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----- ----- ----- ----- It was very quiet in the woods. This was one of the oldest hardwood groves on the Cape, a remnant of the great forest that had once covered the entire peninsula from the ocean to the bay. Although the trees topped the hill above her den, Sara had been here only a few times in her life, and never before alone. ----- The woods weren’t particularly dangerous for rats, but there was little of interest to them here. There was nothing much to eat---that was the reason, really. Sara smiled to herself. That was what it often came down to with water rats. ----- She listened, hardly breathing. The sounds of traffic on the mid-Cape highway were faint and distant. Nothing moved on the forest floor. There were few signs of life up here compared with the teeming fields and marsh below. No, that was silly. There were fewer living things, perhaps, but the great creature in front of her was monstrously alive. The grandfather oak was the tallest tree on the hill, and it was the one she had come to climb. ----- Rats are good climbers, but rats are good at many things that they are ordinarily too sensible to do. If Sara had told her parents what she planned, they would have asked her not to do it because it was dangerous and unnecessary, so she hadn’t told them, and that troubled her. He parents were kind and reasonable. She loved and respected them, and usually she obeyed and tried to please them. This time she had made her own decision. She had climbed other trees, and she was strong and sure and not afraid. The danger was slight, she felt, and it was something she had to do. ----- The trunk rose above her like a wall for thirty feet before the first great limb jutted out, as large itself as a good-sized tree. Beyond that the branches grew thickly, and the trunk began to taper toward the light and shadow of the leafy canopy. Sara climbed, carefully and surely, stopping every few feet to listen. She was exposed here and nearly defenseless, but still nothing moved in the woods. She felt safer when she had reached the limb and could stretch out for a moment on the rough bark and look and listen. Five minutes of careful climbing brought her to the highest branch. It was no more than two inches in diameter at its base and reached straight up, above all the branches of all the other trees in the woods. This had been her goal. ----- Two feet below the highest leaf, she had to stop. The branch had shrunk to less than half an inch and bowed slightly with her weight. It was high enough. Above her the early-morning sky was clear and blue. A soft cool breeze brought the smell of the sea, and below here the Cape was spread out in a vast crescent. Trees and sky merged in distant blue shadows to the south, and to the north the bay beach curved thirty miles to the dunes beyond Cape End. North Cape and the dunes--that was a place she’d really like to go. ----- She’d seen satellite photos of the Cape and even bits and pieces of this scene from other vantage points, but for the first time in her life she saw it as a whole, her Cape, serene and lovely in the morning sun. Her field and den were hidden by the trees, but she could see the marsh to the east and the old Coast Guard station and the lighthouse beyond. The steeple of Saint Paul’s soared above the trees directly to the north of her, and to the west a line of fishing boats headed out into the bay from Stone Harbor. Gulls sailed purposively from bay to sea, and two hawks circled very high above. Up here the gentle sea wind drove all the usual distant summer sounds away, the trucks and diggers, hammers, drills, and power saws. Except for a water tower and a few slim antennas, there was no sign of the many roads and other artifacts of human culture that dotted the Cape beneath the thickly growing pitch-pine forest. It looked as it might have looked to the Nauset Indians for a thousand years before that. And at the moment it was hers. ----- She spent ten minutes on her branch, breathing in the pungent air and looking out across the gray-green land and blue-green sea that lay beneath a pale morning sky. This was her world, every place she had ever been spread out before her like a map. It was exactly what she had hoped to see, and yet she had a sense of disappointment. It all was there, as familiar to her as a chessboard, but no helpful text supplied the rules. Nothing was explained, not who she was or what she was to do. Was that what she had hoped to find up here? She felt the warmth of the sun on her back and saw the branches and leaves around her glow in a burst of