Chapter One:
THE GREAT OUTDOORS

Among human beings a cat is merely a cat; among cats a cat is a prowling shadow in a jungle.
--Karel Capek

They called the kitten Tag. They fed him, and he grew. They put a collar around his neck. They entertained him, and the world began to take on shape.

It was his world, full of novelty yet always reliable, exciting yet secure. He was a small king; and by the time a week was out, he had explored every inch of his new kingdom. He liked the kitchen best. It was warm in there on a cold day, and from the windowsill he could see out into the garden. In the kitchen they made food, which was easy to get off them. He had bowls of his own to eat it from. He had a box of clean dirt to scrat in. The kitchen wasn't entirely comfortable--especially in the morning, when things went off or went around very loudly without warning--but elsewhere they had given him a large sofa, covered in dark red velvet, among the scattered cushions of which he scrabbled and burrowed and slept. He had brass tubs with plants and some very interesting fireplaces full of dried flowers, out of which flowed odors damp and sooty.

Up a flight of stairs and into every room, every cupboard and corner! It was big up there, and full of unattended human things. At first he wouldn't go on his own but always made one of them accompany him while he inspected the shelves stuffed with clean linen and dusty books.

"Come on, come on!" he urged them. "Here now! Look, here!" They never answered.

They were too dull.

A further flight up, and it was as if nobody had ever lived there--echoes on the uncarpeted stairs, gray floorboards and open doors, pale bright light pouring in through uncurtained windows. Up there, each bare floor had a smell of its own; each ball of fluff had a personality. If he listened, he could hear dead spiders contracting behind the woodwork. Left to himself up there he danced, for reasons he barely understood. It was a territorial dance, grave yet full of energy. Simply to occupy the space, perhaps, he leapt and pounced and hurled himself about, then slept in a pool of sunshine as if someone had switched him off. When he woke, the sun had moved away, and they were calling him to come and eat more new things.

They called him Tag. He called them dull.

"Come on, dulls!" he urged them. "Come on!"

They had a room where they poured water on themselves. Every morning he hid outside it and jumped out on the big dull bare feet that passed. Nice but dull, they were never quick enough or nimble enough to avoid him. They never learned. They remained shadowy to him--a large smell, cheerful if meaningless goings-on, a caring face suspended over him like the moon through the window if he woke afraid. They remained patient, amiable, easily convinced, less focused than a tin of meat-and-liver dinner. The dulls were for food or comfort or play. Especially for play. One of his earliest memories was of chasing soap bubbles. The light of an autumn evening shifted gently from blue to a deep orange. Up and down the room rushed Tag, clapping his front paws in the air. He loved the movement. He loved the heavy warmth of the air. Everything was exciting. Everything was golden. The iridescence of each bubble was a brand-new world, a brand-new opportunity. It was like waking up in the morning.

Bubble! Tag thought. Another bubble!

He thought, Chase the bubbles!

As leggy and unsteady, as easily surprised, as easy to tease, as full of daft energy as every kitten, Tag pursued the bubbles, and the bubbles--each with its tiny reflected picture of the room in strange, slippery colors--evaded him smoothly and neatly and then hid among a sheaf of dried flowers or floated slowly up the chimney or blundered without a care into a piece of furniture and burst. He heard them burst, in a way a human being never could, with a sound like tapped porcelain.

Evanescence and infinite renewal!

Any cat who wants to live forever should watch bubbles. Only kittens should chase them.

Tag would chase anything. But the toy he enjoyed most was a small cloth mouse with a very energetic odor. It had been bright red to start with. Now it was rather dirty, and to its original smell had been added that of floor polish. Tag whacked it around the shiny living room floor. Off it skidded. Tag skidded after it, scrabbling to keep upright on the tighter turns.

One day he found a real mouse hiding under the Welsh dresser.

A real mouse was a different thing.

Tag could see it, a little pointed black shape against the gray dimness. He could smell it too, sharp and terrified against the customary smell of fluff balls and seasoned pine. It knew he was there! It kept very still, but there was a lick of light off one beady eye, and he could feel the thoughts racing and racing through its tiny head. All the mouse's fear was trapped there under the dresser, stretched taut between the two of them like a wire. Tag vibrated with it. He wanted to chase and pounce. He wanted to eat the mouse: he didn't want to eat it. He felt powerful and predatory; he felt bigger than himself. At the same time he was anxious and frightened--for himself and the mouse. Eating someone was such a big step. He rather regretted his bravado with the pet shop finches.

