THEA

“HERE, THEA!” Phillip called. “Here, Thea! Thea!”

Thea sat in the center of his bedroom rug with her white paws primly side by side, blinking up at his face. The impression she conveyed was of a cat who knew exactly what was going on; who held him in tolerant affection but wasn’t going to jump through hoops for him.

He rattled the cardboard container of cat treats. Her pupils jumped wide for a second, but she only adjusted her paws and purred audibly at him across the room.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Phillip cried. She was making him feel like a fool. He went across to where she sat and gave her a treat. She ate it with dainty satisfaction, then rubbed around his legs approvingly.

“Hey! Who’s training who here?”

“Mee,” said Thea.

“Yeah, you! You’re a witch, that’s what you are!” He picked her up and lay across the bed. Thea arranged herself on his chest, paws tucked under her breastbone. She beamed down into his face, purring so heartily that he felt the vibration through all his internal organs. Once again he felt he’d done just what she wanted.

“You know what I think?” he said. “I think you cats are an alien race, taking us over by mind power. You make us your slaves, and you make us like it. The human race is doomed!” At the moment he did feel taken over, with Thea’s purr humming within him and the condescending looks of approval she cast him from time to time. Poor nice dumb slave Phillip! A pat on the head will make him feel good.

“You treat us like dogs,” he said.

Dogs could be bought with a little approval. Dogs could be bullied. Dogs could be trained. Dogs were smothery, and slobbered affection on you at inconvenient moments. Rebuke them and they lay around looking sad and sighing. Dogs were heavy.

Pigs, now … actually he preferred not to think about pigs. He considered other farm animals as he had known them. Cows were vague, stubborn, and seemed unrelated to people. Cows and people treated each other as objects, and obstacles. The relationship, on both sides, was conducted on a level of low cunning … except that cows were innocent, however annoying; like crying babies. Humans were not.

Goats were different, now. His two aunts, Vivian and Pat, kept goats, and it seemed almost like they lived in a commune. The goats weren’t pets, they weren’t spoken of like children; but they weren’t just livestock, either. They were more like partners, and Vivian mentioned them casually in her letters—Amy, Leah, Tony.…

The neighbor’s motorcycle roared to life, tearing apart the quiet afternoon. Thea jumped, sat up on Phillip’s chest looking annoyed, and then soothed herself with a bath. The motorcycle revved for several minutes before the neighbor departed, trailing the sound a long way behind him. Phillip clenched tight fistfuls of the bedspread. “Bastard, I hate your guts!” he whispered. Why should people have so much power to ruin other people’s quiet? Damn it.…

Thea glanced up suddenly from her laundry, and a second later Phillip heard a girl’s voice. “This is the house.”

Go away, he thought. Shut up and go away!

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” said another voice—an older woman. Burglars, casing the joint? Jehovah’s Witnesses?

“I’d like to see the girl, anyway,” the younger voice said wistfully. “Greg’s gone bananas over her.”

Greg would be one of the half dozen boys who whirred up their dead-end street on bikes all day long, hoping for a glimpse of Carrie. They looked to be his own age. They probably didn’t know that Carrie was three years older and going to nursing school in the fall. Phillip had marked them down on his mental list of people not to make friends with.

“Oh, look! Chicks!” the old lady cried. “I should have thought keeping chickens would be illegal in this part of town.”

“Everything interesting’s illegal in this part of town,” the girl said bitterly.

Well, now, a girl after his own heart! Ruthlessly he dumped Thea to the floor, swiveled on his bed, and peeked out the narrow crack between the edge of the curtain and the window frame.

Out in the sunny street, looking over the picket fence into the yard, stood a tall, straight girl in jeans, and a taller, straighter old lady in a denim jumper. No Bibles, but both had a fanatical look about the mouth, a look of intolerance.

“Chickens are disgusting things,” said the woman, after they had watched the baby chicks a few minutes.

“Why?”

“Oh, the way they peck at one another. If one is hurt, showing a little blood, or it looks the least bit different, they’ll all gang up and peck the poor thing to death. Makes you ashamed.”

“Ashamed?” The girl looked, frowning, from her grandmother to the baby chicks. At last her expression lightened, and she shook her head decisively.

