This is not a luvums-duvums-itsyboo book, about pooty-tats.

I keep forgetting who said what, and am generally too impatient to trace it down. Someone said: Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

It would be a strange injustice to the breed to write a sentimental book about Roger and Geoffrey. House cats are implacable realists. Their affections are as honest as their lust for the hunt. Their vanity is not diluted by any lack of confidence. Their codes of behavior are based upon an essential dignity which, in careful proportion, demands and awards respect.

Portions of this book may strike the pretty-kitty set as being unnecessarily unpleasant. Without apology I say that life for any mammal from mouse to man is a precarious and bloody gamble wherein, despite the most astute management of resources and shrewdness of play, the house percentage will eventually win.

I am beginning this account in the spring of 1964. Roger the Lodger, sometimes known as Gladys, is downstairs drowsing on the corner of the sill of the picture window overlooking a blue mile of Little Sarasota Bay. Should he survive until September of this year, he will be nineteen years old. His half brother, Geoffrey, died during the summer of 1960, a few months past his fourteenth birthday.

Dorothy and I, in talking over the episodes and impressions which make up this book, are aware of our tendency to anthropomorphize these house-guest beasts, to attribute to them awareness and responses beyond their capacities. In so doing, we have perhaps made too generous interpretations of observed behavior. Such generosity is inevitably a product of affection. As is so true of children, the cherished cat is inevitably exceptional.

Though it is considered bad artistic judgment to state bluntly the theme of any book, and quite possibly pretentious to infer that a pet book can have such a weighty increment, I herewith state my pot of message: When any higher order of animal is given security, attention, affection, and treated in a consistent and predictable manner, that animal will respond with a continuing revelation of those factors of intelligence and personality which differentiate it from the norm of the breed. This is especially true of both cats and people. The barn cat, in the hard bargain of shelter in return for mousing, withdraws to that standardized catness which the uninitiated think typical of all cats regardless of vocation. Were a Martian to observe us only in throngs, during our surly passages to and from work, he might think us a sorry and unrewarding species indeed and generalize about us in an unflattering way.

Though the house cats will respond to a trusted environment in astonishing ways, their reactions will be related to varying quotients of intelligence and personality, even as you and I. If Roger seems to take over more than his share of the episodic account, it is not because he was the first acquired and has survived longest, nor is it because his intelligence is greater than was Geoffrey’s, but rather because his personality — clown, neurotic, reckless hero, inept hunter, nag, hypochondriac, experimenter — shows more deviation from the anticipated norm than did Geoffrey’s.

Another aspect is worth comment. With half of the world’s billions on such short rations that a few hundred calories can make the difference between survival and disaster, there is an effete and trivial overtone to the pet-keeping habit. Yet I cannot help but sense herein some supra-historical instinct more constant than the contemporary economics of starvation. We and our domesticated animals have shared hundreds of thousands of years of a precarious mutual existence on this whirling mudball, have tested the scents borne on ancient winds, died in the same rude tempests, bled the same color, feared the same darkness, protected our young with the same desperate instinct. We have shared this journey, and now in a world where we are busily interposing more layers of plastic, paper, transistors, and asphalt between ourselves and reality, where we are poisoning the air, the earth, and the waters in our hot wars against insects and our cold wars against each other, it is a needful reminder to have, close at hand, that striped, furry camouflage, that functional honesty of fang and talon, the sleekness of the muscles of the hunt. In its best form the relationship is ceremonial-symbiotic, composed of grave courtesies and considerations, a sharing rather than an ownership structure. In its worst form, wherein the dignity of both species is degraded, it is suffocatingly pooty-tat.

I can not properly dedicate this book to the two cats. In 1960 Simon and Schuster published a suspense novel of mine entitled The End of the Night. As a result of a momentary attack of the quaints, the dedication reads, “To Roger and Geoffrey, who left their marks on the manuscript.”

In an abashed penance, I dedicate this book to all those doctors of veterinary medicine who, despite all the cutenesses of the pooty-tat trade, have retained a respect, liking, and consideration for animals on their own primitive terms. In these affluent days of the teeny cashmere sweaters, tiny electric blankets, pedicures, exotic diets, and dear little kitty-coffins, such gentlemen are becoming ever more rare. The ones mentioned in this account are included in this dedication.

I grew up with a smooth-haired fox terrier named Prince. He was acquired before I started school and was still living when I went off to college. When I was little, he was very much the country dog. We lived in Sharon, Pennsylvania. We had a summer cottage on the Pymatuning River in Orangeville, Ohio.

Much to my mother’s indignation and despair, Prince buddied up with a jovial pack of farm dogs and would run off with them on a periodic debauch, which involved hurrying down to a country slaughterhouse and rolling in some pungent horror, and coming home wearing a bashful and guilty smirk. The invariable procedure was to put on gloves, take him out along the boathouse dock, and eject him into the river. After this was repeated three or four times, the stench was diminished to the point where he could be washed. He came to expect this as the inevitable end result of fragrant holiday and as a price which, though he made a great show of reluctance, he was willing to pay. It was a canine variation of a night in the drunk tank. When he was at last clean, his morale was excellent.

My maternal grandfather was an avid hunter of the Ohio woodchuck, and Prince became of such value in this patient sport my grandfather bragged about him to anyone who would listen.

When my father went with another company, we moved to Utica, New York, and Prince made the transition from country dog to city dog. We lived on Beverly Place in Utica, and across the street lived a rugged Airedale named Mike. He belonged to the Robinson Family. My kid sister, Doris, later married Bill Robinson. It became Mike’s mission to kill the overconfident fox terrier across the street. Their brawls were loud, bloody, and in deadly earnest. Prince was outclassed. We managed to separate them in time, every time.

My grandfather developed an effective system. There was an old turret-top refrigerator in the back hallway at that time. He kept a supply of very loud flash crackers and kitchen matches atop the refrigerator. At the first sounds of combat he would run out, light a firecracker, and toss it into the snarling turmoil. The bang would send both dogs screaming in opposite directions. In time truce was established, and thereafter they ignored each other, with the infrequent exception of a mild sneer at long range.

With his learning process accelerated by being bowled over without serious injury by a passing car, Prince took over that porky-wise manner of the city dog, the broadchested little trot, the obvious preoccupation with destination, interrupted by the routine examinations of light poles and tree trunks.

A friend phoned us once and told us of Prince’s solution to the traffic-light problem. We followed him and saw how he managed it. At the foot of the Beverly Place hill, a block away, Beverly Place crossed Genesee Street, US Route 5, a four-lane street, heavily traveled, with a traffic light at the corner. Prince would stop at the corner and begin to bark. Sharp, peremptory barks, widely spaced. The light would turn. Traffic would stop. He would thereupon trot across the wide street staying within the pedestrian stripes, quite obviously convinced that he had demanded a favor and that, as always, it had been granted.

I am convinced that after I went off to the University of Pennsylvania my subsequent relationship with Prince was a disappointment to my parents. After all, this was A Boy and His Dog, reunited during school vacations. But I had to force more enthusiasm than I felt, and his response also seemed somewhat stylized. I used to wonder if I was lacking in capacity for this sort of affection. I realize now that the world had broadened for both of us. We had gone separate ways and had other things on our minds. I was learning to bark at another kind of traffic light. Our relationship was mildly affable and slightly nostalgic.

It was an old and shabby neighborhood, those few blocks along State Street between Oneida Square and the knitting mills. But our windows looked out at the leaves of the old elms, and Dorothy had redecorated that upstairs apartment into a cheerful brightness.

It had one overwhelming advantage. I had decided to try to make our living by writing fiction. We had a few dollars saved, plus my terminal-leave income — four months’ pay as a lieutenant colonel. We expected it to be precarious. And that two-bedroom apartment was under rent control, frozen at a monthly rate of $23.50.

State Street sloped downhill toward the mills. The next street down was Mandeville Street, and just around the corner on Mandeville was the Mandeville Market, owned and operated by Howard Ehrenspeck, a good friend then and now. He and Jenny are now over on the east coast of Florida, where Howard is in the insurance business. Once upon a time, when food was half today’s cost, he let a very nervous and insecure writer run up a grocery bill of three hundred dollars. People came from all the best parts of the city to trade there. Howard and his employees had been most kind to Dorothy and Johnny. And so it got to be a pleasant habit to take a break and walk over to the market to get a pack of cigarettes and have a soft drink.

That was the way I happened to meet George. At the time I met her, George was one very busy female cat, providing for some six kittens in the basement of the market. George had huge paws. She had six toes on one front foot and seven on the other.

George had her litter in early September in the cellar under the Mandeville Market, in an old grocery carton of her choosing. I met her in October when she was in the process of weaning them. The market was renowned for the quality of the meat. There was a huge chopping block, scrubbed pale, curved to a shallow concavity by long use. There was sawdust on the floor behind the meat counter. On the floor against the back wall near the doorway to the walk-in cooler was the scrap basket, a bushel basket lined with butcher paper into which the meat cutters tossed the trimmings.

The cellar door was propped ajar a few inches, enough room for George to come though. A cellar window was fixed the same way to give George access to the outdoor world, for night ventures and the pursuit of status.

The first time I saw George, she came from the direction of the cellar with a air of purpose, went directly to the scrap basket, hoisted her front feet up onto the rim, and stared down into it, studying the contents. Next, braced by her left front paw, she used the hooks on her right paw to sort down through the scraps of meat. She was very intent and much like a housewife at a melon bin. When at last she found the piece suitable for her children, she leaned in delicately, picked it up in her jaws, reared around and walked back to the cellar stairs with it. Howard told me that sometimes she would come up, sort through the basket, find nothing suitable, give them all a brief, icy glance, and go on back down. And then some very tasty scraps would be tossed into the basket to await her next shopping mission.

George was diligent in the acceptance of her responsibilities. She did not seem to feel that the scrap basket was in any sense a handout. It was there, and because she was doing her part without sloth or complaint, she expected it to be maintained adequately. She was pleased to have people clump down into the cellar and admire the kittens. She would purr extravagantly. A meat-market cat is not inclined toward a pessimistic view of humans. The kittens were lively and healthy.

Not long thereafter Dorothy came walking home from the market with a male kitten from the litter. She was quite tentative about it. We were dog people. If anybody objected, he could be returned to George. She had gone down to the cellar and picked the one most responsive. She said that after such hideous luck with dogs lately, maybe...

I was dubious. I had the cat-lovers tagged. There were four categories. The traditional lonely spinster, of course. And that strange clan of hard-jawed, intensely competitive female who breeds for show purposes cats who look like squirrels, monkeys, Pekingese dogs — like almost anything except a cat-cat. Also the eerie eccentric with eleven million dollars in tin cans and pillow slips, who lives in rancid squalor, scavenges trash cans, and keeps thirty-one cats. Lastly the slender-wristed chap with some esoteric relation to the arts, who plays a recorder, decorates with monk’s cloth and chicken wire, seats guests on the floor, and buys tinned breast of chicken for his cat.

Kittens were always fine. Mature cats had always seemed to me to be almost spectacularly unrewarding. Prince had despised them.

