Cat Seeing Double by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page A

down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoyingthe cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean’s wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn’t pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves—they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.
    â€œGotcha.” Then a hiss and a playful growl, humanlike voices no louder than a whisper. “Not me, you can’t catch me.” “Alley cat! You’re an alley cat!” “Last one up the tree is dog meat!”
    Dulcie scorched up the branches of a huge oak that stood on the crest of the hill, a venerable grandfather flinging its black twisted arms out across the stars. Racing and leaping within the great tree, riding its wind-tossed branches like sailors clinging to a rocking masthead, the cats looked down the hills that fell away below them. Ancient curves of land that, just here, were still totally wild, empty of human civilization. And out over the sea the new moon hung thin as a blade. The stars among which the moon swam were, Dulcie liked to imagine, the eyes of spirit cats who had passed from the world before them.
    The wind died. The cats paused, listening.
    The night was so still they could hear each other breathing; and in the new silence, another sound.
    Something running the hills, trampling the dry tall grass. A big beast running; they could hear him panting.
    High above the ground, they were safe from dogs and coyotes. But cougars could climb. And now in the faint moonlight they could see the shadow running, a beast as big as a cougar, large and swift, dodging in and out among the hillside gardens.
    It did not move like a cougar.
    â€œDog,” Joe hissed. “Only a dog.”
    But the plunging beast ran as if demented, and it was a very big dog. Was it tracking them? Following the fresh scent of cat? In the still night, its panting implied a single-mindedness that made them climb quickly higher among the oak’s dark foliage.
    Contrary to common perception, some dogs could climb quite handily up the sprawling branches of a tree such as this. They had seen such picures, of coon hounds on a passionate mission. Dulcie glanced at the kit worriedly because the kit was young and small.
    But she wasn’t small anymore, Dulcie realized.
    The little tattercoat wasn’t a kitten anymore. She was as big as Dulcie herself and likely was still growing. And Dulcie knew too well, from their mock battles, that this kit was as solid as a rock. Beside her on the branch the kit sat working her claws into the rough bark, staring down at the racing dog with eyes burning like twin fires. As if she couldn’t wait to leap on that running back clawing and raking.
    It seemed only yesterday that Dulcie and Joe had found the kit up on Hellhag hill, a little morsel of fur and bone so frightened, so bullied by the bigger cats that she never got enough to eat. Such a strange littlecat, vastly afraid one minute, and giddy with adventure the next, filled with excitement and challenge.
    But that had been a year ago. A year since Joe saw that car plunge over the sea cliff and found the driver dead inside, a year since Lucinda Greenlaw buried her murdered husband and fell in love with his uncle Pedric. A year since Lucinda and Pedric married, and adopted the kit and set out traveling with her. The kit had been so excited, setting off to see all the world,