Chapter One, Continued

Two hours later, he was huddled--hungry, cold, and disoriented--on someone's back doorstep. Afternoon had given way to evening as he made his way from garden to garden, recognizing nothing. At first it had seemed like a great game. Then the fences had got higher and harder to jump, the tangled rose briars harder to push through, the smells of other cats more threatening. Human beings had shouted at him through a window--he had run off thoughtlessly and got turned back on himself, ending up in the garden he had started from. Now he was so tired he couldn't think. He knew it wasn't his own house. But he was grateful to sit on the doorstep anyway. He was grateful for the old damson tree, spreading its branches over the white garden furniture glowing in the dusk. These things were familiar, at least. He gave a little yowl now and then, in case someone came home and let him in.

As he sat there, the light went slowly out of the sky. The sun was a great cool red ball behind the garden trees. Rooks began to settle their evening quarrels--"My branch, I think." "No, my branch!"--the whole ragged ignoble colony of them whirling up into the sky to wheel and caw before settling again, one by one into silence. Suddenly the air was colder. Shadows crept out of the box hedges. The garden seemed to change shape, becoming shorter and broader. The lawn, the shrubs in their borders, the lighted windows of the houses yellow with warmth and company--everything seemed closer and yet further away. The apple trees faded to a uniform gray.

Night had come. Tag had never been out in it before.

He knew the night only from warm rooms behind double-glazed windows. Then it had seemed exciting. Now it was only menacing and strange. As human activity decreased, the real sounds and smells of the world came through: the sudden low twitter of a bird disturbed, the slow tarry reek of leaf mold from under the hedges, the bitter smell of a rusting iron bucket, a dog barking somewhere down at the end of the road, thickly woven odors of snails eating their way through the soft fleshy leaves of the hostas. And then, suddenly, from the gloom at the very end of the garden, came a smell that made Tag's heart race with fear and excitement! His head went up. Almost despite himself, he sniffed the air. Something moving down there! It was a highway, like the one that ran along the bottom of his own garden! Something was trotting down there, fast and purposeful, its paws moving silently across the broken, lichenous old flagstones as it made its way from left to right along the tunnelly overgrown path between the flower bed and the sagging board fence. Tag could barely keep still. He wanted to make himself known. He wanted to hide. Every part of him wanted to say something. Every part of him wanted to stay silent.

In the end, though, he must have moved, or made some sound, because the animal on the highway stopped. It sniffed the air for him. He heard it. Terribly afraid, he huddled into the doorway. Too late. It was aware of him. He could see a dark silhouette, a thick black shadow with four legs and a blunt muzzle, its head turning this way and that. A single bright, pale, reflective eye that seemed to switch itself on suddenly, like a lamp. It was looking at him. There was a long pause. Then a wave of scent, a sharp, live, musky reek in the garden air.

"Little cat," it said in a soft voice. "Your true name is not Tag. Do you want to discover your true name? If so, you must undertake the task which lies before you."

He shrank back in the doorway until his head was pressed so tightly into the corner his face hurt. To no avail. The thing that inhabited that shadow could see him whatever he did. There was a low, grunting laugh.

"Don't be afraid," said the voice. "Come with me now."

Its owner took a pace toward him.

He cowered into his doorway.

There was a sudden impatient sigh, as if the creature had been interrupted. It paused to listen, then, purposeful and urgent, it loped off into the night without another word.

Tag huddled on the doorstep until it was light again. Exhaustion made him shake; anxiety kept him awake. Every sound, familiar or not, seemed to threaten him, from the abrupt shriek of an owl to the patient snuffling and rootling of a hedgehog in the next garden. He was afraid to make any noise of his own.

Toward dawn he fell into a restless sleep, only to dream of the animals on their highway. Tag could never be sure what he saw--what he sensed--moving along it. They were cats, certainly, although in the dream they seemed much larger than a cat should be, and they had deeply disturbing, shadowy shapes. They moved in their own powerful stink--vague, slippery, indistinct, always angry or excited. Their voices came toward him from a long distance, in the echoing yet glutinous speech of dreams.

"A task," they told him, "a great task."

The next morning he was stiff and tired, but the sunshine made him feel optimistic. Breakfast! he thought. He sat up, stretched himself, and gave a huge yawn. "Chicken and game!" He jumped on top of a fence and looked across the gardens. They lay before him: a lawn as precise as a living room carpet, bordered with regiments of red flowers; then rusty objects propped against a shed; then bedsheets flapping on a line. He jumped down, nosed around. There, on the concrete path as it warmed up in the sunshine, was his own smell from yesterday, faint but distinct!