But perhaps I felt a little guilty about cats. Long ago I had been an apprentice assassin. Or possibly the better phrase would be timid accessory. It happened in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Perhaps I was nine years old. We lived at 215 South Oakland Avenue. My father worked for the Standard Tank Car Company. I knew a boy named Ralph, who lived a block away. He was not a friend. He was twelve years old. That age difference put him well out of the reach of friendship.

I was awed by him. He seemed very large and constructed in a crude and ominous way. He had big hands, big knuckles, a great many large, yellowish teeth, and a raw-boned, shambling, go-to-hell manner. He had the reputation of being a dangerous and merciless fighter. He was hero-villain, the ambivalent image. The only attentions I had ever received from him were unexpected punches on the arm upon the brick-paved playground of the public school. He had developed the knack of hitting at just the right angle and just the right place — about an inch below the point of the shoulder — in such a way it would deaden the entire arm for an hour. When the numbness went away, the ache would begin. He created an entire legion of smaller boys who always revolved slowly when they stood in one place, to prevent anyone drifting up behind them. Ralph had an unwashed smell, an exceptionally pungent vocabulary, and a seemingly perpetual post-nasal drip, which he turned to advantage with a startling WHONK sound, followed by a wha-THOO of deadly accuracy.

Under normal circumstances we would have never shared any exploit, be that the word for caticide (felinicide?). But one weekend afternoon in the early fall, after school had begun again, on my way to find my standard pack of friends, I ran into Ralph walking alone toward the viaduct carrying a black cat in his arms, a mature cat which did not seem completely enchanted by being toted along by Ralph. I imagine he felt the need to explain such an effete act as cat-carrying, and he told me gruffly he was taking this old cat down into the viaduct to teach it how to hunt stuff. Did I want to come along?

I must explain the viaduct. It was a natural gorge which ran through that residential part of town. A bridge crossed it at South Oakland Avenue. It was respectably deep there, a small stream winding along the bottom of it. It had, I know now, a potential natural beauty, but it suffered the abuse one would expect in a small industrial city. People threw junk into it. Kids set fires. I remember the familiar commands: You stay off that bridge, you hear me? Stay out of the viaduct. There are terrible old drunken bums down in those bushes.

The viaduct wandered down the slope toward town and then broadened out into a trashy, cindery area before it reached the railroad yards. I was delighted to be asked to go anywhere with Ralph. It was a status situation. It entitled me to shamble and whonk and say bad words and wish I were not forced to bathe so frequently.

We approached the steep bank after traversing the cinder alley that ran behind the houses on the other side of South Oakland from ours. (It ran behind Brindle’s house, the one right across the street from ours. I was in love with Carribelle Brindle, and later with Doris King, and later with Florence Heintz, but we moved away when I was ten years old, before I had a chance to acquaint them with this emotional condition.)

The cat, uneasy enough at level transit, became agitated when we went sliding and scrambling down the steep slope to creek level. At that time in that culture it was pronounced crick. Wash was pronounced warsh. Forty years later I sometimes hear myself revert.

As we reached the creek the cat made some convulsive efforts to escape. Ralph had hold of it firmly, but it hooked him. When he shifted his grasp, it bit him. It bit him on the thumb. He roared and yelled son-of-a-bitch and hurled the cat into the center of a natural pool. The creek entering and leaving the pool was only about three feet across and quite shallow. The pool was an irregular oval perhaps thirty feet across and forty feet long, three or four feet deep in the middle, with a gently sloping shore all the way around it. The tall trees that grew down in the viaduct were leafed out still, the leaves just beginning to change. The afternoon was sunny and cool. There was a city around us, but we were out of sight, as completely as we would have been in a virgin wilderness.

The cat disappeared in the middle and popped up at once, swimming strongly. Ralph raced around to the place where it was planning to emerge. The cat wanted no more association with people. It turned around and headed back across the pool. At Ralph’s command I ran and headed it off. At first it required agility because the cat was making good time, but it was expending energy at a dangerous rate and was soon swimming so slowly we could almost saunter to the estimated landing point. “Going to drown him,” Ralph announced.

Immediately I lost my stomach for the game. It had been just a game, a curious form of tag. I would like to say that I made violent objection, that I put forward good arguments in favor of mercy, even that I made an attempt to rescue the cat. But this was Ralph, a big boy, a whonker, an arm number, a celebrity in my small culture. Protest was as unthinkable as was going away and leaving him there. I backed off a little way and watched with a sickly fascination.

By then the cat’s anxiety to avoid Ralph was less than its need to reach land. Looking half-asleep, moving quite slowly, it would swim right to Ralph’s feet. He wore what was then called hightops, those tough shoes which came to just below the knee, were laced with rawhide, and came with a buckhorn pocketknife which fit into a little snap-fastener pocket on the outside of the right calf. I seemed to have a hundred reasons for feeling inadequate those days. One was that my feet were too tender for those shoes. When wet they stiffened, and one attempt had given me such horrible blisters upon blisters in the futile attempt to swagger rather than limp in them that my mother said never again.

He did not kick the cat. When it came crawling onto the shale, he would gently work the toe of his hightop under its belly, get it in balance, then project it out into the center of the pool. It returned many many times. The cat made no sound. Ralph made no sound. I merely stood and watched. What seemed most curious to me was the way that the cat, with the entire shore line to choose from, came right toward Ralph every time. Possibly in that extremity of its exhaustion, it thought that half-seen figure was help rather than death. It was eerie to see and to remember later, the way it returned to him. Finally, when slung back, it made some aimless motions and then was quite still, turning slowly in the movement of the current through the pond. This was my look at death, the soaked black fur, the scrawny, irreversible stillness.

“Guess we taught that son-of-a-bitch not to bite,” Ralph said.

Indeed we did. He wanted to leave it there. I said I thought burial would be nice. My conscience was beginning to require something. He was patronizingly tolerant. We threw stones to wash it close enough to reach with a branch. He dragged it by the tail to soft ground. I began digging with a stick. Ralph lost interest and wandered off. I hastened the ceremony, prodding the cat into the hole before it was deep enough, then covering it with a hasty layer of dirt, leaves and small stones. I hastened after Ralph and caught up with him when he was halfway up the steep slope. I walked along the alley with him.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

He stopped and gave me a look of total contempt. “Look. You wanna follow me around all day? Stop following me, kid.”

I went home through Brindle’s yard. I do not remember weeping about that cat. I remember that night in bed feeling soiled, sick, and unworthy. The heroes in my books would never have permitted it. All I could do was wish I had left the house five minutes earlier or later, and then I would never have met him with the cat. I could remember too vividly the early chances I had to let the cat escape. I could have fallen down on purpose. But I couldn’t kid myself. That cat knew there were two of us. I knew there were two of us.

I do not know whether it left any mark at all on Ralph. It left a mark on me which has lasted forty years. Not that I am innocent of subsequent crimes of omission. We accumulate remorses the way sea creatures build their shells, so that at last the carapace is an armor, protecting the tender parts from the minor wound. But that was the first time I had faulted my own image through silence, and that was the first time I had realized that death is not a saccharine sleep, but the horrid silence of forever, a black smear of fur in green water.

Now there was a kitten in the house, and a faint uneasinenss in me because I had forfeited an obligation to the entire race of Cat.

(There is another cat somewhere in memory, a country kitten which I think my sister Dorrie had for a time. I see it only as a cat half-grown, absurdly clad in doll clothes, sidling apprehensively away from the game, looking back with patient, depressed anxiety, stumbling over skirts and sleeves.)

Kittens are fine. And, like very small children, anonymous. They use the big muscles, are endlessly curious, play the games of run and pounce and pretend, are either violently active or deeply asleep. When healthy and unafraid, they are enchanting, batting the victim spool about with a comedy ferocity, climbing into a lap for the drugged, trusting sleep.

As I accepted the underfoot reality of kitten, I had no intimation that one day, in a curious symbolism, in perhaps an act of cancellation or a reprieve, I would have to kill another black cat, and, in killing him in a manner more grotesque than any invented scene, rid myself of the last guilt about the drowning.

I have no idea why we named the kitten Roger. Perhaps it was out of a mutual impatience with precious names for kittens. Or terribly clever names. Or lit’ry allusions. Or folksy names. Roger seemed a name with an acceptable dignity. He had been weaned on scraps from meat eventually served on the best tables in town. His mother had personal dignity. At the time we knew two Rogers, one a banker and one an attorney, and though he was not named after either of them, perhaps their status conditioned our choice of name.

Roger had inherited George’s tendency to a multiplicity of toes. Twenty-six, to be precise — six apiece in front, seven in back. He was tiger, black markings on gray, with white feet, a white bib, belly, and muzzle, a nose that started pink and remained pink except for one small brown spot near one nostril. This nose later provided a reliable color-clue to the state of his health. When he is the sickest, it fades to a pink so pale it is almost white.

Tiger markings on house cats are curiously consistent throughout history. And the same markings occur all over the world. The most ancient drawings show this same racial camouflage, the striped alternations of dark and light that, at dawn or dusk, can make the animal almost invisible in a grassy field. The black guard hairs make a line down the spine. The faint dark pattern wrinkles the forehead, stripes the cheeks in a way which seems to make the eyes more expressive, and rings the tail and legs.

We did not know that Roger — and his half brother — would become exceptionally large cats — fourteen pounds and better during their hardiest years — so large that visitors would stare at them and inquire what breed they might be. We learned to say that they were pure Mandeville. But such pretention eventually came to seem a little too smart-ass, so we re-established their dignity by saying the breed was alley cat.

In these days of the huge flourescent basketry of the supermart, the grocery store is no longer the prime source of house cats. Yet, up until a few years ago, Syd Solomon, the painter, who lives ten minutes away from us in Sarasota, devised a system of his own invention which for a time reversed this trend. He and Annie had several cat families living in their compound on the shore of Philippi Creek. Being naturally squeamish over the chore of bagging up new litters and drowning them in the creek, Syd would don an old hunting jacket with huge pockets, put kittens in the pockets, and go grocery shopping at Marables Market down on Osprey Avenue. The trade there was, and still is, both social and affluent. It is a supermarket. Syd would find an empty aisle, set a kitten down, and hastily walk away. Minutes later a woman would come across the little thing mewling along in confusion, after several more resolute women had passed it by, and her heart would be touched. Ah, the pore little thing. The pore little darling thing! She would pick it up, ask where it had come from, and, of course, neither the staff nor Eddie Marable would have the faintest idea, and she would take it home. One suspects a wide-flung cat dynasty in south Sarasota and on the keys. Pure Philippi? Or pure Marable. (Pronounced marra-belle.)

In the spring of 1946 Dorothy came home from the Mandeville Market with a kitten from George’s next litter. Two cats are better than one. Their reaction to each other adds an extra dimension of cat-watching. Then would not three be better than two? I do not think so. I think that at three and beyond they tend to set up a social order which diminishes the importance to them of their relationship with humans, and thus lose a certain responsiveness, tending more to become cat’s cats rather than people’s cats. In other terms, the cat by instinct tends to establish itself with a co-operative living arrangement known as a pride when one speaks of lions. With proper trust established, the cat will make the unnatural adjustment of accepting the huge, two-legged beasts as members of the pride. Two cats will accept and confirm this disparate relationship, but when there are three or more there is enough quantity for the formation of the instinctive community which can then consider the nearby humans as bond servants, furniture, and infrequent sources of clumsy entertainment.

