An excerpt from a long fantasy story. The narrator, Eshtine, is a tigress who has learned she has the capacity to shapeshift; this is about how she learns the craft of it from her cousin, a tiger named Neekohl. (Key facts you need to know first: Eshtine's fur is black with yellow stripes, unlike the usual tiger coloration of yellow with black stripes. And her eyes change from green to red when she is angry.)
My initial experiments in shifting were not uniformly successful. Neekohl aided me as much as he could, but that didnít take me very faróit was as though I needed to feel a sensation Iíd never felt, or flex a phantom muscle. Neekohl had no words to describe the process I had to undergo. The best he could do was to guide me to the threshold of the experience, to see if some long dormant instinct would awaken in me then.
ìTry this,î he suggested, stretching to lay full length on the ground in front of me so the sunlight glinted in his fur. ìConcentrate on my coat. See if you can make your stripes match mine.î
With his guidance I went through the preliminary steps. I slowed my breathing and listened for my heartbeat. Then I cast from my awareness the sound of my breaths, my heart, my blood pumping past my ears. I patiently ignored the outer noises of birds and wind and tasty morsels scurrying past us into burrows; I willed my tail into stillness so the flies which settled on my skin wouldnít disturb me by buzzing away.
Only one sound remained now, the subtlest sound of all. I had never heard it before but now it seemed all-pervasiveóthe sound of my fur, its constant motion. In every region of me (and in my state of utter attention, I seemed huge as a continent), at every moment, I heard millions of sproutings and sheddings. The noise nearly maddened me. But I focused tighter and discovered something interestingóblack fur and gold fur made different sounds. I could predict which was about to appear above my skin. Armed with this insight, I pulled back from the microcosm. ìNeekohl? What do I do next?î
ìYou hear them?î
ìI did.î
ìThen look at my fur, and tell your fur to be like mine. No, donít screw your face up like that. You tell your legs what to do, you tell your tail what to do; why should this work any different?î
So I plunged back down and told gold fur to grow instead of black and vice versa. They did as they were told. Then I commanded old fur to spill out, and I was a new tigress. When I knew the technique, Neekohl insisted I practice many times in succession. ìGet to the moment,î he explained, ìwhere you no longer mind the mechanics. Get to the moment where youíre only concentrating on telling your fur to act like mine. Let the mechanics act on their own.î
I kept my eyes on him. I concentrated on the ridge of his shoulder, where the muscles below raised skin and fur so high they threw shadows against his body. His stripes were bunched together as though they radiated out from here to the rest of his body, ìAnd then out to touch my skin,î I thought.
But the magic was sharper now than when Iíd started. In my transformation this time I had changed my stripes, but I had also adopted Neekohlís muscle. My teacher blinked twice to see me bulging in the shoulders further than Iíd ever bulged before. ìVery good,î he said finally. ìNow switch back.î
Some time later, I was watching a human youngling from behind a thin lattice wall of thornbushes. The girl never felt my eyes on her, though I concentrated so much of myself into my eyes I thought she would feel a tigressí weight pressed against her. And all she had was the sort of hair I wanted.
ìNo human is perfect, but you can be,î Neekohl had said. He meant I should not model my human form on one female. I should look for the ideal nose on one, the ideal ears on another.
I disliked this business. I found them all ugly. Every face appeared marred by an injury which squashed the noses in; every mane of hair grew grotesquely long and stringy. The femalesí bodies in particular were lumpy in the oddest places, reminiscent of camels. I was falling deeper in love with my sleek, aerodynamic form the more I pondered the alternative, but then I remembered how my body betrayed me. I had to go through with this.
Once I memorized the ravenís wing hair on this girl, my catalogue was complete. I had already chosen a knife edge of a nose from a woman Iíd seen silhouetted against sunset of the night before; chin and cheekbones, mouth and forehead from a bored girl sitting in a linen shop; strong running feet from a dancer (large feet, but I figured Iíd need the support if I was to lift my body so far from the ground). I must have collected in my memory bits and pieces of twenty different women, hoping to shape them together not as bits and pieces but as a total person. Me. Me, only human, not tigress. The prospect threatened to awe me. So that I wouldnít have to think about it for much longer, I worked more quickly and for longer periods of time.
ìDonít do it piecemeal,î Neekohl warned me. ìDonít practice by changing a claw to a finger. Youíll only get used to seeing a human finger on a tigress paw.î
So I couldnít practice the change itself until I had assembled my complete form. I could, however, improve my concentration, listen over and over to the wave of noise from my living fur, count the muscles strung over my bones, memorize the map of my tigress body so that I would not lose it forever once I changed.
And I would change, totally changeóexcept for one thing. I would keep my eyes. They would be shaped to fit a human face, and the black in them would not tighten into slits in the light of the sun, but the fire in them would be the sameógreen or red. Neekohl told me flatly: ìYou could not change them if you tried.î
When the time came, it found Neekohl and I sitting up with our tails coiled around our forepaws, facing each other in an unconsciously identical position. I donít know who imitated whom. We sat on a large sunning rock just inside the jungle. It was daylight, and the crystals in the rock sparkled. Generally, we would have been asleep now, if we werenít scouting human models, but Neekohl insisted I shift during the day, when he could see me better and make sure I had memorized the body parts in the right positions.
ìDonít forget clothes,î he said, and then I began.
I had to plunge deeper now than before. This time I was not just listening in on my fur but to my bones. Once I knew every bone, once I knew how tensed or relaxed each muscle was, I breathed one more long breath and gave the order: ìChange.î
It happened very quickly. I think Neekohl was surprised, though less surprised than I was. The composite human female in my mind acted like an air bubble trapped underwater. Held beneath the surface for so long, it rushed upward with alarming speed the moment I freed it. And then the picture in my mind wasnít of a woman any more. It was of a tigress. The woman thinking about a tigress was sitting in a comical position on a sunning rock, facing a tiger.