“No. Now you sound like Dad.”

“How so?”

“Oh, he loves to do that—point out something that animals do that seems vicious, and … and … uh …”

The old lady had made some mental leap and now looked perfectly enlightened, but she let the girl struggle on.

“Well, he somehow makes out from that that the world is basically bad, that people can’t help the terrible things they do, and we might as well not even try. And I hate it!”

“Hmm,” said the old lady thoughtfully. “Deriving a moral principle from animal behavior—that’s quite sentimental thinking, Kris.” The idea appeared to give her satisfaction.

Then she looked at the chicks again, and the satisfaction disappeared. “On the other hand—”

“Oh, look!” the girl interrupted, pointing at Phillip’s window.

Phillip jerked back from the curtain and flattened against the wall, heart beating rapidly. I won’t answer the door, he thought. No one’s home.…

“Her name is Thea,” said the girl. “Isn’t she neat?”

“Oh, yes, she’s somebody!”

Phillip relaxed against his wall. Thea stood with hind paws still on his bed and front paws on the windowsill, her body stretched long across the gulf.

“Show-off!” he hissed. Ignoring him, Thea got gracefully onto the windowsill and settled herself, like a queen granting audience. She was purring.

“My, she’s quite a little minx!” said the old lady.

“Hi, Thea,” called the girl. “Remember me?”

Wait a minute! thought Phillip. How does she know Thea’s name? He risked another furtive peep but had to duck back too quickly. She did look familiar.

“Well, we shouldn’t hang around too long,” said the girl when they had admired Thea some more. “What if they come home?”

“I thought that was the whole idea.”

“No-ooo! Aunt Mil!”

“Sorry. I misunderstood.…” The voices were starting to recede. Phillip came boldly to the window, watching the two straight backs disappear up the street. They were talking again. What had the old lady been about to say when she was interrupted? On the other hand …

The girl made a wide gesture as she disappeared beyond the third house down. What on earth were they talking about?

“No, Thea, you can’t come.” He ducked out his bedroom door and shut it quickly in Thea’s face; out the kitchen door, down the driveway, stopping at the end, and watching the two high heads until they turned the corner. Then he sprinted after them. Please, nobody see me doing this. Nobody’s looking out their window …

When he reached the corner, the two figures had disappeared.

Phillip shoved his hands in his pockets and began walking rapidly, glancing down the side streets as he passed, whistling. He spotted his quarry in the third street and turned down it, slowing his gait to a shamble, looking innocently into front yards. The girl and old lady turned in at a hedge and a red mailbox, and he remembered—a half-seen girl sitting on the steps, Thea running toward him. “Don’t be taken in,” she had said.

Just for the looks of it, he loitered down to the end of the street, which dropped off like their own in a steep, eroding sandbank, down to the river. There he stood, watching the broad, murky, undramatic flow. How do I get to know them? he wondered. How do I find out what they’re talking about?

He thought of a way, but by the time his chance came, he was almost too angry to use it.

It was Friday night. They were going to the mall with some of the new friends his mother had made so easily, and Phillip had refused to come along.

“Phillip’s being difficult,” his mother said at last to the other woman. She laughed to show it didn’t matter, but Phillip heard the angry edge to her voice.

“Well,” said the other woman heartily, “all teenagers rebel. Comes with the territory.”

Oh, Christ! Phillip swung away to stare out the window, blowing his breath out audibly.

Carrie gave him a wink as she hitched her pocketbook strap up onto her shoulder. She was last out the door, and before she shut it, she called in softly, “So long, rebel. Don’t play with matches!”

Carrie understood, but she was still going to spend the evening at the mall.

He stood at the window watching them arrange themselves in the car; the other man driving, with his father in the front seat, the three women in the back. His father’s chest looked sunken, as if it had been hollow all along and a sudden blow had caved it in. Phillip wondered if that was real, or only his imagination. He’d heard his mother say hysterically, “His lungs are just gone!”

A man whose lungs were gone, a family uprooted, four whole lives changed forever, and all they could think to do was go to the mall!