Roger spent about thirty seconds reacting to the newcomer as though it might be an exceptionally large and dangerous bug. Roger was beginning to be a boy cat, rangier and more agile. We could not guess what his response would be. He astonished us by becoming almost idiotically maternal. He washed the kitten day after day into a strangely sodden state. He was almost consistently gentle with it, enduring its fierce little needle-toothed games, but sometimes his own kittenhood would get out of control, and he would bat the little fur ball across the kitchen floor until it yelled with consternation and alarm.

I remember how we named the new one. I had a dictionary with lists of first names in the back. We went through the list of male names to find one which might fit properly with Roger. We did not have to go very far down the list. To Dorothy, to Johnny, and to me the name Geoffrey had precisely the right ring.

A different tom had fathered that spring litter. In vastly oversimplified terms, Roger was a long blue cat and Geoff was a square brown cat. It never failed to astonish us that some people had difficulty telling them apart.

Geoffrey became a chunky cat, his shoulders and forearms considerably more massive than Roger’s. His face was broader, forehead higher, nose dark. The short fur on his face had a definite red-brown tinge. His ears had Lynx tufts Roger’s did not. His belly fur had a pale buff tinge. The shape of his jowls was more leonine. Roger’s head configuration can best be described by saying that sometimes he is known as Old Turtlehead. Where the line of Geoff’s back was quite straight, Roger’s narrow hind quarters stand higher than his shoulders. People who despise cats always found it easier to despise Roger, even though — if it is the distillation of catness they so instinctively fear — Geoff was the more primitive, the one ever more aware of the obligations of his profession.

All three of us were, I must confess, thinking of these cats as temporary. Not that we had any idea of disposing of them, but rather because we had the dual pessimism of thinking that something always happens to cats — and something always happens to our animals. We had the feeling cats are temporary despite the example of Nicky, a husky, square, black and white, businesslike cat owned by Dorothy’s paternal grandmother in Poland, New York. Nicky was then in his teens, and, whether he was at home at the old house in Poland, or up at the family cottage at Piseco Lake in the summer, it was his nightly habit to slay his quota of rodents — moles, shrews, mice — and place them in a curiously neat array on the porch, side by side, heads all pointing in the same direction. Nicky, a mighty hunter, had elected himself provider and made it his business to forage for his pride, his community. That the offerings were not accepted in the spirit they were acquired made no difference to him. He had all the quiet confidence of a master woodsman.

We knew of Nicky’s durability but thought of him as an exception. Our cats would not last as long. We were sure of that.

Dorothy brought them home, and they became a part of life. As we were on the second floor, and traffic was heavy on State Street, and dogs prowled the neighborhood, we did not let them out. They quickly accepted the shallow box filled with newspaper tom into strips. When they were more sure-footed, we let them out onto a small flat area of the roof, too high for jumping.

I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines. The first story, written while overseas, had sold to Whit Burnett for Story Magazine. During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short-story form. That is the equivalent of ten average novels. Writing is the classic example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months. I could guess that I spent eighty hours a week at the typewriter. I kept twenty-five to thirty stories in the mails at all times, sending each of them out to an average of ten potential markets before retiring them.

Except for Dorothy, everyone thought I was a read-justment problem. Even today I do not know how much of her confidence in me was genuine and how much was a calculated effect devised for my morale. But I do know that her attitude was that it would be absurd to think of spending my life in any other way.

In the fifth month, in February of 1946, I sold my second story. For forty dollars. It brought my lifetime earnings from writing up to a total of sixty-five dollars. I had a wife, a son, two cats — and almost one thousand form letters of rejection.

But as this account is of cats rather than of writing, let me say that by the last day of 1946, the total was over six thousand dollars, and we were living in the Hill Country of Texas, in Ingram (“The Only All Rock Town in the U.S.”), in a hillside cabin.

I have no patience with those crypto-primitives — who are almost invariably of the moneyed leisure class — who seem to believe there is something effete or degrading to the animal in altering a male house cat.

The tomcat is a damned nuisance. He pursues his specialty to the almost complete exclusion of other interests. His is a nocturnal existence so rigorous, he spends his days flaked out, stirring once in a while to go see if anybody has put anything in his dish. He shreds upholstery in the serious business of keeping his claws and shoulder muscles in fighting trim. He develops a voice which will shatter glassware at twenty paces. His eerie howls of challenge disturb the neighborhood. He roams far and is sometimes gone for days in a row, returning sated, surly, smug, and bearing the wounds of love and combat. He stakes out his territory with extraordinary pungent little driblets of urine, and will occasionally stake out the house where he lives, either just for the hell of it or because another animal has been there during his absence. Owning a tomcat is curiously akin to working in some menial capacity for one of the notorious Lotharios of show business.

On the other hand, waiting too long to fix a cat results in an end product equivalently unattractive. The hormones have had too much chance to alter body chemistry, and then when the animal is deprived of this source, its physical adjustment is to become a eunuch cat, fat, slow, sedentary, sleepy, and not at all playful. A glutton cat, inclined to flatulence and timidity.

The ideal, in view of the ultimate personality of the cat, is to have him castrated just as soon as the testicles are sufficiently apparent to make it possible. Body chemistry will not have altered. He will remain lithe and active. He will be responsive and retain some portion of the psychology of his kittenhood all his life. And, as this account will show, he will not be cowardly or lack a sense of adventure. The younger the cat the more minor the operation and the quicker the recovery. We took them in turn, waited, brought them home. They were cross and slightly baleful for about one day.

Roger lost his tomhood before one of his secondary sex characteristics had time to develop. He never has acquired an adult cat voice. Except in combat, or just before he vomits, Roger has a kitten mew, an entirely futile device for getting doors opened or his dish filled. In the stress of war or nausea, he can make ululations rather like a drunken lyric soprano with the croup.

Geoffrey achieved mature vocal chords. There is a curious sidelight to this difference in voice. As we have always followed the sun, there have always been screened doors. We have always arranged a window with cat shelves fastened to the outside of houses so the cats could come and go as they pleased. But sometimes their window would be closed. Roger soon learned to beat on the outside of the screen doors with his fists, making a racket like that off-stage thunder achieved by shaking a piece of sheet metal. For about the first six years of his life, Geoffrey took the traditional approach of sitting outside the door and bellowing for it to be opened. Sometimes they would both be out there, one thumping and one shouting. I would judge each method equally effective.

But quite suddenly Geoff switched to Roger’s system. He was six years old. He was in fine voice. It is impossible to guess what manner of reasoning was involved. Certainly he did not give up the use of his voice for other demands. In fact, he perfected it. During his last years, possibly through trial and error, he finally achieved the ultimate effectiveness in demanding food. I can define it only as an abrupt, abused, stentorian whine. Human nerve ends could take no more than thirty seconds of that. It could have been stupendously effective in getting doors opened. But he knocked on doors, as his brother did.

There was one sound they made which was almost identical, Roger’s just slightly weaker and pitched a few notes higher. It is a distinctive and recognizable sound all cats use. It means, “Where are you?” It means, “Come and play.” Ah-rowr? Ah-rowr? Ah-rowr? The accent is on the second syllable, which ends on a rising inflection. There is a two- to three-second pause between each questioning call. If humans and cats are indeed part of the same pride, they will call humans and can be called by them with this portion of the standard vocabulary, though generally it is a cat-to-cat affair. They quickly become skeptical of people who go around making too many cat noises. So do I.

The winter stay in Texas without the cats requires some explanation. Along in April and May of 1946, though I had begun to sell some stories here and there, they were to pulp magazines, and the money was small. I began to think we might not make it.

I found a job as Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Research Bureau in Utica. I made that jump a little too nervously and hastily. I spent every spare moment writing. Through the summer the stories began to sell at a greater rate and to better markets. We paid off our debts and began to build up a little surplus. By autumn I was still stuck with that job, and with an unwritten obligation to keep it for a year. There we were with the funds and the mobility to evade the misery of a Utica winter. I resigned on the basis of need to take Dorothy to a warmer climate. It was not entirely a pretext. She could have endured the winter, but she does not take cold well, and it was certain that she would spend a good portion of the winter in poor health. We arranged to go to Taos.

Dorothy’s long-widowed mother, Rita — pronounced in the Dutch manner, Right-a — was living in Poland, New York. It made sense to keep the inexpensive State Street apartment and have Rita move in from Poland for the winter and live there and take care of the cats.

We did not make it to Taos. En route we looked at that Hill Country of Texas north of San Antonio and approved immediately. In the spring Rita became ill, and we had to return before we had planned. We still had our little green prewar Ford convertible with huge mileage on it. We were towing a jeep trailer, an army surplus purchase. At anything over thirty-five miles an hour, the car gobbled both gas and oil. There had been a temporary lull in sales, and we were down to a hundred dollars and no credit cards.

I estimated that if we kept it at thirty-five, and stayed on the road fourteen hours a day, and were circumspect about food and lodging, we could make it in good season on the cash in hand.

We arrived with a little less than ten dollars to find two substantial checks waiting, Rita on the mend, the apartment closed, and the cats boarding at Dr. Sellman’s. When we went to get them we found they had ingratiated themselves with the management, and instead of being confined to the normal kennel cage, had the run of the cellar. One can imagine that if the earliest memories are of the damp and darkness of a cellar, that same environment will always be reassuring.

In fact, during all of Geoffrey’s life, he had a special thing about cardboard cartons. Roger liked them, but not to the same degree. Nothing could be unpacked without Geoff establishing himself in the empty box moments after it became empty, looking fatuously content. Though when well he was not interested in sleeping in a box, he definitely wanted one when he was sick. He was restless when sick, and a box was the only thing which would stop his roaming from place to place trying to get comfortable. To Roger a box was more of a game place, a place to hide and pounce from. To Geoff it was ancient security.

We took them back to the apartment and they re-explored every corner of it and settled back into their routine.

At just about that time we were dislodged from our low-rent haven. It was still under rent control, but the house was sold, and the new owner elected to move into our apartment. That was the only legal way we could have been cast adrift.

After dreary rounds of overpriced and depressingly gloomy apartments, we decided to buy a house. Believing in our innocence that a small college town might provide a pleasant atmosphere for the writer, we looked extensively around Clinton, New York, near Utica, where Hamilton College is located, and at last found a large and very pleasant house up on the Hill, almost surrounded by college property. It was being sold by a Mr. Prettyman, the Athletic Director, who had built most of it himself and had not gotten around to finishing off the upstairs, a factor that kept it within our rather optimistic price range.

College Hill, that spring, was the cats’ introduction to the out of doors at ground level. They were tense and apprehensive. It was one hell of a lot of space for small animals. It was full of unfamiliar scents and shapes. Geoff, though the first to adjust, retained a certain wary conservatism about the potential dangers. Roger, after a few exploratory ventures, became entirely foolhardy. I believe that if a bear had appeared, Roger would have made his typically clumsy attempt at stalking it. He seemed to have that quality of egocentricity which made him think nothing would dare eat him.

