The Aeolani are friends with the big cats. I've seen tracks nearly the size of a dinner plate, strangely round and distinctively feline but unbelievably huge in the deep mud beside the barefoot prints of humans and scattered with droplets of fresh blood.

They have been friends for a long long time.

There are big cats...and then there are really big cats. Big damned cats. You can only imaging their ferocity on a feeding rampage. What seems wild and insanely angry to us, must just be habits at the kitty cat dinner table to them. But there must be some deep, ancient genetic fear, based on myriad ancient encounters that that thunderous and unearthly shriek instills. I've heard it many time and it chills my bones deeper than any winter's cold.

There were way too many of us then, way back then. No one could solve the dilemma and no amount of reason would curtail the explosion that rocked the planet nearly to the point of toxic extinction. We live today in a beautiful and pristine balance where the thunderous exuberance of the natural diversity reigns supreme everywhere and the colonies of mortal men are small, delicate, exquisite and mysteriously in balance with the higher, silent and gorgeous forces of the Gia Chi.

Probably no one will ever know why or how that turn around ever came about. They may ....somewhere in the annals of remembered history of those strange creatures to whom we owe so much and about whom we know so little.

But their relationship with the cats even stranger still. Why do creatures larger than any other mammal on the planet, with fangs the length of sharp machetes and talons that can rip the door off any home in seconds ....and most certainly carnivorous not just to the lower species of warm blooded creatures ....befriend and protect these fragile, elf-like creatures of the wood.

From the tracks you can see, they obviously walk together like children, playmates, friends. But then, what is the blood they leave behind. Never a carcass, never cleaned bones, only the flattened meadows where quick, terminal struggle began and quickly found its end ....and the dripping blood as if the lacerated carcass was intentionally harvested and carried away.

There is a script retrieved from the cavernous rubble of one of the ancient, holocausted cities ...burned, as was nearly all the office's contents, along with all the other structures and collapsed by the big explosions. It contains the following text (much of its beginning and end must be missing):

"......were apparently warned several times before, but chose not to heed any of it. Instead they ventured forth with their carried containers of herbicide in compliance with government and cattle industry edict to irradicate those invasives many of us believe were spread by the cattle grazing on public lands themselves.

The remains were found the following day after they failed to return home, as is the case in so many instances of late, suspiciously beginning to appear as a systematic targeting and vendetta to those intent on toxifying the public landscape for the profits of industry and at the expense of those of us exposed to these long documented destructive poisons and who have suffered the terrible deterioration, pain and loss of consciousness resulting from our carrying away the seeds of petrochemical poison unknowingly in our bodies and blood.

Not all of us are missing hope and support for these disappearances mainly because they are certainly and consistently eliminating a vile and destructive foe from our environs, although none of us ...at least those who would be known ...can identify who or what is behind it all.

There were on Saturday, four reputable members of the ......."

(note...the charring of the paper texts framed the beginning and end of this quote, leaving all else to our imaginations and the whims of unknowable history.)

One of the young girls who claims, still to this day, to have been taken in by the Aeolani and indeed was missing for several days in the deep woods and returned in remarkable shape, with incredible stories and without a scratch told a small story that caught my eye, reading its recount a few months ago. There was a brief mention of a fire ring with a skewer of roasted meat she claimed (twice) looked very much like a leg.

The mention jarred me enough to trace her down ...now many years later, and with her now as a restless, but sharp young pubescent woman ...to ask for a more detailed recounting of her memory.

"Oh, yes," she said.

"It looked just like my daddy's."

I was stunned by her innocence in treating the witness of nearly certain cannibalism with such innocence and joy.

"Were there marks on the meat," I asked.

"Oh, ya."

"What did they look like?" I queried.

She grew pensive and looked around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and taking out a piece of fresh bread. She bit off a corner and held the semicircular imprint of her teeth up for me to see, without saying a word.

Again, a deep and shaking chill went through me.

"Was there anything that reminded you of a cat?" I asked.

"Oh, they told me that that was what had killed it," she said.

For sub-intuitive reasons of surprise and analysis I asked a question which even to this day I can't explain coming from me:

"What did it taste like?"

"Kind of sweet, no fat and wonderfully tender."