morning light. It all appeared quite ordinary close at hand, exactly like the three-foot scrub oaks that edged the field a hundred feet below. ----- She never knew what made her glance down in time to see the shadow glide among the dim trunks with the silence of a moth and settle on a limb below here. It was an owl, a very big one, and he had decided for some idiotic reason to change his daytime perch and come to join her in her tree. ----- She wasn’t afraid at first. The unlikely lunacy of the thing was almost comical. But he was there, and she was swaying in the breeze no more than fifty feet above him, and here she’d stay until the owl left on his evening hunt or she grew weak or dizzy and fell, to become his unexpected meal. ----- He couldn’t see her against the light -- he or she. It didn’t matter. She’d get no concession either way. Owls had little sense of smell, but they could hear a seed drop on the forest floor. She’d better not shake off any acorns. He would hear her move or cough. He might even hear her breathing if the wind fell off. This wouldn’t do. She didn’t know if he could take her up here in the leaves and sunlight, but she’d never last till dark. Dark was his element, anyway. He might wait all day, knowing she was there, and then in darkness come and pick her off the branch like a ripened peach. She’d never get past him, though, not down in the twilight of the great tree trunks. She fumed in anger and frustration. She was surprised that she felt no fear. Maybe it was because there was only one way down and no decision to be made. Just the one almost surely fatal course. At least no one would know about her foolishness. She’d simply disappear. That was the usual way with rats, until they got too old to go out on the land at all. No one would ever know what had happened to her, and they’d all be very sad. ----- She was just about to shed her own tears at her family’s sorrow when an acorn fell from a branch below her and struck the limb above the owl. Not a feather flickered. The sound had startled her, however, and for the first time she felt afraid. He must have heard it hit. It had echoed like a gunshot in the silent forest. She heard another fall in a nearby tree, and then a third. There were acorns dropping all around her. She’d heard them all along, she realized. What was more natural in a stand of oaks? They’d mean nothing to the owl. Could it even help her? Could her scramble down the tree be hidden by the sounds of falling acorns? It seemed unlikely. Another fell from the branch below her, and this one struck the owl’s own limb. The owl flinched. ----- Sara considered the bird a moment. He looked a great deal like a big stuffed specimen sitting worn and dusty on its perch. Slowly and carefully she reached out and twisted an acorn from a twig. She thought about the distance and the trajectory and then threw it at the owl. It sailed behind his head like a bullet. All wrong! Not even owls were that simple, but he hadn’t moved. Could she toss another now? How long normally would a tree wait between acorns? How idiotic--acorns fell when they were ready. Well, they were ready in this tree. She tossed the next one in a gentle curve, and it plunked directly onto the owl’s round head. He twitched again, in quiet rage, presumably. It took another seven acorns and three more hits before old Newton got the message that this was an unusually productive tree. Without a sound, he launched himself into the air and swiftly disappeared among the somber trunks. ----- Sara waited for a few more minutes, to be sure the owl wasn’t planning to return and that even the memory of his annoyance with the oak would have seeped from his tiny brain. Then she carefully climbed down. ----- She rested briefly on the leaf mold of the forest floor, until her breathing had slowed and the trembling in her limbs had calmed, and then she headed for the sunlit field. She didn’t stop until she felt the comfortable cool stone of her own front entrance beneath her paws. ----- Sara stood there for a moment and looked out across the green and pleasant marsh below, feeling both excitement and relief. She had done it, and it had been far more of an adventure than she had planned. The owl had posed an unexpected danger, but she had gotten around him by her wits. She wished she could tell her brother Peter. He might think her foolish, though, to have gotten into such a scrape at all. What had the experience taught her? That she was smart enough and not a coward? Not the sort of thing you had to prove. It hadn’t told her what to do. How could it? ----- The view, of course, had been