It was there that we arranged the first cat window for them. You cut a square hole of sufficient size in a window screen, trim the removed portion down a bit, and hinge it back on with two small pieces of wire. A piece of plywood as tall as the exit and as long as the rest of the window opening keeps too much wind from entering on cool days. To the outside of the house, depending on the height above the ground and the agility of the cats, you affix one or two cat shelves in place with angle irons. It helps to have another at sill level, just outside their exit. On cool days when the sun is just right they will take their ease on the shelves, watching the world from a benign height, knowing the retreat hatch is handy.

Roger came and left in silence. Geoffrey left in silence, but would always announce his return. Rahr? Rahr? He would stump through the house toward us, saying, Geoffrey is here. If that announcement was curiously distorted or muffled, it was wise, we learned, to pay attention. He would have a mouthful of victim.

Dorothy and I have tried to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of birds Geoff slew in his lifetime. We think that twenty would be the absolute top, and that ten is a more likely figure. Many of those were killed because he caught them before Dorothy learned a system of taking them away from him. We thought the birds were being mangled, and when we leaped at Geoff with shrill cries of consternation, accusation, and dismay, he would give one emphatic crunch and the bird would be dead. I imagine nothing is more futile than trying to convince a cat he is morally wrong to catch birds.

Soon we discovered that the shocked and bedraggled look of the birds was a product of the actual capture, and that Geoff held them in his mouth with an uncanny delicacy. The curve of the fangs held them in place. He was inflicting no wound or bruise.

The proper procedure was to admire him extravagantly, and in the right tone of voice. Geoff, you are a great cat. Stroke his head. Tell him it is a lovely bird. Then he would, more often than not, lay it down gently. If he did not, you could stroke him again and bring thumb and finger around for gentle pressure on the hinges of the jaw. Then you could pick up the undamaged bird, shocked into immobility, and put it in some high, safe place, usually in a shallow cardboard box atop a car or high hedge or edge of a low roof. After minutes of shock-induced lethargy, the bird would suddenly jump up, stare around, and go rocketing off, yelling about its horrid experience.

The well-fed cat is not terribly interested in eating a bird. And apparently the instinct is to bring the game home undamaged. A few times, a very few times, when we were not at home, Geoff would eat a bird. We would find a few feathers by his dish. He was the methodical cat. If you are going to eat something, you take it to where you always eat, and you eat it there. I think we averaged about ten or fifteen birds a year released undamaged.

We cannot remember Roger ever catching a bird. Maybe he grazed a few. He exhibited extreme nervous enthusiasm when Geoff would bring one home, and the problem was to keep him from falling upon it when Geoff set it down.

There was a considerable difference in their hunting technique. I have watched Roger trying to sneak up on something. He worms along on his belly, ears flat, tail thrashing. I think it was the tail which made him so ineffectual. Secrecy seems improbable when the tail is whacking the grass and the brush. And possibly his breathing was audible. It might have seemed to any bird that a rackety little steam engine was slowly approaching. Roger’s proficiency level limited him to bugs and beetles, small hoptoads, the infrequent butterfly, and, on a very few triumphant occasions, a rodent. It would please me to give him credit for one entire rabbit, but the implausibility of it would seem to make Geoffrey the captor and donor.

We were privileged several times to witness Geoff’s curious and effective hunting method. I suspect that it was only one of his methods. I believe that it was the result of his lumpy feet, odd gait, and unexpected agility. I think he invented the system, finding that he was not very apt at sneaking up on things.

He would go trudging across the lawn, frowning, staring straight ahead, obviously unintersted in anything around him. His route would take him under small trees. Birds would scold him and, growing bolder, come down into the small trees to cuss him out at close range. One of them would get just a little too close. That solemn, square cat could suddenly, without warning, without even seeming to break stride, go five feet into the air and clap those two front feet onto the abusive bird just as it took off from the limb it had thought safely out of reach. In effect, he was using himself as a lure. Perhaps this system is not unique, but I have never heard of any other cat using it.

It is difficult to appraise the intelligence of any creature, including man. I.Q. in man, maze skills in rats, chickens who play baseball, chimps who pile the boxes to reach a banana, the quicker learning and longer retention of cattle as compared to horses, the circus dog who will walk grotesquely on his front feet — all these things are small illuminations in a great darkness. Too often we confuse some adaptive instinct with reasoning power. There is, for example, one small and enchanting crab in tropical waters which carefully plucks bits of marine weed and, with all the care of a woman doing her own hair, plants these living bits atop his shell so as to make himself less noticeable in his environment. The hermit crab, growing too large for his mobile home shell, will crawl from empty shell to empty shell, using his claws to measure the opening, as businesslike and thoughtful as any carpenter measuring for a shelf. Finding one a suitable degree larger, he will take a long and careful look around before, with frantic haste, he hoists his soft nether portions out of the old home and slips them into the new. (If watching this sort of thing entertains you, grab a hermit crab and put him in a shallow pan of sea water along with several empty shells. Then take one of those tap-icers and carefully crack the back end of the shell he lives in, carefully enough not to damage him. Put him back and watch him pick a new house.)

Another area of confusion in measuring intelligence in animals is our tendency to give the higher marks to the animals most willing to follow orders. (The kid who strains to do well on the I.Q. test may be of lower intelligence than the boy who, lacking sufficient motivation, drifts through it thinking of more entertaining things and makes a lower score.)

Cats are not interested in pleasing anyone by a display of obedience. They are unfailingly pragmatic, which in itself seems to denote a kind of intelligence we are not yet equipped to measure. If a cat can detect no self-advantage in what it is being told to do, it says the hell with it, and, if pressure is brought to bear, it will grow increasingly surly and irritable to the point where it is hopeless to continue. Yet, where the advantage to be gained is clearly related to the task required, the learning process is so acute as to be almost instantaneous. Once learned the feat will be repeated only when the cat is interested in the result.

Geoff was constructed in such a curiously square fashion, we could not help but notice that he had a strange habit, when sitting, of sometimes lifting his forepaws off the floor, sitting much in the manner of a ground squirrel. Sometimes he would adopt this posture for the business of face washing. When he was interested in what people were eating, he would sit near the table, and it took just a little upward gesture of the hand with a morsel in it to bring him up into his sitting position. The implied guarantee of receiving the scrap would keep him there, like a small dog.

Yet after the novelty of that wore off, we did not continue it. It was a question, I suppose, of appearances and of dignity. The cat who emulates a small, supplicant dog has somewhat the same inadvertent ludicrousness of, for example, a small and extremely fat man. The grin of conviviality is always a little abashed. In some obscure way it shamed the three of us to shame him in a way he accepted so solemnly, and without ever having to discuss it, we all gave it up.

It was Geoffrey, when we lived on College Hill, who provided us with the most memorable example of reasoning power we can remember.

It came about this way. We used to go quite often to the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica with my parents. Johnny was popular with the staff, and they would take him out into the kitchen. One of the other guests had brought in pheasant that fall, and it was being prepared for his table when Johnny went out there. One of the chefs gave him a handful of the big tail feathers of the cock pheasants. He brought them home, and the cats were delighted with them. They could be batted about, knocked into the air, chased, clawed, bitten. They were symbolic birds. In a week or so there were only a few not completely destroyed, and these had been denuded of feathers all except that tuft at the very end which has “eye” markings much like peacock feathers. They were twelve inches of heavy, naked quill with the end tuft.

I should mention here that whereas Roger seemed to prefer co-operative play, either with brother cat or one of the people, Geoff often played alone for long periods, playing solemn and wide-ranging games of solitary field hockey, dribbling a half-bashed ping-pong ball from room to room.

We had finished dinner. Johnny had gone to bed. Roger was sacked out. Dorothy was doing something in the kitchen. I was reading in the living room. She came in and in a hushed voice asked me to come and see what Geoffrey was doing. I went with her and stood quietly in the kitchen doorway and watched him. It was a very long and narrow kitchen. Geoff had invented a game with one of the remaining pheasant feathers. He would circle it and then carefully pick up the quill end in his teeth, adjusting it so that it stuck straight out in front of him. He would flatten himself into the position of the stalk, and then, ears flattened, tail twitching, he would stalk the tuft end of the feather down the length of the kitchen. When he stopped, it would stop. When he moved, it would move. Six feet from the end of the kitchen he would release it, pounce upon it, slide and roll and thump into the wall at the end, biting and kicking the hell out of it. Then he would get up, walk slowly around it, studying it, and pick it up again by the quill end and repeat the same performance. I kept count. I watched him do it seven times, and at the end he left it there and walked out of the kitchen. We could never entice him into doing it again. We wanted witnesses. When we told about it, people looked at us with that tolerant skepticism which is so infuriating. They seemed to think we thought we had seen Geoff do that. He would never do it again because I imagine he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of that game.

A year or so ago I read a newspaper account of a game invented by some bottlenose dolphins in one of the Florida aquariums. Scientists have recently become very much intrigued by the physiological complexity of the brain of the porpoise, their learning speed, their intricate sounds of communication, even their sense of fun. Several years ago a porpoise inhabiting the outdoor tank at Marineland near Daytona Beach invented a way to amuse himself. A brown pelican was in the habit of filling his belly, then drifting and drowsing in the tank. When he seemed the most off guard, the porpoise would come slowly up under him from behind, then make an explosive underwater turn and, with an upward sweep of his powerful tail, propel the pelican a good twenty feet straight up into the air, flapping and gasping.

But not long ago, in solemn tones, the professors announced they had seen the porpoises at play in a game of their own invention. They had a white sea-bird feather. They would grab it in the lips, take it over to the place where water was constantly pumped into the big tank at high velocity. They would release it in the stream, then chase it and catch it. The professors said this was a reasoned use of a tool, a perfect example of a creative intelligence unsurpassed among all mammals lesser than man, not only because it was of their own devising, but because it was purely for the sport of it, unlike the simian use of objects to knock down food or pelt their enemies.

I like to imagine that those porpoises keep right on playing their feather game. Geoffrey outgrew it after one lengthy session.

At Cuernavaca we found a small brick house behind a wall. It was at 8 Jacaranda Street, a long block east of the main highway, about five miles north of the city, and with a view of the volcanoes from our small front porch.

We acquired a part-time gardener for the small yard and garden, and a full-time maid named Esperanza. We located a private school for Johnny. Dorothy coped with the public market. Our neighbors on either side were a Mexican dentist and a Mexican colonel. Much later, when I computed our total expenses for the best part of the year we were there, I found that the total for everything — including entertainment, side trips, and typewriter ribbons — averaged out at $115 a month.

There were savage dogs in our neighborhood. One, owned by a mystery woman who lived diagonally across the street and was reputed to be the mistress of some important Mexico City politico, was so damned large and unpleasant that when we ventured outside our gates at night on foot, I carried a rock or a club.

We suspect that this dog inflicted the wound on Pancha, the bleeding, terrorized cat who came scrabbling under our closed gate one day with a deep, fresh wound in her back. We gave her care and refuge, and she responded with warmth and trust. She was a pretty and dainty little cat, and she obviously had no intention of ever going back out where the dogs were. She was so obviously hardly more than a kitten that we could not believe she was pregnant. But with an increasing obviousness, she was, beyond doubt.

