The sounds of a sun-sick Sunday morning washed into my ears at around eight, when the skies outside were windless, and the shrieks of seabirds rang out from all around. Sunlight seeped through the shutters, coating my friend Cormac's dusty bedroom floor, where Keith and I had set up our air mattresses to crash. The light forced my bleary eyes open and I sat up to soothe my splitting headache in the churn of the distant surf. The online swell report was open on the kitchen bench, haunted and encircled by a half–drunk array of green liquor bottles. I picked it up from between the shrapnel and flashed the others a glance, listening to them ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the day’s promising forecast.
We fastened the zips of our damp wetsuits and began a beach–bound walk with our surfboards swinging at our sides. Sand crept between my toes as we inched up the spotless dunes that bordered Lockheart beach; our gorgeous, sprawling oasis of untapped nature. At the crest, I noticed that Cormac had frozen abruptly and was now staring upwards in confusion.
‘What're all those birds doing?’ he asked the sky.
Three sea eagles swirled in a circle far above him. These weren't rare birds by any measure, but it was strange to see them this close to shore. I'd often spot them surveying the waters just past the reef break and diving for fish, but today their beady eyes had found something else to perouse; a large wooden crate, washed ashore.
‘Am I still drunk?’ I laughed, rubbing at my eyes in disbelief.
We planted our surfboards in the wet sand and trudged closer. It was presumably some sort of shipping container, but on an isolated beach like Lockhart, it may as well have been an alien spacecraft. With each churning surge of foam, the sides creaked and groaned, and in the silence between sets I could hear the porous wood splinter faintly beneath the weight of the sea.
‘Let’s open it up!’ Keith suggested, grinning deviously and gesturing to a dotted trail of flat skimming stones that were swept ashore.
We fetched the stones in handfuls, and over the course of the next hour, took turns hammering them into a crack in the wood. Between turns, I gazed longingly towards the horizon, where the waves seemed to grow bigger and smoother by the second. My itch of impatience quickly spread to Cormac.
‘Bit of an ordeal, isn’t it Oscar?’ he panted with his hands on his knees. ‘What’s inside better be fucken’ worth it.’
Keith, determined to finish the job, finally pried the beam from its place with a thick crunch. The three of us broke into a backpedal as the loose wall slapped against the rising tide, and a cloud of sawdust billowed from the opening.
‘Not quite the treasure I was hopin’ for,’ Cormac spluttered, squinting his watery eyes into each murky corner of the container. ‘The thing’s nearly bloody empty.’
Nearly, but I spotted a cage at the back, and a mass of moving fur deep within. I pinched my nostrils shut from the lingering dust and cautiously shuffled inside. As I approached, I was greeted with the gentle, purring slumber of five grey kittens, none larger than my palm. The kittens were adorable, but with no mother, food or water in sight, and the crate stifling with heat, my face burned with frustration. With sweat trailing down my hairline and black spots emerging at the corners of my eyes, I retreated and battled for air.
‘No loot to be seen,’ I reported, shooting Cormac a firm grimace. ‘Just a bunch of kittens.’
‘That’s loot to me, you heartless grub! Let me pet them!’ Keith exclaimed, pushing himself past me.
‘All yours, Keithy.’ Cormac sighed in defeat.
‘As weird as all this is, I’m cooking alive in my wettie. I’m heading out to the reef.’
‘Same here. We haven’t had waves like this in weeks, Keith. Besides, we’ve got the beach to ourselves, as always. Those furballs aren’t going anywhere.’ I said.
‘I’ll meet you out there.’ Keith replied, unfazed.
Cormac and I coasted out through the salty chill, to where a large pointed rock and a bed of submerged seaweed would mark our offshore takeoff point. Water lapped at the nose of my board as I positioned myself away from the wave's towering peak. I swivelled to watch it inch up against the rear end of my fins, and then I was off, weaving left and right to avoid Cormac's hot pursuit as the two of us coursed along the wave’s glassy face. The water deepened once again, our boards slid to a halt and we cut back around to rinse and repeat, our faces teeming with fiery adrenaline. Keith joined us half an hour later, with a sheepish expression, eyes turned downwards to the wax coating on his board.