He went out on the cement front steps, to look bitterly at the houses on either side and across the street. Each had a picture window. Through each picture window he saw the pale flicker of a television. Everybody’s garbage can was set out by the mailbox. Everybody’s driveway held a nice newish, middling-expensive car. Phillip’s stomach convulsed with hatred.

He turned around quickly and went inside, thinking, Thoreau complained about Concord, but he never saw this! Everything conventional, mass-produced, and ugly. Every house on this street was made to the same plan. The only thing allowed to differ was the shade of paint.

Get hold of yourself, rebel! The farm wasn’t heaven.

No, the farm was hell. The hog pens were built over manure pits. The barn kept the fumes inside until they reached toxic levels, but that never affected the hogs, for they didn’t live long enough to get sick. They were farrowed and fattened and slaughtered, the span of their lives measured in weeks. His father, with a longer exposure to the fumes and to pesticides, herbicides, antibiotic dusts, and tobacco smoke, was the one who’d gotten sick; he and the barn cats, who were always dying mysterious early deaths.

The farm was ugly and it stank, but at least it had some texture. At least people worked there, did real and necessary things. You could walk to someplace beautiful—the creek where wild plums grew, the cottonwood bluff. He would rather live there than here, where everything was packaged just the same. The only thing that marked his family as different from any other was the chicken yard, which was probably illegal.

Then he remembered the girl and her old aunt, and he remembered his plan.

Still, he almost didn’t. He went toward his room, thrashing in his angry thoughts like a man in quicksand and only sinking deeper. Of course we rebel, he was thinking. We’re smart enough to want something better, and not old enough to get it. There’s nowhere for me, no place where …

Thea met him, curving herself around the corner of his door with a thin cry. Thea, the last barn cat.

Phillip watched as she strolled down the short hall to her food dish, gave it a passing glance, and leapt onto the sink to look out the window. There were birds in the yard. Her tail began to twitch, like an extension of her calculating brain. She looked the embodiment of evil, crouching there, intent on the kill. Could an animal be evil? Anyway, he was glad to be larger than Thea, and hence her friend. He remembered the old lady: “Chickens are disgusting things!”

All right.

He scooped Thea up, closing one hand firmly across her breast to prevent sudden leaps, and went out the door. He thought he should be locking up but didn’t bother. He walked down the dusky street, silent in his sneakers; past the mailboxes and the mid-size cars, past the picture windows and the leaping blue light. He turned the corner, walked three streets up, and turned again.

“Okay, Thea, go right where you went before, remember? Remember that girl?”

Thea wasn’t listening. She sat bolt upright in Phillip’s arms, her clear eyes huge and glowing. She was beautiful; the only beautiful thing in his life, Phillip thought.

They were nearing the house with the red mailbox. Phillip’s heart began to thump a little. He was glad of the hedge. He would stop at the end of it, put Thea down in the driveway—

A black-and-tan terrier lunged out of the yard he was passing, with a belligerent whoof. Thea shot out of his arms, landed ten feet away on the pavement, and raced across the opposite lawn, her tail as big around as her body, and the terrier in yapping pursuit. They disappeared.

For a second Phillip stood blank. Then he sprinted after them, under a TV-lit picture window, across a neat clipped lawn, along a picket fence, always guided by the barks. “Dog!” he yelled. “Dog! Quit it! Thea!”

Yard lights snapped on. A man’s voice shouted aggressively, “What’s going on out there?”

“I lost my cat!” Phillip shouted back. He didn’t want the guy calling the cops. “Dog! Quit that!”

The dog and Thea were at least two backyards away, receding. How could they go so fast when neither of them came as high as his knee? He vaulted over someone’s low hedge and landed on someone’s little red wagon. It flipped, catching him behind the knees, and he nearly went down. “The-a!” Now they were three more yards away, and across the street. He hurdled the hedge at the other side of the lawn as a yard light came on behind him and a voice shouted, “Hey!”

Across the street, the dog stopped barking.

Phillip ran as straight as he could remember, toward where he’d last heard the noise. His breath seared down his chest. He was out of shape from lying too much on his bed and hating.

Why did the dog stop barking? Did he catch Thea and shake her? Was she dead?