As her time grew near and she began a rather absentminded investigation of dark corners and closets, Dorothy fixed her a box and introduced her to it, and she seemed content with it.

One morning I got up before dawn and drove with a friend down to Lake Tequesquitengo and fished for bass. We came back at noon, and I stopped at his place and had some Oso Negro gin with local ginger ale. John Commerford was a good fishing companion, but he made those drinks heavy.

(John’s wife, Pearl, was taking Spanish lessons, but John insisted sign language could get him anything he wanted. He went into town one day to buy a fly swatter and stopped at a likely shop on the narrow street leading to the public market. Making random, fluttering gestures with his left hand, and saying, “Zzzzzzzzz,” John held the imaginary swatter in his right hand, then struck, saying “Pow!” After about two solid minutes of this the totally blank expression of the proprietor turned to a beaming grin of comprehension. He ran into his storeroom and returned proudly with a box of ping-pong balls. John joined La Perla for the language lessons.)

I wobbled two blocks home through a garish unreality of daylight, undone by the early hours, the drive, the fishing and the gin. Dorothy had gone marketing. I stretched out on my back on the bed and fell asleep. About an hour later I was awakened by cat claws needling into my side. My right arm was outstretched, and Pancha had nestled into my armpit. She was purring very loudly and became louder when I stroked her. Every so often she would stop purring, dig her claws into me, then begin purring again. It seemed odd behavior. I had my hand on her the next time it happened, and I felt a strange rippling which seemed to start at her shoulders and go down to her back heels. I lifted my head and stared down at her and suddenly realized what was going on. My first impulse was to hustle her to her box, but then I thought that if she had that much trust, if she had selected that particular place to have her kittens, then the least I could do would be go along with it.

By the time I heard Dorothy arrive, we’d had the first kitten. Pancha was very tidy and efficient about it. She had three, and one was dead. Except during the labor pains, she purred every moment. Birthing done, she was content to be moved into the box with her damp, blind family. The kittens were a male and a female, and we named them Brujo and Bruja — he-witch and she-witch.

By then we had become friendly with Van and Scottie MacNair, who lived one diagonal long block away in a little house called La Casita, just off the main highway. Their boys, younger than Johnny, were in the same school. Van was also free-lancing in magazine fiction. We became close, and despite subsequent geographical dislocations, have remained close. Van is now Director of Public Relations for the Los Angeles County Museum.

Their boys wanted a cat, and in due time we gave them Brujo. Van had a studied and skeptical indifference to the whole idea, an attitude which reminded me strongly of my own back on State Street.

It was not long before Scottie reported that Brujo had become Van’s cat, accustomed to staying with Van in the room where he worked and watching him companionably from the couch. Van maintained his amused tolerance for a respectable amount of time, and then at last admitted that it was one hell of a fine cat, and he had never known a cat intimately before, and they were splendid animals indeed.

One evening after Brujo was almost full-grown, Van came wandering dejectedly over in the early evening to tell us that Brujo had been missing and they had all gone calling for him, hunting for him, searching the highway ditches and the fields, and had at last found him fifty yards or so behind the house, tom to pieces by dogs. The whole MacNair family was crushed.

Bruja fared better. We found her a home with an acquaintance, a lady who lived alone in a large house with swimming pool and staff of servants. We learned later that Bruja was living on tinned chicken breast and cream and wore a little collar with her name on it.

Though it was certainly not long ago, shipping pets by Railway Express was a far more plausible venture in the late forties and first half of the fifties than it is today. The cost of shipping two big cats in a big plywood crate with wire windows at either end was not exorbitant. You would cover the box floor with tom paper, fasten their water dishes and food dishes solidly into the corners, tack a sack of canned food with can opener to the outside, and glue simple feeding instructions to the outside. Railway Express would fasten a card to the crate upon which employees en route would write the day and time they were fed and watered, and sign their names.

The cats would ride from Utica to Florida and back in an average two and a half days and arrive in a state so mildly traumatic that a couple of hours would see them back to normal.

But each year the rates went up, and each year the train schedules worsened, and each year the men along the way seemed to give less of a damn about a pair of damn cats, and they arrived in increasingly worse condition until, finally, it became impossible.

So this, too, relates to the myth of our ever increasing standard of living. We live in a culture where service is increasingly slovenly, surly, and reluctant, where schedules mean less and less, where every species of life including the human animal is held in less esteem each year, where all the glossy gadgetry disintegrates at an ever increasing rate, where mediocrity in all things has become a goal — with all excellence suspect.

There is nothing mysterious, of course, about this accelerated decline. My sixth-grade geography teacher told us that the individual life was cheap and cruelly used in China because of the terrible population density of four hundred millions of them. Today we approach half that number in less than half the space, so that the mass insularity of the anthill is the inevitable result. Thirty-seven witnesses can watch a woman murdered. Millions of kids can learn group adjustment as if it were a commendable skill. Over half the humans in the world have no memory of World War II. In an acceleration of the technologies, it is cheaper to repeat experimentations than to conduct a search for previous results. As life gets ever more inconvenient, trashified, and irritating, it is possible to convince through electronic repetition the brand-new millions that everything is, in fact, getting better and better and better.

It is still possible to ship pets. One purchases an approved crate constructed of light metal. One drives the necessary distance to a major airport where there will be a direct flight to the major airport nearest the destination. One makes the air-express arrangements, confirms the loading, then phones someone at the far end to go to the airport and arrange to receive the animals. It is wise to get the proper tranquilizers from the vet so the animals’ response to extreme trauma will be dulled. And be prepared for heavy expense. This is yet another one of the conveniences of the jet age.

The cats had their first full summer at Piseco in 1950, and they were busy the entire time. In Florida they were more indolent. At Piseco there seemed to be a flavor of industrious self-importance about them. They would hurry in and eat and hurry out. They were working at the trade of being cats. Those summers, from 1950 through 1957, were the summers of their prime, when they were both at their heaviest, their pelts the glossiest, their agility and condition at peak. They ate hugely and with minimum selectivity and ran it all off. Always, at Piseco, their rich coats had an incomparable smell, a sweet, fresh, airy odor related in some way to washing which has been dried in the fragrance of a spring wind.

Their transient life kept their automatic control mechanism for the density of the coats in perpetual confusion. Before we left Florida, they would begin to shed winter coats, but the coolness at the lake would slow this process. Toward fall they would begin to grow a winter coat apparently planned for an Adirondack winter. They would come down then into the really suffocating heat and humidity of Florida in September, and, after a shocked pause, they would shed with such profusion our environment seemed adrift with cat hair which adhered to everything within range — furniture, clothing, and moist people.

We have one charming picture of the two of them that summer at the rented camp. Nephew John Gilbert Prentiss, Sam’s younger, was about six years old, and, trolling along the lake shore with his father, he personally caught and boated a fine small-mouth bass a little over three pounds. I took his picture on the narrow front porch of the camp. John Prentiss wears a red shirt and a wide, proud grin. He holds up his big bass. One cat is on the railing beside him, looking at the bass with pleasurable anticipation, and the other winds around the boy’s ankles, just the banner of the upright tail visible in the photograph.

That was the first summer we spent in the new camp. It was a delight, for people and for cats. The south shore of the lake was more wild than the old shore where the camps were close together. We built on a rock ledge and had a cement deck overlooking the lake. Our road was over eight hundred feet long. It was and is a good place to live and work.

The cat window was in the front, opening out onto the cement ledge of the waist-high fireplace on the terrace.

Later, Roger was to discover that he could leap up under the shield and into the mouth of the flue. This was an idiot performance, and he would stay up in there, peering down, quite obviously very satisfied with himself. When it acquired a heavy coating of soot up in there he stopped. Cats do not voluntarily dirty themselves.

The flaw in the window arrangement was that they reached it from the inside by hopping up onto the glass-topped table in the dining end of the long kitchen, next to the wall of stone which was the back side of the living-room fireplace. Our cats were quite self-effacing about this exit system. Staying close to the wall they would hop to chair, to table, and glide out. By never giving an inch we had managed to train them never to hop up onto the table where the people were eating. They did beg scraps sometimes, but in a mild and mannerly fashion. Roger was the one who came closest to taking advantage. He would sit patiently on an empty chair and then, with the stealth of an awareness of guilt, he would put one paw on the edge of the table. His name said in a tone of accusation was usually sufficient to make him flatten his ears, gulp, and pull the paw back. When this did not work, you could commit the indecency of leaning forward and blowing into his face. He has always despised and resented this. He will stalk away, pausing to stare back two or three times. He manages to express incredulity and resentment. How can you possibly be so crude? Geoffrey never took such violent exception to it.

We did not mind the Piseco window arrangement. In fact, it was handy on those days so cold we did not want any window open. It could be readily reached to be opened for a cat and closed again.

But visiting cats and kittens made it a little less than ideal. I remember one time when Charlie, in momentary confusion, tried to leap from the floor to the window sill. Trouble was, there was a good solid hunk of plate glass in the way. He gave himself a thump that left a little knot on his head. For days he preferred to holler at the door to get in and out. And, summer before last, a visiting kitten, enormously busy, had the habit at mealtime of jumping up into a lap at the part of the table furthest from the window, scrambling onto the table, and charging through the groceries on his single-minded way out.

Roger has always had a precise awareness of his table rights. Circumspect about intrusion at any meal, he will nonetheless leap up onto the table without hesitation, when Dorothy is reading there or writing letters, and spread himself out amiably atop whatever she is trying to do.

Neither cat tried to steal anything from the table. With one startling exception — the time Geoff got hooked on pills. But that comes later.

The last day of travel south was through torrential rains which were the aftermath of a hurricane, rains which for the first time soaked through the tarp laced over our cargo trailer, and through the suitcases, washing the unnecessarily vivid colors out of the suitcase linings and onto the clothing therein.

We had written Randy when we would arrive, and it was raining hard that late afternoon when we got there, hardly in any mood to cope with the thousand irritating little problems involved in moving into a rented cottage. But Randy, bless him, had put a crew to work at the house. All the utilities were hooked up. The yard and house were spotless. Beds were made and turned down, opened packs of cigarettes on the end tables, Coke and beer in the refrigerator. Never have we been welcomed so imaginatively. A few days later when he came out to see how we were getting along, he brought a throw net, cast it over a fat mullet, split and cleaned the mullet on the dock, and showed Dorothy a fine method of broiling it.

The cats approved the setup at once. They liked the bay side. They would go over onto the beach when we did, but they did not care for it. The glare seemed to bother them. In all that open space they had no chance of catching a sandpiper, a sanderling, or a tern. They seemed to regard the surf as ominous indeed and would become agitated when we went out into it. They would pace back and forth and we could see their mouths make hollering motions.

We had seen a cat who had made an interesting adjustment to beach life. When we lived on Acacia Street, my sister and her husband had vacationed down at Madeira Beach. When we went down to see them there, Dorrie pointed out a cat at work. She had been watching him for days. A battered old timber groin extended out into the water. That cat would lie on the beach against the groin, in the actual wash of the surf. He looked like some wretched bit of flotsam, all soaked and caked, the waves washing over him. When finally some unwary water bird came near enough that sodden cat would spring and bring it down, kill it immediately, and carry it off the beach up into the sea oats to eat it. I have never heard of another cat who used this hunting scheme so contrary to cat habit and instinct.