He watched the mouse for some time. It watched him. Suddenly, Tag decided not to change either of their lives. His old cloth mouse had a nicer smell anyway. He reached in expertly, hooked it out, and walked away with it in his jaws. "Got you!" he told it. He flung it in the air and caught it. After a few minutes he had forgotten the real mouse, though it probably never forgot him--and his dreams were never the same.

That afternoon he took the cloth mouse with him up to the third floor where he could pat it about in a drench of cool light.

When he got bored with this he jumped up on the windowsill. From up there he had a view of the gardens stretching away right and left between the houses. However much he cajoled or bullied them, the dulls never seemed to understand that he wanted to go out there. It fascinated him. His own garden had a lawn full of moss and clover that sloped down toward the house, where a steep rockery gave way to the lichen-stained tiles of the checkerboard patio. Lime trees overhung the back fence, along which--almost obscured by colonies of cotoneaster, monbretia, and fuchsia--ran a dark, narrow path of crazy paving. Cool smells came up from the garden after rain. Wood pigeons shifted furtively in the branches all endless sunny afternoon, then burst into loud, aimless cooing. At twilight, the sleepy liquid call of blackbird and thrush seemed to come from another world; and the greens of the lawn looked mysterious and unreal. Dawn filled the trees with squirrels, who chased one another from branch to branch, looting as they went, while birds quartered the lawn or hopped in circles around the mossy stone birdbath.

Transfixed with excitement, Tag watched them pull up worms.

That afternoon, a magpie was in blatant possession of the lawn, strutting around the birdbath and every so often emitting loud and raucous cries. It was a big, glossy bird, proud of its elegant black-and-white livery and metallic blue flashes. Tag had seen it before. He hated its bobbing head and powerful, ugly beak. He hated its flat, ironic eyes. Most of all he hated the way it seemed to look directly up at him, as if to say, My lawn!

Tag narrowed his eyes. Angry chattering sounds he couldn't control came from his throat. He jumped off the windowsill, then back up again. "Wrong!" he said. "Wrong!"

But the bird pretended not to hear him--though he was certain it could--and unable to bear its smug proprietorial air, Tag sat down, curled his tail around himself, and closed his eyes. After a while, he fell asleep, thinking confusedly, My mouse. This seemed to lead him into a dream.

He dreamed that he was under the Welsh dresser, eating something. Somehow, the dark gap beneath the dresser was big enough for him to enter; he had followed something in there, and was eating it. The soft parts had a warm, acrid, salty taste, and he could hardly get them down fast enough. Before he was able to swallow the tougher bits he had to shear them with the carnassial teeth at the side of his jaw, breathing heavily through his mouth as he did so. That was enjoyable too. Just as he was finishing off--licking his lips, snuffing the dusty floor where it had been in case he had missed anything--he heard a voice in the dark whisper quite close to him, "Tag is not your true name."

He whirled around. Nothing. Yet someone was there under the dresser with him. He could almost feel the heat of its body, the smell of its breath, the unsettling companionable feel of it. It had quietly watched him eat and said nothing. Now he felt guilty, angry, afraid. His fur bristled. He tried to back out from under the dresser, but now everything was the right size again and he was stuck, squeezed down tight in a dark space that smelled of wood and dust and blood with a creature he couldn't see. "Tag," it whispered. "Listen. Tag is not your true name." He felt that if he stayed there any longer, it would push its face right into his, touch him in the dark, tell him something he didn't want to hear ...

"Tag is my name!" he cried, and woke up--to a loud, rapid hammering noise near his ear. While he slept, the magpie had flown up from the garden. It was strutting to and fro on the ledge directly outside the window, screeching and cawing, flapping its wings against the glass, filling the whole world with its clamor. Now its face was right next to his, and its chipped, wicked beak was drumming against the glass and it was shouting at him.

"Call yourself a cat? Call yourself a cat?"

And he fell off the windowsill and hit his head hard on the floor.

Everything went a soft dark brown color, like comforting fur. When he woke up again, the bird was gone and he could hear the dulls preparing their food downstairs, and he thought it had all been the same dream.

Tag had lived in the house for two months. It seemed much longer, a great stretch of time in which he was never unhappy. He never wanted for anything. He doubled in size. His sleep was sound, his dreams infrequent and full of kitten things. All that seemed to be changing. Now, as he curled up on the velvet sofa, he wondered what would happen when he closed his eyes. Each time he slept, he lived another life--or fragments of it, a life of which he had no understanding.