‘I set them free.’ he blurted through a mouthful of seawater.
‘You dropkick. Why would you do that?’ I turned to face him. Stupid Keith..
‘They'd cook alive in there eventually,’ he choked. ‘Plus there's no food or nothing. I figured they'd have a better chance of survival out here than in there.’
‘They'll be eagle food by the time the next set rolls through, you drongo.’ Cormac sneered at him.
Keith's face drained to a pallid white as he turned to face the distant birds. From where I was looking, they looked to have assembled into a distant halo far above his head, as though rewarding him for the bountiful feast he’d just served them up on a silver platter.
‘They don’t eat cats… Do they?’
‘They eat anything, man. Survival of the fittest.’ Cormac replied, rolling his eyes.‘Come on, let's get you a wave. No point worrying about it now. It's none of our business.’
We surfed up until noon. By that time, the sun had reached its highest point and even the cool release of the water failed to shield us from the heat. As we trudged back up the sandswept path to civilisation, Keith glanced anxiously around for the kittens, scouring the bottoms of every shrub and bush and listening for lingering ‘meows’. He came up empty handed.
The sea eagles, however, failed to elude us. We found their remains at the foot of the dunes. The sand was shredded with claw marks and garnished in feathers. The smell of blood in the air was palpable, and with pits in our stomachs, we traced the paw prints that encircled our pacing feet until they spread out and slunk into the undergrowth.
‘Created a bit of a monster here, didn't you Keithy?’ I teased him nervously.
The next day, a group of council workers in a busted pickup truck came to retrieve the crate, but this did not erase the kittens from our minds, nor their presence from the beach. As time passed, the eagles and waterbirds grew fewer and further between. With their ravenous chatter slowly vanishing from the skies, our boards sank, with our stomachs, into a near-silent sea.
Each day, it got worse. More trampled, scratched-up paths of destruction to be found, and more blood speckling out across the sand-dunes. Despite all this, the cats themselves continued to slip through our fingers. We treated their presence like a cryptid of sorts, and the search like our own hunt for ‘Bigfoot’. This little fantasy kept us going without falling into panic – until the hottest day of summer came around. That particular day, Cormac emerged from the bush trail looking wired and alert – completely stripped of his usual composure. Keith, by comparison, was as white as a ghost, repeatedly murmuring ‘their appetite’s grown’.
‘We found a wallaby first,’ Cormac solemnly explained ‘...What was left of it, at least. But that wasn’t all.’
‘There was someone’s dog, man. Blood fucking everywhere.’ Keith’s voice cracked as he showed me his red–tainted palms. ‘It was collared and everything. See for yourself.’
His glassy eyes told me I shouldn’t have…
But I went and looked.
The poor animal was strewn across the path. It was an explosion of flesh. Blood soaking the sand.
We stopped looking after that, and at night I ignored the beastly roars from the beach.
But the topic of the kittens arose again out of restlessness and boredom during a disappointing flat spell two weeks later.
‘What should we call it?’ I asked the others as we floated alongside our boards. ‘A cryptid this vicious needs a name, surely.’
‘The Pussy Patrol,’ Keith replied all–too–predictably, his teeth plastered into a shit eating grin. I rolled my eyes but admittedly, it was nice to see his spirits lifted. Cormac however, gave Keith’s suggestion some undeserved thought.
‘Might not really be a patrol anymore, if only a couple survived,’ he considered. ‘They could have multiplied, too. Could be a whole army by now.’
With this uncertainty in mind, we named the beast ‘Trace’, and over the years, I saw a glimpse of the creature only once more. I had been alone, coasting into shore on my last wave of the day. Between the rolling reflections of seaspray, I had spied for a second, a flash of sunlit grey…
And then nothing more.
Yet as I walked cautiously up the beach, panting from exhaustion and questioning my sanity, the salt on my skin began to itch and prickle-up. The deafening cicada-noise stopped. Somewhere, deep in the bush, the scrub, the reeds, or the dunes; I felt watched by a million eyes.
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