There was the memorable instance of the big wave. When weather and tides were opportune, I used to knock off work in the late afternoon, take some frozen fishing shrimp out of the deepfreeze and with rod and gear take the narrow path through the three hundred feet of mangrove out to the sand bar at the end of Point Crisp and fish the dredged channel near the Inland Waterway marker.

On one strange afternoon I caught sixteen fish, each of an entirely different species. The cats would invariably accompany me, walking along with me, tails pleasurably high. They liked it much better than the beach. They would sit behind me like a pair of dogs, and when the line tightened and the reel hummed they would stand up and move closer, as eager to see what would come out of the water as I. The people in small boats thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of them snapped our picture. I wonder how many of those pictures are tucked away in drawers and albums in the north, showing “that fellow fishing with those two big gray cats.”

One afternoon the fishing was slow, and both cats lay on the shells a dozen feet behind me. I always wore old sneakers and pants so I could wade around on the submerged part of the bar. A cabin cruiser came up the channel from the south. It did not seem notably large or notably fast, but as it went by I noticed it was dragging a wake behind it worthy of a Great Lakes ore boat. It slapped me at about mid-thigh, and I turned, too late to scramble for my tackle box. Roger, for once, was more alert. He went scampering to high ground with the wave in close pursuit. Just as Geoff sprang up, the wave hit him and knocked him down and rolled him over. He came up sputtering, and as the wave drained off the shells, he headed miserably for home. He gave a tired whine of complaint about every twenty feet until I could no longer hear him.

Thereafter he did all his waiting up on the high ground. Roger braved the shell beach as before. When a fish was being caught, Geoff would come down to the edge of the water as before, but if while awaiting his share he happened to see a boat coming from any direction, even a skiff with a five-horse outboard, he would whirl and run to high ground, returning well after it had passed.

To dwell only upon incidents is, in a sense, misleading, because these incidents do not show how these house guests, even after maturity, continued to change in interesting ways.

For years Dorothy and Roger carried on a most curious and stubborn conflict. Things have to be done to cats. Drops for itching ears. Powder for flea time. Nails on many-toed feet tend to sometimes grow back upon themselves and start digging into the pad. Matted hair must be brushed. When cats have colds, their eyes need wiping.

Geoffrey was a stoic about these attentions. He endured them, and they were over quickly, and he bore no ill will. Roger was determined that no one was going to touch him without getting clawed ragged, and Dorothy was just as determined that he would learn to accept these necessary attentions. He would lie on his back and snarl and yowl at her, digging and biting every chance he got. I kept telling her that the cat might really hurt her some time. She was always dabbing medicine on the little nicks and gashes he gave her. For years it was stalemate. She wouldn’t quit trying, and he wouldn’t quit trying to make the whole thing impossible.

Then, over quite a comparatively short period, he mellowed. He became tractable. He became, in fact, so ingratiatingly gooey and sloppy that he began to be known as Gladys. Though still showing the wistful urge to let someone have it, he endured unwelcome and sometimes quite unpleasant attentions. It became standard practice, when they were ended, for him to go right to his dish and wait for something special, a reward for exemplary behavior. I can account for the change which occurred only by attributing it to the eventual, reluctant exercise of reason. No matter how venomous the objection, the unpleasantness, such as the removal of a tick, would be accomplished. He did not become “tamed” in the sense of being broken to obedience. He made the rational decision to accept, and this carried over to the ministrations of veterinarians also.

At Point Crisp he showed at one point an unmistakable capacity for logical thought. When we made the addition to the main house, we removed the garage, put in a double carport, and put my work area on top of the carport as the only second-story portion of the house. The sliding glass windows above my desk area open onto a shallow screened porch. From the farthest corner of this screened porch, one can look down at an acute angle directly into the window over the kitchen sink.

It was and still is Roger’s habit to come up the stairs and pay me a visit on the average of about once every two or three days. Though he has never had Geoff’s affinity for boxes, he has had an exploratory interest in cupboards. I have dozens of them in my work area, at floor level. He comes up and picks a cupboard, tugs tentatively at it with his claws, turns, and makes a small yow of polite request. Sometimes there is no vocalization at all, just the movement of the mouth. I get up and open it a few inches. He likes to pull them open the rest of the way. He goes in and explores. He isn’t after game. He just wants to check and see what it’s like in there. He doesn’t settle down. He prowls around and leaves.

One day he wanted to go out on the screened porch. He had been out there before. On the day in question I let him out. As it was a warm day Dorothy had the kitchen window open, and she happened to be at the sink. When movement caught her eye, she called up to him. I watched him. He stopped and stared down at her, six feet away. He tilted his head and stared at her. She continued to talk to him.

Abruptly and purposefully he turned around and came back into my office, walked diagonally across to the stairs, went down the stairs to Dorothy’s studio, walked back through the service area to the kitchen door and stood there and stared at her.

Nothing unusual here. However, that cat with the two of us observing him, repeated that trek seven times, without side trips, interruptions, or any lagging of attention and curiosity. Obviously the spatial relationships baffled him. Down there was the familiar food corner, the accustomed voice and greeting. There could not be a duplication. Yet how could he come so far yet remain so close? Seven times he stood on the porch and stared down at her. Seven times he went to the kitchen doorway and checked. It was not a game of hide and seek. He was doing no prancing. He was involved in solemn thought. At last he seemed satisfied, and when I next spotted him about fifteen minutes later he was sitting out in the sun in the driveway, either by accident or intent, in the precise place where he could most readily see both the upstairs porch corner and the downstairs kitchen window.

There was one interesting change of habit and attitude which seemed to be a result of the mellowing of Old Turtlehead. When he decided once and for all that no harm was intended him, he went overboard in expanding the number of people he would trust. It was as though, discovering his own capacity for good will, he could now assume everyone felt the same.

Previously they had both been prone at times to pay visits. When we had people in the guesthouse, they would spend as much time there as at the main house. They both quite obviously enjoyed the excitements and confusions of parties we gave. Geoff in particular was the party cat, showing off shamelessly, and very deft at singling out those guests who would most willingly share the hors d’oeuvres. In his younger years I would do a party trick with him to demonstrate his trust and his amiability. I would take his hind legs in one hand, adjusting the grip carefully so as to avoid hurting his legs. Then I would lift him by the back legs and hold him at arm’s length. He would hang there, apparently quite content, front legs extended, even purring at times. Trying the same thing with Roger would have been like trying to juggle a few nests of hornets.

Incidentally, one of Geoff’s homely pleasures was to lie on his back in the shell driveway, wriggling, feet in the air and have somebody grasp his feet, front paws in one hand, rear ones in the other, and rub him back and forth on the shells, like a furry iron on a gritty ironing board. Roger’s response to this was to try to get his teeth into the nearest wrist, not in anger but in too vigorous a response to what he thought an invitation to roughhouse.

Also, both of them seemed to feel that we employed people for the express purpose of amusing the cats. For several years we had a yard man they were especially fond of. Mac was a black man with a miraculously green thumb and an extraordinary sense of design and proportion. He had such an affinity for growing things, that when he worked around the place he actually talked to the plants. And when he was at our house, the cats were in the middle of everything he did. Later it turned out that his habit of keeping his cigarettes in his hip pocket was a fatal one. During an argument he was shot through the heart when he reached for them.

He was replaced by Arnett Baker, the husband of Rianner Baker, who has been our part-time cleaning woman from the first year we lived there. The cats knew that dusters, dustcloths, and dry mops were game things. It took Rianner some time to get used to one of Roger’s habits. He still does it, though rarely. He is stretched out on the floor in apparent indifference. If you walk within range, he reaches out and hooks you by one leg. If you are wearing pants, he uses the claws. Bare legs get a quick little tug when he hooks his arm around the ankle.

This would startle Rianner almost as much as the unexpected bite. Housework was punctuated by little gasps and yelps. Until she got used to him, I think he managed to upset her considerably. She was immediately fond of Geoffrey cat and intrigued and impressed by his responsiveness, which seemed like courtesy. Geoff was never too busy to say hello. If you walked by him twenty times in an hour, you would invariably get a greeting, a little noise which I can spell out as Yop. And whenever you opened a door for him to let him in, as he walked by you he would say his version of thank you, a strange little mumbled sound he uttered on no other occasions. A little Mermph, spoken with rising inflection.

I might interject here, about this business of opening doors, as the cats grew more elderly they would use their window when the people were unavailable. But it was an extra effort, and when there was the opportunity of doorman service, they used it.

Rianner, in time, became very amused by Roger and eventually fond of him. But he still complicates her chores. He is especially intrigued by mop water. He likes to trot behind in it while the floor is being mopped. He enjoys lying down on a damp, freshly mopped floor or, even better, a floor freshly waxed. He gets very excited over the odor of Clorox. Geoff was indifferent to it. But to Roger that odor seems to have some kind of sexy import. Perhaps it does bear some faint chemical relationship to the odor of tomcat. But he makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself weaving around and around a bucket of Clorox water, smirking and bumping his head against it.

Having mellowed, Roger became an inveterate caller. Alone, he would visit every house on the small peninsula, thumping the screen doors, walking happily in and making a short tour of inspection, tail high. If food was offered he would accept a little graciously, but that was apparently not his objective. There are just six houses. His last stop would be the house of Bruff and Beth Olin, the house on the point nearest the mainland part of the key. There, in addition to the house, he would go out onto the dock and hop aboard their cabin cruiser and check that over. Tour finished, he would come back down the road.

One year, right after the house next to Olins’ had been rented, the woman there saw Beth in her yard and came over to tell her what had happened the previous afternoon, late. She said that a poor mother cat, obviously expecting kittens any moment, had come to the back door and asked to be let in. Once in, the cat had searched all over the house, obviously looking for a place to have the kittens. The woman had called the vet and had been told to fix a box for the cat. The woman had torn up one of her dresses to make a soft nest. The mother cat seemed to appreciate the box, purring and all, but then she began to ask to get out of the house. They had kept taking her back and putting her in the box, but finally she grew so insistent, they let her out and she hadn’t been seen since, and the woman was very worried about her.

Beth, suddenly suspecting what had happened, asked the woman to describe the cat, and when she came to the part about something being wrong with its left eye, Beth said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, that was Roger MacDonald!”

As male neuters grow old they develop a loose and heavy fold of flesh under the abdomen. To the uninitiated, it could look somewhat like pregnancy. We are glad she did not rush poor old mother cat down to the animal shelter.

It must have been one of Roger’s more confusing social experiences.

The summer of 1957 was the last time we shipped the cats to Utica. They were in fine shape when we expressed them. They arrived at Dr. Sellman’s in horrid condition after four days in transit. It was cold throughout the East, and he said that it seemed possible that somewhere along the line they had been left out of doors, perhaps on a station platform. The once legible statements of care given them en route had deteriorated to an indifferent, incomplete, indecipherable scrawl while, over the interim, the cost had more than tripled.

