Tallycat

Clambering and cunning, slinking and stalking, aggressive and... artistic? All are words that describe the tallycat, a spire forest sawjaw with a fondness for heights and tight spaces, and an unusual way of marking their territory. 

These small descendants of the springheel leave the open grasslands and now find respite within the cementrees that now dot the plains in clusters and colonies. They climb up and down stone-like trunks of the spire forest, using their grasping tails as an additional limb - but only some of the time, for on flat ground, they are still much faster bounding on just two feet. They hunt anything they can overpower, pouncing on birds and small trunkos and seedsnatchers with their wicked talons and subduing their victims' struggles with precise bites to the spine with a serrated set of teeth finer than most, but no less sharp. Their sickle claws have begun to move toward the back of their wrist, becoming opposable thumbs to hold on tight as they climb up the trees. They den in the hollow centers of the spires, descending down into the darkness through narrow tunnels accessed from small holes near the crown, and there make their quiet home in quiet, tight spaces where they can hide from the world. Mothers raise their kits here, safe from most predators, and often within a paw's reach of roosting birds that gather in the forests each evening to roost, unaware of the dangers that wait for them just out of their view.

The tallycat is a mostly solitary animal, though females with young live together, and males and females spend short lengths of time cavorting together in between litters, when females become receptive to breed again. Each individual is territorial, and once settled in a spire forest is unlikely to ever leave it except, in the case of the male, to seek out mates for brief, fleeting courtships. The tallycat lays claim to its land through boundary markers at every edge of their domain. This cat's claws are deadly sharp, and with its tail it carves out three-lined patterns up to a half centimeter deep in the surface of cementree trunks. A gland in the palm of its tail, just beneath the talons, excretes a strong-smelling secretion as it scratches, so that the tallycat marks the trees both for the eyes and noses of any rival to pick up. Frequently, the tallycat marks each spot twice, producing a cross-hatch pattern resembling tally marks used to count, and from this it gets its common name. Individuals can vary in their expression of this behavior, however, and may make marks ranging from a single simple scrape to an elaborate, radiating pattern of lines. Males frequently produce more complicated marks than females, and there may be some effect of mate selection ongoing which encourages the creation of more elaborate scratches. An interloper that doesn't respect the boundaries marked by the land-owner is inviting a physical fight, which though rare can be very fierce, and may result in the death of the less strong party, especially in females, which are the more aggressive sex (for they must protect their kits from enemies that include rivals of their own kind.)