Follow myself home, he thought. No problem.

But it was a problem.

Chasing the magpie, he had taken an alarmingly random course, zigzagging, turning back on himself, often going in circles. In the night, other animals had passed; other scents had overlaid his own. While it was a good idea, the attempt to follow himself was doomed from the start. High old brick walls, espaliered with fruit trees, blocked his path. Abundant crops of nettles forced him to divert. He blundered into another cat--or rather the insane face of another cat was thrust unexpectedly into his own, screaming at him so loudly that he jumped in fear and ran off under some bushes and came out disoriented twenty minutes later to find himself trapped in a place that didn't even seem to be a garden. The spines of dying foxgloves mopped and mowed against a tottering wooden fence. What had once been an open space was now a jungle: fireweed seeding down to ashes, a choke of brambles and old rose suckers bound together in the dusty heat by convolvulus and grape ivy. The air was thick, still, and oppressive, full of the sleepy drone of insects. Eventually he pushed his way out. He was hot and tired and out of temper. The house in front of him had blue shutters, peeling to show the gray wood beneath, and a blue door. Not much else could be seen through the skeins of honeysuckle and wiry climbing roses colonizing its pebble-dashed walls. Its windows were of rippled glass, dim with dirt. Compressed between the wilderness and the house, the remains of its garden--the patch of yellowed lawn on which he stood, the beds overgrown with rubbery hostas, the tottering wooden shed which had also at some point been painted blue--would soon be engulfed.

Tag sighed and sat down suddenly in the shade of some terra-cotta pots full of dead geraniums. It was already noon, and he still hadn't eaten. He crouched down, tucked his front paws neatly under him, and let his nose rest on the ground. Not knowing what else to do, he slept. When he woke, the magpie was perched on a broken pot in front of him.

"Raaark," it said "On your own then, Kit-e-Kat?"

"Don't call me that!" said Tag.

The magpie laughed. "Call yourself a cat?" it asked. It added mysteriously, "I don't know why he bothers with you. If he could find them on his own, he wouldn't." Then it put its head on one side, regarded him with one beady eye, and said with measured nastiness, "Oh yes, you're on your own now, Kit-e-Kat!"

Tag was enraged. He jumped up and rushed the magpie. "My name's Tag!" he cried. "I am a cat, and they call me Tag, not Kit-e-Kat!"

The magpie only bobbed its head wickedly and took flight. It flapped with a dreamy slowness up from the lawn and into the rowan tree. As it flew it looked less like a bird than a series of brilliant sketches of one. For an instant--while it was still rising but almost into the tree--it seemed to wear its own wings like a black, shiny cloak. Then it perched, quickly ruffled its feathers, and looked down at Tag, its head tilted on one side to show a bright cruel eye.

"They call me One for Sorrow," it said. "And you won't forget me in a hurry."

Alone, thought Tag.

He tested this idea until sudden panic swept through him. He ran around and around the lawn until he was tired again. He licked his fur in the sunshine for ten minutes. He couldn't think what to do. He jumped up onto a windowsill and rubbed both sides of his face on the window pane. "Breakfast!" he demanded. But clearly it would not be feeding him today. So he jumped down and tried the same with the back door. No luck. Clearly no one would be feeding him today.

He had a new idea. He would feed himself.

Eat a bee, he thought. Eat more than one.

And he tore off excitedly across the lawn, the little bell on his collar jingling.

An hour later he had chased four houseflies, a blackbird, two sparrows, and a leaf. He had caught one of the houseflies and the leaf. The leaf proved to be unpalatable. No bees were about. All this effort made him hungrier than before. He went back to the house and jumped up on the windowsill again.

"Yow!" he said.

Nothing. It was silent and empty in there.

He stalked a wren, which scolded him from a safe place inside a hedge. He tried it on with two squirrels, who bobbed their tails at him and sped off along the top of a board fence at a breakneck pace, vying with each other for the lead and calling "Stuff you!" and "Stuff your nuts, mate!" as they ran. Then he tried a thrush, which kept a lazy eye on him while it shelled its breakfast--a yellow snail--against a stone, then rose up neatly as he pounced, and with no fuss or fluster cleared his optimistic jaws by four inches and left him clapping his front paws silently on empty air.

"Nice technique," said an interested voice behind him.

"Pretty stupid cat, though," answered another. "Anyone could have caught that."