The cats were eleven and twelve, too old to adjust readily to hardship and exposure, and certainly we did not feel right about risking them again to such slovenliness and indifference. Geoff wasn’t badly off, but Roger was dangerously ill. We discussed it with Dr. Sellman. I had learned during Geoff’s serious illness how to give a cat a pill. With thumb and forefinger on exactly the right place, the jaws will open. Then, using a dart-throwing motion, you throw the pill down into the upturned mouth, aiming at one side of the back of the tongue. Still keeping the mouth aimed upward, you close the jaws and hold them closed, and the cat’s throat will work as he swallows. Geoff, aside from some devious business of pretending it was gone and spitting it out later, had been very good about it. But I had qualms about Roger. Nevertheless, we all agreed that a cat so sick had a better chance of recovery in a familiar place with his own people. They readily become depressed while in kennels.

So after the doctor treated him again, we wrapped him up warmly, and Dorothy held him in her lap while we drove them up to the lake. Once there it soon became evident that giving him his pills was no problem. He became weaker and weaker, until he could hardly lift his head. He was too weak to eat. We kept him in a box near the floor furnace. Dorothy was up every night several times, spooning warm milk into him. He was a few bones and sinews in a disreputable gray sack. After a time he stopped feeling as hot, and he did seem a little more responsive, but he was still terribly weak.

Even after seven years, Dorothy still recalls his moment of recovery with a certain amount of amused indignation. One afternoon was warm and sunny. She thought it might make him feel better if she carried his box out into the sunshine for a little while. She could watch him out the kitchen window.

Suddenly she looked out and saw the slat-sided cat get out of the box and wobble off in the direction of the clearing at the side of the house. Remembering the way Geoff had crept away to either recover or die, she hurried out. She found the old fool in the clearing, with painful slowness going through the unmistakable motions of the hunt. He looked at her with his idiot grin. In view of his hunting abilities when in peak condition, it was an incredibly optimistic performance.

Thereafter he recovered so quickly that in a couple of days it was a gory chore trying to get a pill down him. His new-found benignity stopped short of having his jaws pried open.

In the autumn we risked one final railroad trip. The weather was good. Again it took too long, and that was the time the inside of their box was such a fetid horror Geoff went immediately over and stood with his face in the hedge. I put the crate in the bay weighted down and let the tide cleanse it. After it was recovered and was dried out, I put it on the burning pile.

When we picked Roger up at Buckelwood and took him home in the fall of 1960, we expected him to search for Geoff once back in familiar surroundings. But, of course, he’d had a cage to himself at Buckelwood after Geoff died. Always, except in case of illness, we requested that they be kept in the same cell.

Roger was delighted to be home. And he seemed equally delighted to be the only cat. All food, service, and sleeping places were his alone. He seemed to understand there was no other cat there and no point in looking for one. But once in a while, not oftener than once a week, we would hear him, usually out in the screened cage, making that ah-rowr? ah-rowr? which was forever the call to game-time.

Deprived of the customary rough-and-tumble he perfected the substitute which he had begun to devise during the previous spring when Geoff would not play. Perhaps because of the malformed feet, Roger makes an astonishing amount of noise on a hardwood floor when he runs. It is a ba-rumm, ba-rumm, ba-rumm sound, exactly like the hoof rhythm of a galloping horse. Thus the name of the game became the Flying Red Horse, a dead giveaway as to the age of certain parties who used to hear it on a radio commercial long ago. It would usually begin out in the screened terrace and still does. It is a morning game, most probably when the people are on the second cup of coffee. Having the doors open to the living room and to the studio in warm weather enhances the game. First there is the arched back, the tail slightly puffed, a feisty little sidelong scamper, as though he is avoiding some opponent visible only to him. Then there are some yammerings, and he breaks into his gallop. Some days it takes up the stairs to my work area and back down again, but always through the studio and kitchen, around and around, hoofs drumming, ears laid back. There is always at least one reckless transit under the couch, this accomplished by stretching out on the back and using the claws to dig into the underside of the low couch and pull himself along at a good pace. It always ends with his scrambling recklessly up onto the long bar, using chair back and stools to get there, running the length of the bar, then, panting, mouth open, looking terribly fierce, he reaches his claws as high as he can on the four-by-four post at the end of the bar.

I suspect that this is a rare activity for an old party of 130. Reflexes and elasticity being not what they were, he sometimes miscalculates. Twice this past season he has misjudged the leap to the bar, scrabbled at it, slipped, fallen. The game ends there. The humiliated cat walks away.

When the game is successfully concluded, wild passion spent, he finds himself atop the bar. He can get down, but it is a jolt to old bones and muscles he would rather avoid if possible, and cons the people into lifting him down. Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I awoke and heard him, all alone in the dark house, being a Flying Red Horse. I cannot say why it seemed so touching.

Johnny and Anne had acquired other livestock that spring — rabbits, some ducks, a pair of goslings. The geese adopted them as parents. By the time the geese were half grown, Johnny and Anne had become so enchanted with their responsiveness, intelligence, fastidiousness, and the ducks, by comparison, seemed such mindless, offensive, noisy, sloppy gluttons, they began to dine on duck.

Geese are fantastically effective watchdogs. In the middle of one night there was a horrible racket out back. By then the wildcats had cleaned out most of the small creatures in their wood lot. That night they or it came to eat goose. They slew the gander and opened a long gash in the neck of the goose, before the kids were able to get out there and drive it away. Johnny and Anne had named the female Knees, a name which will seem apt to anyone who has stared with any objectivity at the knees of a goose. She was understandably agitated, and they brought her into the house, bandaged her neck, finally got her settled down.

When they took walks, Knees and Grey would accompany them. Geese are not constructed for walks in the woods. They cannot see where they are stepping. She would do the best she could and wait noisily to be picked up and hoisted over obstacles she couldn’t manage. There were references to Knees in every letter. We felt that a goose could be nothing other than a rather absurd-looking idiot.

They wrote us of leaving Knees alone outside one day when they went on an errand. When they came back she was gone. As they were looking for her, the phone rang. A farmer nearly a half mile down the highway had her, and they drove down to find the farmer and his wife and Knees standing on the porch. Knees acted nervous and gave them elaborate greetings.

The farmer said that he had seen this here white goose going across that back lot out there, flat out, wings spread, running like hell, apparently with something chasing it. Thinking he might scare off whatever was after it, he had given a yell, whereupon Knees had spotted him, veered, and come directly to him to stand and lean against his leg, staring out into the field and talking a blue streak. Considerably rattled, he had headed back to the house with the goose practically underfoot, talking every step of the way. There it had climbed the steps to the porch, and damn if it didn’t act as if it knew they were going to come after it.

Knees and Grey were at the camp when we got there last summer. Johnny and Anne had arrived first and opened it up.

There is room for Knees in this cat book, because this book is concerned with how living creatures display their separate personalities only when there is trust and security and, most of all, attention.

She was almost full-grown when she first saw water she could swim in. She went into it at once and headed off until she was a tiny white spot. At first she was a bad swimmer. She couldn’t stroke properly. Each thrust would swing her tail over toward the side opposite the thrust, so that instead of gliding she wobbled from side to side. When Anne went down to the dock and called her, Knees came heading back from far away, giving a resounding, triumphant QUONK every fifty feet.

That first night she spent a happy hour in front of the floodlight by the deck, snapping moths out of the air with that multi-purpose beak. The kids were planning a trip very soon and were testing a tent they had erected under the pine trees back of the camp. When they went off to bed, they called Knees, and she went waddling along with them, keeping up a continuous conversation.

In a few days they left, taking Grey, leaving Knees with us. By then Knees had given us her approval. We knew the formula for goose soup — cylindrical duck pellets which dissolve in water to make a greenish and singularly nasty-looking mess. Just as she was more responsive to Anne than to Johnny, she was more responsive to Dorothy than to me.

We were most astonished by the “vocabulary” she had. There was a greeting noise, made when you approached her. This was accompanied by a series of low bows, strangely oriental in flavor. There was the eating noise when she was presented with soup, an ecstatic and delighted little chuckling that she could continue to make even when her bill was deep in the soup. She liked the soup donor to stay close by, preferably sitting on his or her heels on the other side of the bowl. Knees would stop the chuckling and soup-sucking at regular intervals to lift her head high and stare directly and fixedly into your face. For some reason a goose, head on, staring at you, looks cross-eyed.

There was quiet conversation — when adult was inert and goose was paddling about or trudging about, a kind of peaceful little quabbling sound. There was excited conversation, such as when she was going for a walk, a swim, or a boat ride. This was a quabbling carried on at a louder and faster rate, punctuated every little while by one or two of those huge, resonant QUONK sounds. Sometimes QUANK!

After Dorothy found that Knees adored having fresh grass pulled for her, she developed a con-artist sound, a tiny, inquisitive, plaintive queeping, head tilted, leaning hesitantly toward the thicket where the good grass grew, and which she dared not enter. Pull the poor little goose some grass.

There were the almost inaudible little peeps she made when composing herself for sleep. There were the huge series of trumpeted quonkings giving warning of anyone or anything coming by land or by sea — in the daylight.

There was the guttural little sound she made while preening and combing herself after the elaborate daily bath, a kind of expression of diligence and satisfaction.

It surprised us to learn that geese yawn and also snore.

The one kind of conversation which most intrigued us cannot be explained without discussing her daily routine. After the kids left she took over a small, shallow bay directly in front of the house. It lies to the left of the small, thickety peninsula leading to the dock. A spur of rock runs off to the left, making her bay into a U with the opening to the left, a U about ten feet across and ten feet long. Her dish was on the sand rim of the U opposite the opening.

Geese apparently have phenomenal eyesight and hearing. In the flock they must somehow have a rotating-duty system for the sentry geese. Being a one-goose flock is a very serious and exhausting business indeed. She was very white. She was such an impressive, blazing white that even by starlight we could see her out there standing on the end of the dock, no matter at what time of night we looked out, head very high, tense and alert and sleepless. We learned she seemed a lot more relaxed if we left the floodlights turned on. They did not reach that far, but at least she seemed to feel she could not see anything that might be coming after her from the bushes.

In the daytime if you called to her, you would get the big, jolly QUANK routine. If you called to her at night, you would get an answer you could just barely hear. And so we fell into the habit of going down there each night to say good night to the goose. Her conversation was hilarious. It was a variation of the daytime excited gabbling, but it was carried on in such a hushed tone, it was exactly like a person whispering. She would keep turning her head from side to side, inspecting the darkness about, and she was obviously telling us of all the horrors lurking about It was such a convincing performance we would find ourselves talking very quietly too. One night she got so carried away with her recital of terrors, she gave out with one great, shocking, rusty QUONK that frightened her into an abrupt silence. She listened for a long time, then began muttering to us again.