His feet made two sharp slaps on the pavement, and then he was across the street in someone else’s yard. There he stopped, trying to gulp down each breath as it came whistling out; trying to listen.

At first all he heard were voices from a television set, in the small, unsuspecting house near which he stood. When he managed to filter that out of his consciousness, he became aware of a whoofling, sniffing noise, coming from the next-door backyard. He pushed through the hedge.

The dog ran in widening circles with its nose to the close-shaved lawn, obviously trying to pick up a trail. Thea was nowhere in sight.

“Phew!” The dog gave him a passing glance as it continued casting about for a scent. Phillip considered kicking it.

Now, where was Thea?

A voice down the street called, “Alex! Here, Alex!” The dog pricked its ears, listening, then shot away, around the corner of the house and down the street. Phillip heard the scratch of its claws on the blacktop, and the jangle of tags. Alex! Obnoxious name for an obnoxious little cur!

“Thea,” he called very softly. “Thea.”

A fresh fear roosted on his heart. Thea didn’t know this place. They’d been keeping her in the house; to acclimate her, to keep her safe from cars and neighborhood dogs. What if she got lost? With all this pavement and mowed-off lawns, and nothing to distinguish one house from another, how could she ever find them again?

“Thea?” he called. The louder cry released more desperation in him. Next time he yelled. “Thea!”

A woman’s round face looked out the window, showing consternation. She seemed unable to see him.

“I’m looking for my cat,” he called to her. All this shouting was doing him no good. It was shaking things loose inside. Now, not so deep down, he felt himself crying. It was only a matter of time before that worked to the surface. He turned away from the house, whispering, “Thea!”

A screen door fell shut on the other side of the house—someone coming out. Go away, Phillip thought. Just go away!

“Hello. Can I help you find her?”

It was the girl. In the grid of light from the kitchen window, she looked tall and straight and strong. She looked good to him. He hated her.

It’s not worth it. If I’ve got to lose Thea, it isn’t worth it.

“There was a dog,” he said. “I caught up to it here, sniffing around …”

“Then she’s probably close. Up a tree, I bet. I’ll get a flashlight.”

This side of the lot was bordered by tall white pines, ten or twelve all in a row. Perhaps they had been planted in ignorance, by someone who thought they would make a hedge. Now they stood up strong against the sky, bigger and wilder than anything in the neighborhood. Beneath them, a thick carpet of fallen needles had conquered the lawn. Phillip walked softly up and down, listening. It made sense that Thea would have climbed a tree. He hoped it was true, and not a time-wasting diversion.

The girl came back with two flashlights. She gave him one and walked away to the other end of the row. Phillip was glad she wasted no time in talk.

The flashlight beam would not penetrate far into the soft green masses above. By raising his arm straight in the air, like the Statue of Liberty with her torch, Phillip could make it go farther, but not more than halfway. How high would Thea climb? He walked all around the first tree, all around the second.

“Should you call?” asked the girl.

Yes, he should, and perhaps he could, now that he’d had a few quiet minutes to himself. “Thea! Thea?”

“Did you hear that?” the girl asked quickly.

“I think it was just a branch. Thea?”

Again a small squeak penetrated the black silence. It seemed to come from the center of the row of trees. Phillip hurried toward the spot, flashlight high. “Thea?”

“Mee!”

The beam flashed across something. Phillip brought it back swiftly, to strike squarely on Thea’s broad white tuxedo front.

She sat complacently on a large limb, nearly out of flashlight range, white paws neatly tucked together. When the beam shone on her, she uttered another thin, high-pitched comment, narrowing her eyes against the light. She sounded as if she were in her own house, inquiring about supper. But when Phillip lowered the beam a little, it showed a huge, fluffed-out tail hanging off the other side of the branch. The very tip of the tail crooked back and forth, back and forth.

“Come down!” Phillip called. “It’s safe now. He’s gone.”

Thea uttered a long, thin comment that sounded like, “Naah!” She was doing fine just where she was.

“She won’t come down for at least half an hour,” the girl said confidently.

How do you know so much? Phillip wondered. He folded himself cross-legged onto the bed of pine needles.

