and fro.

The male tiger seemed just as dazzled by her as she was by him. His breath caught in his throat - not that he really needed to breathe since he wasn't real, the tigress reminded herself - and then he licked his chops. His eyes refocused a moment later and he admitted, "I don't know to be honest, although..." he reached out and the tigress managed not to flinch. He tickled the flabbiest part under her protruding pigeon chest, "I imagine that it involved lots and lots of food."

The tigress giggled lightly despite herself, she felt like she was barely a year old again. She was about to refuse him and explain that she just woke up this big, but he asked abruptly, "Are you hungry?"

She opened her mouth, a sarcastic comment on the tip of her tongue, but she was silenced by the thunderous roar produced by her own cavernous innards. Her paws flew to her tummy - which she could reach easily since it bulged more than a little out from under her chest where she sat - and she grimaced as the hunger pangs ripped through her insides. 'That was just a little too well timed' she thought grimly, but that didn't stop the pain and terrible hunger that rose within her.

This time he really did laugh, full throated, but there was only merriment in his eyes, not ridicule. "I'll take that for a yes. Come, I'll show you what I caught in the jungle." But then he eyed her body warily, "That is if you feel up to it. I can bring it here if..."

She didn't let him finish, "I can walk, thank you very much." She said, perhaps a bit too harshly, she was still used to being the one in control of the situation. To ameliorate, she added, "Though I can't blame you for asking, especially the way I look."

As she began getting laboriously to her feet, her soft, squishy bulk still just as hard to shift as ever, the male tiger looked like he wanted to say something, but decided to keep his mouth closed.

"Ugh... Well, I suppose this is the part where you take me to some enormous feast and I gorge myself." She said sarcastically once she had squared her stance.

He began to trek off into the forest at an exaggeratedly slow pace, only speeding up once the tigress overtook him, bumping him with her heavy flank on purpose as she passed - though he seemed to enjoy the less than gentle push even as he corrected his stride and came forward to walk at her side. "I don't know about any feast." He said cheerfully as he walked a safe distance away from her pendulous swinging gut as she waddled next to him. "I just happened upon a little snack, though..." and he looked slyly at her, "You eating a feast would definitely be something I'd like to see."

"Look, I'm not..." she began, slowing just a little, her thighs were starting to burn again. But she couldn't complete denying who he thought she was, not when he was so obviously into the gluttonous, morbidly obese tigress that he saw in front of him. It made no sense to desire his affection, he wasn't even real, but it was how she felt.

"Not what?" he asked when she didn't reply, "Not hungry?" he frowned when she didn't answer and looked away. He looked at the ground, "If you were a proper fantasy, I would have found a whole cow instead of one piddling coyote." The tigress's fat clogged heart lurched unpleasantly as he said the word. 'It can't be.' She thought, but he was already continuing. "To think that I have to resort to this," and he gestured hurtfully towards her, both of them now stopped moving, "Imagining a perfect mate since I'm doomed to die alone on this godless rock of an island. I would have rather drowned when the ship sank!"

And with that, he leapt off into the forest, already out of sight before the tigress could even get her sloppy waddling into full gear. A dozen ideas raced through her mind, 'Was he on the ship? Could it be possible that he's here? Could it be that he's real?!' "Wait!" she called and trundled after him. She tried to break into a run, but her hind legs just kept bumping into the soft, yet firm wall of her belly and she became out of breath almost as soon as she started. She tripped and fell in her graceless careen. She landed right on her face, her body's own inertia still pushing her forward, grinding her chin into the dirt. She cried out, but then he was sitting before her, looking shocked.

He looked momentarily cheered to see her, but thrust his head away. "No, I don't need fantasies to soothe me. Leave me alone."

The words were there on her lips, I'm real! You're not alone. But then she saw what he was standing over. The little fuzzy body was mangled and still bleeding. It looked like he had been trampled and broken in over a dozen places, but he was still alive, it was Coyote. The tigress was rendered speechless and she lay where she had fallen, immobile as if she had another ton on her back as the pristine white tiger reached and picked up Coyote's limp body in his mouth, none to gently either. The prodding teeth seemed to arouse Coyote for the last time, he whispered breathlessly, "Help me..." before the tiger's jaws snapped tight.

This time, the tigress woke not with a gasp, but a full throated yowl; luckily for her, there was no one around to hear it. Her head felt like it had been in a vice all night long, but conversely, her body felt lithe and light in the absence of thousands of pounds of fat. It was such a change from what she had indeed gotten used to during the night that at first she didn't even notice the true amount of excess she had developed while she had slept; and even then she didn't really care. Like in the dream, her mind was abuzz with questions. What was real and what wasn't? It was impossible to tell.

She sat on the leaning tree trunk as the sun rose, her dream having woken her early for once, tossing her head this way and that as she argued and fought with herself; the dense scattering of Manna, like winter's first snow on the ground, going entirely ignored. She kept trying to convince herself that it was only a dream, she knew that it was a dream, she had woken up here, where she had gone to sleep hadn't she? And she was the same size she was yesterday - well perhaps not quite the same size - wasn't she? And yet a part of her, a strong part, felt that it was real nonetheless.