One night we saw her down there floating in her little bay. We spoke, and there was absolutely no response. We went down to the waters edge. Still without a sound she came out of the water and paddled around behind me and stood leaning against me and looking out around my leg. Only then did she make the faintest of sounds, and it seemed like controlled hysteria. She could not have said, more clearly, “It’s really after me tonight” She came back up to the house with us, glancing back, talking more bravely. I lifted her onto the deck. She went at once to the screen door to be let in. We let her in with certain reluctance. The venerable expression — loose as a goose — is soundly anchored to reality. But we couldn’t leave her out there. We piled furniture to keep her sequestered in the kitchen and bedroom hallway area and paved it with newspapers. Once inside she talked ever more loudly. When she began to settle down we went to bed, leaving our bedroom door wedged open about three inches so we could hear her if she got tangled up in anything out there. In bed, we heard her come flapping along the hall, muttering. She stuck her head through the three-inch gap, extended the full length of her long white neck, gave one huge, jolly, ear-shattering QUANK, and then padded back to the kitchen. That night we heard a wildcat scream.

We were afraid a precedent had been set, but that was the only night all summer long she demanded refuge. I don’t think she was kidding.

In daytime excited talk she loved to have Dorothy quabble back at her, and she would put that bill an inch from Dorothy’s lips, and they would go it at a great rate, Knees getting more and more agitated.

She did a lot of sleeping each morning, from first light on, catching up from the night’s vigil, standing on one ridiculous foot, head laid along her back. By mid-morning she was hearty and cheerful. Because of a large and very shallow rocky shelf about 150 feet off our shore, I mark it with a buoy each summer to keep water skiers from bursting their primitive skulls upon it, and as a guide to friends visiting in their boats. The buoy is round, larger than a basketball, and floats high, painted half red and half white, the white side uppermost as it floats. Day after day, Knees would swim out, particularly when the lake had a slight chop, and float right beside that buoy, bobbing up and down with it. I imagine that, driven by the flock instinct, it was the nearest thing to another goose she could find.

The daily ablution, performed in her little bay, was extensive. She would dip her head in a manner that would lift water up and send it running down her back, pausing to dig at herself, ruffle herself up, send small feathers drifting downwind. After at least ten minutes of this, she would do surface dives and swim underwater, going outside her bay and swimming ten and fifteen feet at a time, visible from the dock as a swift, white, and very graceful shape. If, as Anne discovered, people would gather around, clap their hands, and say Good Goose, she could be induced to keep the underwater act up for much longer than usual. After this portion of the routine, she would stand at the end of the rock ridge and preen herself for a half hour. There are oil glands under their wings, and these secretions are used to smooth down each feather. Twice in the summer some motorboat oil drifted in, giving her a ring like a nasty bathtub. Each time she just kept washing over and over until it was gone, hour after hour of effort.

The first time the merganser family came along, Knees became terribly excited. She went after them, big white wings flapping, big web feet running along the surface of the water, neck outstretched, honking enthusiastic greetings. At this apparition, the ducks took off like rockets. She sat on the water and watched them go and paddled back to her bay. After that, she never paid the slightest bit of attention to them. She gave no evidence of hearing them or seeing them even when they passed within ten feet of the end of the dock.

No one in the family could go out in a boat without Knees insisting on coming along. Rowboat, kicker-boat, canoe, sailboat, her self-assigned place was in the bow, standing tall, honking at everything in sight. Dorothy has a water bicycle at the lake which she uses during the last of the daylight. When she took it out, Knees would come paddling along, hollering. Dorothy would stop; Knees would flounder up onto one of the aluminum pontoons, and off they would go into the sunset. But on the water bike, Knees was usually very silent. She would make some sotto voce comments, watch the shore carefully, then manage to fall off as awkwardly as possible when they returned to the little bay.

People liked to either troll slowly for bass out beyond our rocks, or anchor and fish. Knees trumpeted at every passing boat. The very slow ones and the ones which anchored got her so excited she could not contain herself. Sooner or later she would take off in that dead run, that half-flying, half-running zoom across the top of the water right at the boat. Reaching it she would settle down and then merely circle it if it was anchored, or go along with it if it was trolling, quabbling loudly. The smart fishermen learned they either had to lift her into the boat or go fish somewhere else. Once in an early morning mist she went so far down the lake shore, escorting some fishermen, I could no longer see her or them from the dock. But I could hear her, and I could hear the plaintive voice of the fisherman overriding hers, pleading, “Go home, duck! For God’s sake, go home!”

I saw one friendly approach which could have turned out disastrously for Knees. A boat was about a hundred yards out from our dock. A man and a woman were in it, fishing. Knees, after considerable racket, worked herself up to the proper pitch and took off. She could be quite a sight to an unsuspecting stranger, big white wings flapping, feet slapping the surface of the water, coming right at you, quonking furiously, moving at perhaps twenty miles an hour. While the man merely stared at the oncoming goose, the woman sprang to her feet, grabbed an oar and took aim like Mickey Mantle. Some people are afraid of birds, and some have heard that geese are dangerous, confusing them, no doubt, with swans. Knees halted ten feet short of the boat. The woman sat down. The man started the motor, and they roared away from there, and Knees came paddling thoughtfully home.

Usually, when boats did not leave, if we called to Knees she would often come chugging in, talking all the way about what she’d been doing.

When anybody went swimming, she was transported. She would go right along with them, yap into their faces, and try to stand on their shoulders. With Johnny and Anne, she would dive and circle their legs, brushing against them under water.

Best of all, Knees loved the catamaran. I had ordered it. It came in a cardboard box of suitable size to make a coffin for the Cardiff giant. The detailed instructions said the average twelve-year-old could put it together in an afternoon. It took me three days, plus considerable help the final afternoon from Dorothy’s brother. Under sail, the people sit on a canvas sling, about eight feet square, not unlike a trampolin, laced to a frame elevated six inches above the twin hulls.

We had only to start rigging the sail, and Knees would come out of a sound sleep and come paddling around the headland toward the other bay, quonking with expectant pleasure.

Not long before Labor Day, Dorothy and I took Knees on her final sail of the summer. We crossed the lake and ran slowly before a light breeze down the row of camps on the other side, about sixty feet off shore. By then Knees was a celebrity bird all over that lake.

We would hear child voices yell from shore. “Hey! There’s Knees! Hi, Knees. Hey, Knees!” And that bird would respond, each time, by gathering herself and giving out with such huge honks, they resonated and echoed off the hills and deafened us and delighted a whole lake shore of children.

Our nephew, John Prentiss, visited us one day last summer and brought Kristin to meet us, the girl he is now married to. Kristin has lovely long hair, a natural strawberry blond shade. They sat down by the dock, and Knees circled Kristin, gabbling with excited approval. And finally she began to preen Kristin’s long hair, strand by strand, working her way around the girl’s head, uncannily gentle, making her small pleasure sounds for the entire fifteen minutes it took.

I used the incident in a short story which This Week Magazine published in November 1963.

The goose was the good thing last summer, and Grey was the bad thing. He had grown into a large and handsome cat and, I am afraid, a bold and reckless cat. The second trip Johnny and Anne took, they left Grey with us too. He was happy and busy. He despised Knees, probably resenting the attention she got. When he learned how afraid she was of any subtle rustling in the brush, he would torment her in the evening by stalking her, sometimes sending her in a wild honking dash out to where she would float beside her buoy, reluctant to return.

It was his habit in the evening to go in and out through the window a half dozen times after dark, before we went to bed. One night he went out just before dark. He didn’t return during the evening. We went out and called him. He did not return all night. Had he returned, he would have made himself evident. He had a curious trick. He didn’t sleep with the people, but when he decided it was time they should get up, he didn’t holler. He merely walked across them, stomping. He would step lightly at other times. In the early morning he would deliberately stomp. There is no other word to describe it.

For days we walked and searched and called. Had he been in the area and alive, he certainly could have found his way back by the periodic daytime QUONK of Miss Knees. Maybe something got him. Possibly, on the other hand, somebody picked him up. He was a handsome cat with a perfect confidence that all people bore him good will. He would have gone up to anyone who spoke to him.

It is a miserable experience to lose someone else’s cat. Johnny and Anne were all too tolerant about it, though very saddened to lose him so soon after losing Jaymie. After all the years and all the cats, the odds ran out last summer.

They took Knees back to Michigan. She had made some casual attempts to build a nest in the grass near the Piseco dock. Back in Michigan, each night, they put her on a small screened porch. She built a nest at the foot of the porch steps at one side. One morning Anne found Knees running back and forth in front of the screen door in considerable agitation. It was a cold morning. Anne opened the door, Knees ran out, plumped herself into her grass nest and stood up moments later to reveal a large, steaming goose egg. One has eggs on the nest, not on the porch.

They came down to visit us last Christmas. They boarded Knees with a very sympathetic veterinarian they know, and by Christmas they had replaced Jaymie and Grey with five cats and brought them all along.

I shall not go into the characters, habits, traumas, and inter-personal relationships of Lisa, Gimli, Abishag, and group, except to say that I would rather burn bamboo under my fingernails than drive three thousand miles with five cats.

It is too bad Roger was in sorry shape while they were there. The minor athletics of the water hole had become too much for him, and he had settled for a yellow water dish under the bathroom lavatory, which he kept conning one or the other of us to empty and refill with fresh. He slept a great deal, had difficulty getting onto his feet, walked like an old, old man, and was not interested in going outdoors even in the daytime. No Flying Red Horse. Meager appetite.

As far as appetite is concerned, Roger never hollered for his food. During Geoff’s lifetime he never had to. Geoff hollered for two. After Geoff died, Roger’s procedure was to go to his kitchen corner when Dorothy was getting a meal and merely sit and stare up at her with a total, fixed, placid expectancy. Every time she glanced down, he was looking into her face. Unlike Geoff and most other animals, Roger has never been reluctant to stare you right in the eye. And, if there is a face on his level, as when he is atop the bar, he likes to tuck his chin under, purr, and press his furry forehead against yours.

During this past year Roger has added one new little trick to a lifetime of improvisation. Dorothy almost always wears barefoot sandals. When she is at the sink and has not noticed him for what he considers too long a period, he moves closer to sit with one front paw resting on the top of her foot. It is a trusting and gentle reminder. Here is your cat. It is not something which could be an accident. It is too consistent. It establishes physical contact and, as such, is related to affection. For an old cat it seems that the food relationship becomes somewhat ceremonial, with a customary pattern of asking and receiving, even when it ends with but one small mouthful and the plodding return to the soft couch.

Though he was not well last Christmas, the welter of visiting cats stimulated him, and he tried to respond. The little ones were wary of him, and in choosing up sides for the games did not need him. Once, while they were there, he assayed a rather enfeebled rendition of Flying Red Horse, but unfortunately his route brought him face to face with a waspish female with a sore mouth named Lisa, and after an abrupt stop, he turned and walked away with what little dignity was left him.

After kids and cats had left, Roger became worse. I found I hated one thing most of all. I hated to go out into the living room in the morning and see him asleep there and be on his bad eye side, with him too deaf to know I was up. Sooner or later he would sense some presence, perhaps, through the transmitted vibrations of my footsteps, and give a sudden start and snap his head around and stare, then give the curl-tongue morning yawn, the slow, careful stretchings, then the hesitant descent from the low couch to come over and bump a head against a leg and get a morning scuffle of neck hair and under the white chin. Cats are so vibrantly alert, it seems some manner of indecent cheating to be able to come up on one in such inadvertent secrecy.

We thought it was the end of him, the machine wearing down. It was depressing but inevitable.