“I’ll just sit here and wait,” he said. “Uh—thanks for the help.”

“Oh, no problem. You keep the flashlight till tomorrow. I’ll come over and get it.”

“Oh.” Phillip had forgotten the flashlight. “Hey!” he called as the girl started around the corner of the garage. “Thanks a lot! I really mean it—I might never have found her without your help.”

“She’d have been all right,” the girl said, twirling, but not stopping or slowing down. “Thea’s cool.”

Phillip heard the screen door bang, and a woman’s voice anxiously start asking questions. Not the old lady—what was her name? Aunt Mil.

He flicked the flashlight on for a second, to shine on the two white semicircles of toes on the limb above. “Hey, you! Come on down now!” He got another negative comment.

Funny, he thought, turning off the flashlight; funny that they each knew something they weren’t telling. She knew where he lived. He knew she’d come over that day. She knew Thea’s name. He knew her aunt’s. He liked it that way. That was fine.

He relaxed there in the quiet. The residue of his panic seemed to run out of him and sink into the earth. He liked being a stranger in this neighborhood; the only person outdoors, the only person sitting quietly, not watching a television. No one knew he was here but the girl and Thea.

Thea spoke to him from her branch, several times. When at last he got tired and stopped answering, she began to move around. He pointed the flashlight and watched her delicate maneuverings. How precisely she dropped from one limb to another! Her paws landed just where they should, never slipping. Then she hesitated and looked carefully, chose the next limb, and figured out how to get to it. She was small, serious, and absorbed, for the moment paying him no attention.

When she reached the last limb, she paused. Then she uttered a small worried cry—talking to herself, not Phillip—and swung out onto the trunk, grappling with her claws. Her ears were laid back in concentration, yet she lowered herself with the confidence and skill of a steeplejack.

Phillip stood and, as she came within his reach, took hold of her. She stiffened against him, clinging to the bark, until he stroked her. Then her purr started, very loud in the quiet night, and she slashed him nearly to ribbons, twisting in his hands and clawing up onto his shoulder. The purr was thunderous in his ears, such a mighty purr that she choked from time to time and had to swallow and begin again.

He took a firm hold on her tail, in case she jumped again, and he walked around the garage and onto the street, saying goodbye silently to the picture window leaping with blue television light. He walked home. The dog did not jump out again, and the house had not been burglarized, in all this time that it had been left unlocked. His family was not yet home from the mall.

He awoke late the next morning. Thea was gone from his pillow, but he could see the round indentation where she had slept all night, close to his head. He glanced at his alarm clock, got up, and dressed quickly. What time would the girl come over for her flashlight? If she liked him, she might come early.

He stepped out into the hall and heard his mother crying in the kitchen. His stomach clutched in a hard knot, and he looked into his parents’ bedroom. There lay his father, in his striped pajamas, snoring as loudly as if his lungs were whole. Phillip knew himself to be relieved, but his stomach stayed knotted as he went out to the kitchen.

His mother sat at the table with a box of tissues beside her. Methodical and tidy in everything, she had settled down for a good cry. Phillip could have smiled, except that her shoulders shook so hard; and her face, when she looked up at him, was so pale and slack. He stayed across the table, not wanting to get mired in her trouble, but he had to ask, “What’s up?”

“The chicks!” his mother said. “Every … single … one.”

Oh, dear, thought Phillip. Yet it had happened many times before, no matter how tightly they wired the chicken pen. Every year one or two were lost. About one year in three, there was a major slaughter. His mother shouldn’t be so upset.

“Coon or weasel?” he asked.

“A weasel wouldn’t live here! It was a coon.”

“Huh!” He was surprised that even a coon would venture so far into this imitation suburbia. He glanced out the window, seeing for the first time how close the line of trees really was; only four or five streets down, after all.

“Well, never mind,” he said. “I’ll fix the pen and we’ll get some more.”

“Oh, Phillip, I don’t know, I don’t know.” She had stopped sobbing, but she gazed down at the tabletop as if in the deepest despair.

What’s wrong? Phillip asked mentally, not wanting to ask aloud. Actually, he knew. The chickens were a way of still being country people, even in these surroundings. They were the measure of difference between this yard and every other. They were self-sufficiency, and they were a way of saying that not everything had changed.