as splendid as she’d hoped, a sight not many rats had seen. She wished she had the words and skill to share with her friends the sweep of sea and sky, the familiar woods and far horizon. Well, she’d not forget this morning ever, and she wouldn’t have to climb the tree again. Though now... She almost laughed, for what she’d done, she realized, was set herself another evidently pointless goal, a journey to the distant dunes beyond Cape End, much farther than a treetop on her hill. ----- The smell of breakfast wafted from the entrance to the den. She shook away the faintest chill and went inside. ----- -----Chapter 2. ----- Peter watched from an opening in the tall grass as the large tiger cat progressed down the back steps of the library building and stood at the top of the path, only its whiskers showing any interest in the scene below. A few determined stars pierced the mist to spread a faint light on the hill and the dark pond at its foot. The usual chorus of cicadas filled the summer night with song. ----- “Melvil,” Peter called softly. ----- “Peter?” I thought I smelled a rat.” ----- “Peter laughed politely and came up the path to where the big cat waited. ----- “It’s good to see you, Peter. Will you come in for coffee?” ----- “Thank you, I’d like that.” The pleasure in the old animal’s voice had startled him. He hadn’t realized that his visits were important to the library cat. He followed Melvil up the stairs and through the flap into the workroom and then down the dark corridor to the kitchenette. Miss Lang, the librarian, had had her last cup of tea an hour earlier and turned the library over to Melvil, as she’d say, though perhaps more thoroughly than she intended. ----- “Is this a social visit, Peter, or would you like to use the collection?” ----- “A bit of both,” Peter answered with a twinge of guilt. “I did mean for us to have a talk.” ----- “Well then,” said the cat, “it had best be over coffee.” He flipped on the light and bustled about the pots and pans while they talked of the small doings of the mid-Cape. They had much to tell one another. Melvil shared in all the gossip that went on between Miss Lang and her crop of volunteers and a stream of chatty patrons. Few creatures knew more about the Cape then he, but he accepted cat food from a can and rarely strayed beyond library property except to visit relatives. Peter, on the other hand, knew every rock and hole between the ocean and the bay and had a nodding acquaintance with half the skunks and badgers and all the rats for miles around. He had a more fleeting familiarity with the fox and some knowledge of the local hounds. ----- His friendship with Melvil was unique. Most cats kept to themselves or confined their sociability to other cats. The local wildlife spurned them all, of course, as compromised by domesticity, referring to them scornfully as household pests, along with dogs and parakeets. ----- The rats, by contrast, were admired and feared, though equally avoided. The fear was unjustified, but fully understandable. Most animals made do. Rats had made their own society. Its outlines were flexible but strong, and their culture was very old and deep. Peter’s own species, the Norway rat, was the largest and most widespread, and they were familiar to their human neighbors by many names: the house rat, the sewer or wharf rat, and locally, the water rats. The phrase had stuck and had long ago become a family name. ----- Just why Peter cultivated friendships with other species he couldn’t say. His family deplored such contacts, so he tended to keep these visits to himself. His friend Tom knew of them and mildly disapproved, but shrugged his broad shoulders and didn’t let it come between them. ----- Melvil rambled on awhile about his books. There wasn’t much the old cat hadn’t read. He was working his way through Trollop now, he said, the Barchester novels. He recommended them as soothing, and Peter thanked him, thinking to himself that tranquillity was the last thing that he wanted at the moment. ----- “French’s old hound had an accident, I heard?” It was clearly a request for information. ----- “I’m afraid so,” Peter answered. “An assisted accident, I gather, though I know little of it. They say he’d become a menace.” To put it mildly. ----- “Oh dear,” was all that Melvil said. ----- “Good coffee.” ----- “Yes, indeed. It was a birthday gift to Miss Lang from her niece in San Francisco. I’ve been quite appreciative, and very sparing in my use. She deserves her small pleasures.” ----- “You like Miss Lang?” ----- “Oh yes, Peter. She’s a fine person, though I say it who live by her generosity.” He