Wilma grabbed her raincoat from the hall closet. "Dinner won't be ready for a while. I'll just take a look."

But as she knelt to pull on rubber boots, Dulcie reared up to pat her cheek. "In the dark and rain, you won't find her." And she headed for her cat door, pushing out into the wet, cold night-and Joe Grey was out the plastic door behind her.

He stood a moment on the covered back porch, his sleek gray coat blending with the night, his white paws and the white strip down his face bright, his yellow eyes gleaming. Then down the steps, the rain so heavy he could see little more than the dark mass of Dulcie just ahead, and an occasional oak tree or smeared cottage light. Already his ears and back were soaked. His empty stomach rumbled. The scent of roast lamb followed the cats through the rain like a long arm reaching out from the house, seeking to pull them back inside.

Along the village streets, the cottages and shops were disembodied pools of light. They hurried uphill, their ears flat, their tails low, straight for the wild land where the cottages and shops ended, where the night was black indeed. Sloughing up through tall, wet grass, along the trail they and the kit usually followed, they could catch no scent of her, could smell only rain. They moved warily, watching, listening.

It was hard to imagine that a mountain lion roamed their hills, that a cougar would abandon the wild, rugged mountains of the coastal range to venture anywhere near the village, but this young male cougar had been prowling close, around the outlying houses. Nor was this the first big cat to be so bold. Wilma had, on slow days as reference librarian, gone through back issues of the Molena Point Gazette, finding several such cases, one where a cougar came directly into the village at four in the morning, leaving a lasting impression with the officer on foot patrol. Wilma worried about the cats, and cautioned them, but she couldn't lock them up, not Joe Grey and Dulcie, nor the wild-spirited kit.

"Those big cats see every flick of movement," Dulcie said, pushing on through the wet grass.

"That kit's as dark as a piece of night, that mottled black and brown coat vanishes in the shadows. Anyway she'd hardly be worth the trouble, to a cougar-not even a mouthful."

Dulcie hissed at him and raced away through the rain.

The cougar had been on the Molena Point hills since Thanksgiving, prowling among the scattered small ranches, a big male with pawprints the size of Joe's head. He'd been spotted on Christmas Day, high up at the edge of the forest. Since Christmas two village dogs had disappeared, and four cats that Joe and Dulcie knew of; and huge pawprints had been found in village gardens.

Mountain lion. Cougar. Puma. Painter. The beast had half a dozen names. Late at night in the library, Dulcie had learned about him on the computer, indulging in a little clandestine research after the doors were locked and she had the reference room to herself.

She was, after all, the library cat. She might as well make use of her domain. Wilma had taught her the rudiments of the computer, and her paws were quick and clever. And of course no one among the staff would dream that, beyond her daytime PR activities of purring and head rubbing for the pleasure of the patrons, their little library cat followed her own agenda.

But what Dulcie had read about cougars hadn't thrilled her.

California had always had mountain lions. They'd been hunted nearly to extinction, then put on the protected list. Now, as their numbers increased, their range was growing smaller- more houses being built, more people moving into their territory. It took a lot of land to support a 120-pound carnivore.

The residents of Molena Point expected an occasional coyote to venture down from the coastal range; Joe and Dulcie were ever on the alert for the beast called God's dog. And there were sometimes bobcats and always bands of big, vicious racoons hunting in packs. But a mountain lion was quite another matter. When the two cats had first found the cougar's prints high up among the hills, a thrill of terror and of awe had filled them.

This was the wild king roaming their hunting grounds. His magnificent presence made them prowl belly to the earth, ears and tail lowered, their senses all at alarm, their little cat egos painfully chastened.

But it had been a strange year all around. Not only the appearance of the cougar, but the odd weather. Usually, fall in Molena Point was sun-drenched, the cerulean sky graced by puffy clouds, the night sky clear and starry or scarved by fog creeping in off the sea to burn away again in early dawn. But this fall had been wet and cold, a cruel wind knifing off the Pacific beneath thick gray clouds, pushing before it sheets of icy rain. Then people's pets began disappearing, and lion tracks appeared in the gardens.

A horrified householder had called police to report that the lion had entered his carport and had, in trying to corner his cat, slashed the tires of his black Lincoln Town Car, beneath which the cat had taken refuge: four flat tires, two badly scratched bumpers, a ruined paint job, lots of blood, and one dead Siamese.

And now the kit was headed alone into the black hills. And as the two cats moved higher, searching, they had only the brush of their whiskers against sodden grass and wet stone to lead them, and their own voices calling the kit, muffled in the downpour.

The kit had been staying in Dulcie and Wilma's house since her adopted human family, elderly newlyweds Pedric and Lucinda Greenlaw, left Molena Point for a jaunt in Pedric's travel trailer. The kit had refused to accompany the pair again. She loved Pedric and Lucinda and was thrilled to have a home with them, after being on her own tagging after a clowder of vagrant cats that didn't want her. But she couldn't bear any more travel. The old couple's drive up the coast to Half Moon Bay had made her painfully carsick, and on their weekend to Sacramento she threw up all the way.

The kit was special to Lucinda and Pedric, more special than any ordinary cat. Steeped so deeply in Irish folklore and Celtic history, they had quickly guessed her carefully guarded secrets, and they treasured her.

Brought to Wilma's house, the small furry houseguest had chosen for her daytime naps a hand-knitted sweater atop Wilma's cherry desk, beside the front window where she could watch the village street beyond the twisted oaks of Wilma's garden. The kit loved Wilma; she loved to pat her paw down Wilma's long hair and remove the clip that held her ponytail in place, to race away with it so the thin older woman would laughingly give chase. At Wilma's house, the kit dined on steak and chicken and on a lovely pumpkin custard that Wilma made fresh each day. Wilma said pumpkin was good for hairballs. The kit had nosed into every cupboard and drawer, investigated beneath every chair and chest and beneath the clawed bathtub, and then, having ransacked the house and found nothing more to discover, she had turned once more to the wider world beyond the cottage garden. The kit had grown up wild-who could stop her now?

Around midnight, on that Wednesday, the rain ceased. Joe and Dulcie found a nearly dry niche among some boulders, and napped lightly. It was perhaps an hour later that they heard a scream, a chilling cry that brought them straight up out of sleep, icing their little cat souls.

A woman's scream?

Or the cougar?

The two sounded very alike.

Another scream broke the night, from farther down the hills. One cry from high to the north, the other from the south, bloodcurdling wails answering each other.

"Bobcats," Joe Grey said.

"Are you sure?"

"Bobcats."

She looked at him doubtfully. The screams came again, closer this time, answering each other. Dulcie pushed close to Joe, and they spun away into the forest and up a tall pine among branches too thin to hold a larger predator.