He got up and went outdoors, knowing he had nothing to say that could help her. Tomorrow or the next day she would buy more chicks and begin again. Meanwhile he would get things cleaned up.

Thea called him. She was hitched by her leash to the clothes pole. She hated her harness; tried to back out of it or walked around with her body scrunched low to the ground and her head high, making a long, Nefertiti neck. Phillip hated the harness too. It seemed emblematic of everything that was wrong with this place.

He took the harness off and lifted Thea to his shoulders. She wasn’t exactly sure she wanted to be there. The purr sounded thin; the four paws teetered, uncommitted.

“All right, you can get down, but stick around, okay?” It was time for Thea to begin stepping out on her own. Ridiculous for them to guard so closely, she who had survived kittenhood on a hog farm.

Yet as she stalked away toward the fence he thought of losing her. How much pain he would feel—they would all feel—if Thea went off exploring and never came back! He thought of his mother crying at the table, and everything that had shaken loose last night in his desperation started to shift again.

“Here, Thea!” He bent and snapped his fingers. Thea felt insecure, so she came to him, rubbing briefly around his legs. She paused, still leaning on him, but looking intently away at a bush. Her yellow eyes glowed.

Abruptly she left him. She ran a little way, crouched, and pounced on a cricket. The cricket squirmed away. She pounced again, all her weight pointed into her front paws. If she came down that way on a mouse or chipmunk, she would probably break its back. The cricket, cushioned somehow in the deep grass, survived, to be sprung after again. Thea’s face was full of play.

Phillip didn’t rescue the cricket. He restrained himself, too, from capturing Thea and putting her back on the leash. With an effort he turned away and looked into the chicken coop he and his father had built.

He saw the place where they had perhaps used one staple too few. A small hole had been wrenched wider. A few long, soft raccoon hairs fluttered on the wire.

Inside were the silent chicks—some scattered around, half eaten, the rest in a downy yellow heap, streaked thinly with blood. They were too small to make a ghastly sight. They only looked pitiful.

So. Can an animal be evil?

Thea glided past his legs and stepped warily, delicately, across to the heap of dead chicks. She sniffed them, mouth slightly open. With her white, pointed fangs and broad tongue panting back and forth, she looked like a miniature panther. He wondered what she gleaned, all turned inward on her sense of smell. Could she understand, just from smelling, what a raccoon was? Could she understand death?

“Did Thea do that?” asked a voice behind him. The girl!

“No,” he said. “Coon.”

“Oh!” She looked around at the ranch-style houses; trim, uniform, pastels and reds and blues; at the hedges and fences and mowed lawns and the ornamental cherry trees. “Oh!” she said, in a voice of pleased surprise.

Phillip looked down. “Yeah, well … pretty hard on the chicks.”

The girl squatted to look in at them. Her face was serious and intent but cool. “A lot of people say that humans are the only animals that massacre like this,” she remarked.

Phillip had heard that. “They only kill what they can eat,” he said, quoting another bit of folk wisdom.

In the coop, Thea took a chick by the wing and tossed it in the air over her shoulder. She whirled to see it fall, but it landed with a dull, unresilient thump. Too dead to play with. She came out and leapt onto the roof to wash her paws.

“I suppose the coon was just playing too,” the girl said. “All those little things moving … bite, bite, bite.”

Phillip shivered. “That doesn’t make any difference to the chick.”

“No, but it does to me.”

She stood up. Phillip looked at her, trying to decide if she was the same age he was or older. She seemed too confident to be his own age.

“Why does it matter to you?” he asked.

“Because,” she said, “I want to know all about animals, how they’re related to people, and what we all want from each other.”

“Oh.” Older, he thought. He felt discouraged, and his mind wandered to the burial of the chicks. Dig a hole right here in the yard, he supposed. It seemed almost sacrilegious, though. In this whole neighborhood he would be the only person digging a hole in the earth, the only person to despoil the purity of a lawn.

“How come you have chickens, anyway?” the girl asked. “Where do you come from?”

“I come from Illinois. We had a hog farm.”

“You had a farm? And you came here?”