opened a cabinet door so that Peter could see the wall of cans. “It’s not so bad. I hold my nose and supplement it with table scraps when I may. I don’t believe I could catch a mouse to save my life. No offense.” ----- “None taken, Melvil. A field-mouse pie is fancied even by some rats. I’ve never tried it. I have more curiosity about mice than fellow feeling for them, but I do sometimes question our callousness. Rats aren’t bad creatures, but we’re as species-centered as any other, I’m afraid.” ----- “Inevitable, Peter, but your society produced you.” ----- “An oddity.” Peter shrugged and would have let the matter drop. ----- “I don’t agree. If you don’t mind my saying it, Peter, there is a grain of kindness in you that I believe runs through your race.” ----- “It would be nice to think so,” Peter said. “Rats have other faults.” ----- “No doubt,” the cat said dryly. “One marked quality of your own appears to be a restless curiosity. It’s not the usual rodent failing, if it’s a flaw at all.” ----- Peter laughed. “My parents seem to think it is. Why shouldn’t they?” ----- “Because, dear boy, though curiosity killed the careless cat, it generates momentum. I’m no sailor, but I understand there is such a thing as steerageway, the minimum of forward movement that is required to govern any ship. Few have it, Peter. Most of us are merely carried by the currents of our lives. On the other hand, of course, it requires you tend the tiller now and then. Where is it that you’re bound?” ----- Peter shook his head. “I’m not sure, Melvil. I plan to be a scientist like my father, and I enjoy my studies, but you’re right. I’m restless these days. I want to do something, or go somewhere.” ----- “And what stops you?” ----- “Everything, Melvil, you know that. Rats don’t go off on pointless journeys, like lemmings rushing to the sea. I’ve even got my sister confused. Sara’s very bright, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. I think she looks to me, Melvil, which isn’t very helpful to her at the moment.” ----- “I’m sure she looks up to you, Peter. You’re a fine fellow. But you’ve said she writes stories” Peter nodded. “Then she has a mind and an imagination of her own. Perhaps she’ll be a writer, a grand calling.”--Melvil beamed and looked toward the nearby bookshelves--”but with or without your help, she’ll plot her life and live it. I wouldn’t worry, Peter. You’re young, and you’re good-hearted. This is all simply the price of growing up to be someone. Just do your best, and you’ll get through it. You’ll go somewhere interesting as well, I’d wager. What was it, by the way, that you wanted to see me about?” ----- Peter smiled sheepishly. “What I’ve come about, Melvil, is radio.” ----- “Indeed?” The cat smiled, too. “What aspect of the subject interests you?” ----- “Transmitting, receiving. Tom and I want to talk with my cousin Kendon at Cape End. I thought you might have something on it.” ----- “Certainly,” Melvil assured him, “something for every level of proficiently, I believe. I’m surprised that your father has nothing on his shelves.” ----- “Not unless we were going to reinvent Marconi from the point of view of contemporary electromagnetic theory. This seemed more efficient.” ----- “Yes, I suppose so. Stay here, Peter, and enjoy your coffee. I’ll be back.” ----- Melvil returned in a few minutes, padding deftly on three legs, with several small volumes clutched in his other paw. “These should do. Try to get them back as soon as you can. You really must come and see us more often.” ----- “I will,” said Peter, and he meant it. “Thank you for the books, and for the advice.” ----- “My pleasure, Peter.” ----- Peter tucked the books into his backpack and promised Melvil they’d have another chat when he returned them. ----- The old cat truly was a splendid creature. Peter wished he could ask Tom to come here with him. He’d like the cat. Tom was almost as much a reader as Melvil was. He should be a scholar, really. But Tom would come reluctantly, for he was too respectful of their old traditions. Lately even Tom had seemed uneasy, as if he were troubled by some worries of his own. Maybe discontent was catching, which was no joke, in fact. He’d have to talk with Tom about it. ----- Peter’s friendship with Melvil had brought unexpected responsibilities. And benefits as well. Everything that Melvil said made sense, but what could a house cat really know of rats? Quite a lot, apparently. Peter mulled this over as he trotted home, and almost missed the musky scent of fox. He made a brief detour around the hunter. |
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