Tag thought he recognized one of the voices, but he was too ashamed to turn around and look. For the rest of that day, he ate flies. They were easy to catch and, depending on what they had eaten recently, even tasted good. In the middle of the afternoon he bullied some sparrows off half a slice of buttered white bread two gardens along the row. Finally, he went back to the place where he had argued with the thrush. There he caught some snails. They didn't taste in the slightest bit good, but at least, he thought, he was denying them to the thrush.

Toward evening it began to rain.

The rain came stealthily at first, a drop here and a drop there. It tapped and popped on the leaves of the hostas, where it gathered as shiny beads--each containing a tiny curved image of the world--that soon collapsed into little short-lived rivulets. The snails, sensing the rain, opened themselves up gratefully. Then, sensing Tag, they shut themselves away again. There was a kind of hush around the sound of each raindrop.

Tag watched the snails and waited. A cat with a thick coat doesn't feel the rain until too late. Suddenly it was pouring down on him, straight as a stair rod, cold and penetrating as a needle. He was surprised and disgusted to find himself soaked. His skin twitched. He stretched and stood up. He shook out first one front paw, then the other. He retreated to the back doorstep.

No good.

A gust of wind shook the shrubbery and blew the rain across the garden in swirls, right into his shelter. He sat there grimly for a bit, trying to lick the damp off his fur, fluffing up, blinking, shaking himself, licking again. But in the end he had to admit that he was just as wet there as he would have been in the middle of the lawn.

I hate rain, he thought.

He dashed out into the downpour to try the windowsill.

Wet.

He found a dry patch in the lee of the terra-cotta pots. The wind changed and blew the rain into his face.

He tried sitting under the trees.

Wet.

Soon it was coming dark. "Stop raining now," said Tag. Every time he changed position he got wetter. He was hungry again, and cold. But if he scampered about to keep warm he felt tired very suddenly. He ordered the rain, "Leave me alone, now." The rain didn't listen. The garden didn't listen. The wind was like a live thing. It was always blowing from behind him, ruffling his fur up the wrong way to find and chill any part of him that still had any warmth left. He turned around and tried to bite the harder gusts. He ran blindly about or simply sat, becoming more and more bedraggled. Suddenly he realized that he was sitting by the door of the garden shed.

Inside, he thought.

He hooked his paw around the bottom of the door and pulled hard. It wouldn't move. Open! he heard himself think. Open, now! He hooked again and pulled harder. This made him so weary he needed to sit down; but after a moment he was cold again and had to force himself to get up.

Hook. Pull. No good.

"Come on, Tag," he encouraged himself. "Come on!"

Hook. Pull. The door scraped open an inch. Then two.

That's enough! thought Tag.

For some minutes he was too worn out to do anything but sit in front of the door with his head down, looking at nothing. Then he pushed his face cautiously into the gap, and the rest of him, bedraggled and shivering, seemed to follow of its own accord.

It rained. Days and nights came and went, and still no one summoned him for "the task." The house remained empty and the lawn filled with puddles. Then the last leaves fell from the trees, and the nights drew in tight, like a collar around a young cat's neck. Smoke hung low over the gardens in the late afternoon; the days began with thick mists. Winter ushered itself in, quietly and without fuss, in the voice of the roosting crows, the raw chill in the evening air. Tag lived in the shed, and soon became familiar with its pungent smells of ancient sacks and insecticides, spiderwebs and mice. He never caught a mouse there, but it was reassuring to think that one day he might. If it was not warm, the shed was at least dry. The shed saved him.

When he felt strong, he ranged up and down the gardens, three or four houses in every direction. He ate flies. He ate earthworms. He ate anything that could be caught without a great expenditure of energy. He got up in the dawn to beat the squirrels to the scraps of bread and lard and meat that other cats' dulls put out for the birds. He became thin and quick but easier and easier to tire. He avoided confrontations. Seen in the distance in the gardens at sunrise on a cold morning, he was like a white ghost, a twist of breath in the frost. Close to, his silver coat was tangled and muddy and out of condition.

Some days it was all he could do to find the energy to crouch at a puddle and lap up rainwater, then make his way back to the shed. Eat something tomorrow, he would think; and then after a confused doze get up again in the belief that tomorrow had already come. Which in a way it had.

He never left the gardens. If he thought about his life, he thought that this was the way he would live it now. Tiredness, and the comforting sound of the rain on the roof of the shed.

Then one night everything changed again.

The Wild Road will be available in early March from Del Rey in bookstores everywhere.