“Yeah. And lemme tell you, in a lotta ways it’s a big improvement!”

She didn’t seem to expect that, and now she seemed younger, looking around her in puzzlement. Phillip felt glad to be one up on her.

“Farm doesn’t mean Currier and Ives!” he said. “It wasn’t pretty! It was a great big ugly meat factory, and it stank! If these people living their nice, clean lives in their nice, clean houses could smell it, they’d never eat pork again!”

“You didn’t like it at all?”

“It sucked! I hated it. This place sucks too. It just doesn’t smell as bad!”

“Anyway,” said the girl, “I came for my flashlight. Sorry about the chicks.”

Phillip went inside for the flashlight, thinking, Boy, you have just discovered the perfect turnoff! What a genius!

When he came back out, the girl was gone. Thea, too, had disappeared, and when Phillip hurried around the corner of the house, he found them together in the backyard.

Thea was intent in the middle of the lawn; nose a quarter of an inch from the grass, ears hard forward, tail at alert half-mast. The girl was a few paces behind, bent over in equal concentration.

Thea pounced. Her paws spread wide, like hands, and Phillip briefly saw claws. The flurry was short. Next he saw her tossing something small and gray. As it fell, she scrambled after, and then lay down beside it, as proud and leisured as a Roman on a couch, speaking to the girl. Phillip saw the gray thing move.

“A mole,” the girl said, looking up as he came toward them.

Astoundingly the mole was still intact, hurrying away through the grass as fast as it could go. Thea affected not to notice the escape, leaning back luxuriously and speaking to them again. But she watched the mole from the corner of her eye, and when it had gone too far, she pounced and tossed it. The mole squeaked.

Phillip glanced at the girl. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were bright and interested, strangely like Thea’s. She made no move to interfere.

Thea made yet another delighted spring at the mole, and Phillip sprang too. He caught Thea around the middle. She squirted through his hands, but he grabbed again, just in time, and got her by the tail. She squalled, ears flat to her skull, turned, and swatted him. It was no half measure. He heard her claws pop through his skin and saw the blood start. But for the first few seconds it didn’t hurt, and he picked her up, though she squirmed and struggled. Her body felt five pounds heavier than normal.

“You’re going back inside,” he told her, and popped her through the cellar door. He had to slam it quickly. “Sorry,” he said, looking in the window. All he could see was a dramatically lashing tail. “Better luck next time.”

He wiped the back of his hand down his jeans, smearing the blood. The girl had picked her flashlight up off the grass and was coming toward him, looking annoyed.

“It’s perfectly natural for a cat to catch a mole,” she said. “She wasn’t being cruel, she was only playing.”

Thea’s angry wail came muffled through the cellar door. Phillip felt surrounded. He looked beyond the girl, seeing a small gray wedge blunder through the grass. He wasn’t especially in love with moles, though generally in sympathy with anything that made a life’s work of wrecking lawns. He didn’t feel suffused with altruistic triumph. Still …

“It’s perfectly natural for me to save it,” he said, and shrugged and turned away.

But he had interested her. She followed him toward the chicken coop, and when he looked, she was frowning at him.

“Is it?”

“Well, mammals …” said Phillip. “Fellow mammals …”

“Okay,” she said, kindling. “What if you had … a gerbil, say, that you liked a lot, and you had Thea, and all of a sudden—let’s just say, for the sake of argument—all of a sudden there was nothing left in the whole world to feed her except that gerbil. What would you do?”

What a ghoul! thought Phillip; and then, Of course, give the thing to Thea! Then he remembered the gerbil his friend Rob had had in fourth grade, its smooth brown hair and bright black eyes. Oh, damn! Trapped!

He looked up and saw her face, intent as Thea, hunting. Oh no, you don’t!

“That will never happen,” he said, “so I’m not going to worry about it. I feed her cat food, and if she catches things, I don’t really care, as long as it’s not in front of me.”

“Inconsistent,” she said. Her eyes sparkled.

“Yup,” said Phillip. He felt as if he’d like to smile.

“Well, as long as you’re aware,” she said.

“I’m Phillip,” said Phillip. It seemed like time for introductions.