'He knew about the boat.' That part contended, 'He was convinced that I was the dream.' But above all was the sheer realness of it all. In fact, she continued to slouch with her left thigh flat on the ground as if to accommodate a belly that she didn't have - well, not one that devoured all the space between her legs and more anyways - for several minutes. At least her heart seemed to catch up where her behavior was still lagging, her heart rate had slowed and quieted down to its normal level.

She sat shaking her head, trying to convince herself that it wasn't real and that she shouldn't be concerned with it, but continually she failed; not because there were flaws in her rational, level-headed arguments, but because, inside, she wanted to believe. To believe that there was something more on this island than just scrounging out an existence until she was too old to catch her food anymore, that there might be someone here she could associate with on an equal footing. It was a fool's hope. It took the echoing thunder of her midsection to wake her up from her cloud of contradictory emotions and on its heels were pangs so bad she felt faint and made her mouth water.

It was only then that she noticed the Manna that seemed to have drifted down like snow during the night all around her. Wide-eyed she cleaned her roost of the white disks before she recalled the promise she had made herself the previous day. With the disks spread more thickly every day, she had consumed the better part of two dozen just from her perch alone, and that was hardly a fifth of the total amount that had arrived during the night. Shame swept over her, but she still had to swallow to keep from drooling.

The tigress still remembered everything that she had learned about the baneful and impossibly tempting white disks and she could tell that she had gained even more weight during the night; she wasn't just overweight now, she was bordering on obese. But still, everything, even her own desires were as nothing to the temptation, the compulsion to devour these things. She set out, grazing on the scattered disks like nothing so much as a simple minded cow, hardly tasting them and yet each mouthful was like a spray of water on the hot inferno of desire that roared within her. And yet... that wasn't all of it either. The dream she had had still hovered around her like a mist. That tiger had liked her fat - 'No, beyond fat, enormous, huge, gargantuan.' - and the Manna seemed to be doing exactly that. That was only a small factor - the tigress certainly wouldn't have sacrificed her health, her speed, her stamina, pretty much her whole life for anyone, even a perfect masculine partner - but it was there beside the strength of the need for Manna, and she just didn't have the strength to resist.

All told, there was just under 100 disks on and around the tree that morning and the tigress had weighed in at 660 lbs on an empty stomach, that was 125 lbs more than her previous "goal" weight of 535 lbs. She, of course didn't know the exact numbers, but she could guess that she had gained over 100 lbs from the feel of herself, and the worst part was that, after she had finished scrounging around the kudzu for crumbs like a drug addict, she knew the disparity would be even greater tomorrow. Already her throat felt dry and raw, demanding the water that would constitute the pounds she would develop during the coming night... and that she would have to wear for the rest of her life if things continued as they have. She skirted the edges of the meadow, sticking to the shadows as she angled her way to the deep pools of water to slack her thirst. She didn't want to talk to anyone in her foul mood and she walked, full of anger at the world, but more anger at herself.

Though this was also a fact that the tigress was blissfully unaware, at 660 lbs, the tigress would have been the very fattest large cat of the collection the facility in New Zealand had if she were still living there. Her belly was no longer just a concave swell of her abdomen, it was more of an appendage in its own right and as she walked, it jiggled and shook in a way that constantly reminded her of her absurdly obese dream-form. She could no longer feel her ribs either and the profile of her body had widened distinctly; although it was still nothing compared to what she had to deal with all the night long. In fact, she still maintained the sensation of being curiously light on her feet as she circumnavigated the meadow on her way to ease the burning at the back of her throat.

Before she knew what exactly she was doing, she was running and then sprinting through the jungle, just for the feel of it. Her chest was filled with the warm, moist air of the jungle and even the fact that her skin rocked and jiggled around her with every collision and push from the turf under her didn't bother her. It felt good to be free in this way, more like that initial euphoria which had infected her that first day she had awoken and found herself washed ashore. She wondered how much longer she could enjoy it if things didn't change... if she wasn't strong enough to make things change. She emerged from the bushes and her whiskers immediately grew beads of water from the mist that suffused the area near the tall waterfall. Leaping to the water, she stuck her head in and drank until she thought she would explode.

An indeterminate amount of time later, she emerged gasping for breath, dripping water from every follicle of her proud head. She gasped for breath, belly aching at the gallons she had just pumped into it, and settled onto the moist green rocks. She panted lightly and struggled not to vomit, yet another punishment for not being able to control herself. Her idea of the island as a world without restraint governed only by instinct seemed to be crashing around her. She stared into the reflection of the rippling water, looking at her slightly thickened jowls, the wider neck and she wondered just who exactly she was. Something silvery distorted her face in the water and the tigress threw her paws forward with lightning velocity before she even knew what she was doing. Even with her reflexes, her action produced nothing; she fell headfirst into the pool.

The icy water sent a shock through her body as she watched the shiny little fish dart away into the inky abyss at the bottom of the pool. The tigress paddled to the surface and threw her soaked body over the edge; her belly hurt from where she lay on it so she flipped onto her back, her paws dangling in the air while the thick padding on her back conformed to the shape of the rock under her. 'One misadventure after another, it seems.' The tigress thought with a small chuckle. That chuckle grew into a laugh and then a guffaw. She didn't know why she was laughing, not when things seemed so wrong on this island, proven to have birds and now fish but no native mammals of any sort, but laugh she did, long and hard. Her voice vied with the waterfall for volume and filled the air around the never-still pools. She laughed at the very island itself.