In one dream he was walking beneath a sliver of yellow moon, with ragged clouds high up; he heard the loud roar of some distant animal. In another, he saw the vague shape of two cats huddled together with heads bowed, waiting in the pouring rain; they were so hungry and in such trouble that when he saw them, a grief he could not understand welled up inside him like a pain. In a third dream, he was standing on a windswept cliff high above the sea. There were dark gorse bushes under a strange, unreal light. There was a sense of vast space, the sound of water crashing rhythmically on rocks below. In the teeth of the wind, Tag heard a voice at his side say quietly, "I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that." It was the voice of a cat. Or was it?

"Tintagel," it said. "Tag! Tag! Listen! Listen to the waves!"

All the dreams were different, but that voice was always the same--quiet, persuasive, companionable, frightening. It wanted to tell him things. It wanted him to do things.

All the dreams were strange; but perhaps this was the strangest dream of all.

He dreamed it was evening, and he was sitting on a windowsill while behind him in the room, the dulls ate their food, talking and waving their big arms about. Tag stared out. It was dark. There were clouds high up, obscuring the waning moon, but the moonlight broke fitfully through. Something was happening at the very end of the garden. He couldn't quite see what it was. Every night, he sensed, animals went along the path down there, entering the garden at one side and leaving at the other. They were on business of their own, business to enthral a young cat. It was a highway, with constantly exciting traffic.

In the dream there was an animal out there, but he couldn't see it clearly or hear it. For a moment the moonlight seemed to resolve it into the shape of a large black cat--a cat with only one eye. Then it was nothing but a shadow again. He shifted his feet uneasily. He wanted to be out there; he didn't want to be out there. Clouds obscured the moon again. He put his face close to the glass. "Be quiet!" he tried to tell the dulls. "Watch! Watch now!"

As he spoke, the animal out there seemed to see him. He felt its eye on him. He felt its will begin to engage his own. He thought he heard it whisper, "I have a task for you, Tag. A great task!"

Behind him in the room, the dulls laughed at something one of them had said. Tag shook himself, expecting to wake up. But when he looked around, he was still in that room, and he had never been asleep. As if sensing his confusion, the female got up and, putting her face close to his as if it wanted to see exactly what he was seeing, stared out into the darkness. It shivered. "You don't want to go out there," it said softly. "Cold and dangerous for a little cat like you. Brrr!" It stroked his head. The purr rose in Tag's throat. When he turned back to the garden, the one-eyed cat had gone.

Early one morning, before the household was awake, Tag saw the sun coming up, carmine colored, flat and pale with promise. A few shreds of mist hung about the branches of the lime trees. Soon, three or four sparrows and a robin had alighted on the lawn and begun hopping about among the fallen leaves. This was all as it should be. Tag hunched forward to get a better look. My birds! he thought. But then they flew up suddenly, to be replaced by his enemy the magpie, who strode on long legs in a rough circle around the birdbath, shining with health and self-importance. It stopped, stretched its neck, opened its beak to reveal a short thick purple-gray tongue, and let forth its abrasive cry.

"Raaark. Raaark."

Oh yes? thought Tag. We'll see about that!

But what could he do? Only jump on and off the windowsill in a fever of frustration. At last he heard the dulls getting up, and there was something else to think about. He raced down the stairs and stood by his bowl in the kitchen.

"Breakfast," he demanded. Chicken and game casserole! "In here. Put it in this bowl. Breakfast!"

Chicken and game!

That was a smell he would remember later on.

Two minutes after he had got his face into the bowl, one of the dulls opened the back door without thinking. Tag felt the cool morning air on his nose. It was full of smells. It was full of opportunity. And the magpie was still out there, strutting around the lawn as if he owned it.

My lawn! thought Tag. Breakfast later!

And he was out in a flash, straight between a pair of legs, across the lawn--scattering leaves and hurling himself at the bird, who turned its sly black head at the last moment, said clearly, "Not this time, sonny," and flew like an arrow through a hole in the fence, leaving one small white body feather floating in the air behind it. Tag, enraged, went sprinting after, his hind feet digging up lawn and flower bed. He heard the dulls shouting after him. Then he was through the fence and into the garden next door. The magpie was sitting on a fence, regarding him amusedly from one beady eye. "Raaark." Off they went again. Every time he thought he had caught it, the bird only led him farther afield, until, when Tag looked back at his house, he couldn't see it any more.

He hesitated a moment.

"Call yourself a cat?" sneered the magpie, almost in his ear. "This is where you belong, out here in the wild world--not a toy cat on a windowsill!" But when Tag whirled around, ready to renew the chase, it had vanished into thin air.

Tag sat down and washed himself. He looked around.

New gardens! New gardens that went on forever. Through one and into the next, forever.

Out! he thought. I got out!

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