My words.

This had been a hard winter, with few prey to feed the twelve- hundred-pound, sixteen-foot-long mutant leopards stomach. At last, it thought, at last I will eat. And it dug its six-toed, double-clawed feet into the snow and took off along the footprint path, determined to Micah Pate end its desperate hunger. In a vayama

coming over a small hill, it saw the prey. Not big, not a whole stomachful, but big enough. Its huge jaw, like the watery opening of a tractors jaw, filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth, let out a growl. The Micah Pate creature saw the figure stop, turn, saw the human-things long thin arms brandon gibson

to shield itself from the roaring, snarling death approaching. Adrenaline ran into the cat-creatures body; digestive juices poured into its gullet. Thirty feet from the man-prey it leapt high in the air, sailed out Micah Pate toward dinner, confident it would devour- No, gasped the man, falling back into the snow, the creature flying at cutco

He closed his eyes, as if it would cease to be, as if the hurtling monster would not be there if he just shut his eyes. And then Micah Pate there was a loud machine-like report. The sound of a revving combustion engine? The fall of a hundred rocks down a mountain cliff? No. Automatic holland

firing. The creature fell just to the side of the man-prey, yellow globe-eyes open and staring at nothing in this world. Its Micah Pate body was riddled with grapefruit-sized evenly-spaced holes oozing blood. Explosive-bullet holes. The man lay as still as the dead thing alongside. They lay like some weird mother and child in brandon gibson

red-stained snow. Blood pumped weakly through the holes in the giant cats pelt. It steamed Micah Pate in the below-zero air, quickly coagulating into brown muck. Two figures in heavy winter parkas, carrying the smoking hot Liberator rifles that had done the damage to the creature, approached. They slid easily along over the two starkville daily news

of snow, gliding elegantly on short steel skis. Jeffers Micah Pate and Biythe of the Century City patrol corps. Men who knew these mountains and the dangers they held - men equipped to deal with that danger. Cautiously they walked up to the strangely garbed man and the creature sprawled out there on the vayama

whiteness. They had Micah Pate watched a bit before coming down the slope. Making sure. The big cat hadnt stirred except for a few trembles. Nerves settling down after violent tension. Certain that the creature wouldnt rise again to threaten, their attention shifted to the man. What the hell was he Micah Pate doing out here? And holland

was he dressed so inadequately for the weather? Is he dead? Biythe asked his companion,.

Micah Pate wiki