The Catswold Portal

She crossed the fields of a small farm, walked under its last fence and stood surveying the city street and the houses lining the opposite sidewalk. She was less afraid of houses now. Houses sometimes meant food, and she was ravenous. Her swollen paw throbbed with pain, hurting so badly that even though she kept her foot lifted and walked on three paws, every movement sent jarring pain through her body.

Now at the edge of the town she crossed the street behind two slow-moving cars. On the other side she trotted, limping, across yards until she came to an alley. Because it was narrower than the street and more sheltered, she turned into it, walking on three legs.

She traveled the alley quickly, crossing each residential street, never faltering from her destination south. She passed houses and scattered stores, then more houses. She was halfway through the town, in a small cluster of stores, when she smelled fish and paused.

Warily she turned into a side alley and approached the back door of a bait shop.

She stared up at the screen door. The smell of fish was strong. Boldly she picked her way through scattered trash and up three dilapidated wooden steps.

Crouching to run, she stared in through the screen. Inside, a man was cutting up fish. When he turned and saw her, he banged his cleaver on the table and shouted. She fled, leaping down on all fours: the pain jarred like fire through her.

But the jolt broke the abscess. As she fled it began to drain, the pus oozing out.

She ran for two blocks before she crouched under a car, licking and licking her hurting, oozing paw.

Soon the pain grew less. When she left the shelter of the car she was walking on all fours.

By nightfall she was out of the town and in an open field dotted with oaks, and she had forgotten her wound. She caught and ate three field mice, then sheltered high in an oak tree, resting, coming down once more to hunt. Her hurt eye had begun to heal, and the itching annoyed her. Several hours after dark the full moon rose. Its pull made her giddy, she lay out along a branch watching it, letting its power tease her.

At last, filled to brimming with the moon’s madness, she leaped down out of the tree and raced the meadow, running up another tree and down, and up another. In each tree she paused to stare at the sky and out at the moon-whitened field. Then she raced on again. And if, as she ran madly, visions touched her, if she sensed underground spaces, and if mysterious voices whispered, these disembodied experiences seemed little different to her than the disembodied voices coming from radios and juke boxes.

She left the meadow that night, traveling south beside the highway. And now as she hurried on, feeling well again, she stopped sometimes to bathe thoroughly, sleeking and fluffing her fur. And she played more. She was drawing near the place coded in her feline spirit as home.

When on the tenth day she left Highway 101, a sense of rightness made her leap along through the marshy meadow that flanked the narrower road. With kittenish abandon she gamboled, jumping puddles. Her dodging play through the marsh grass made it dance and tremble. When she caught a mouse almost by accident, she ate it quickly then ran on swiftly toward home. Drawing near the portal, her green eyes shone. She smelled home. She stopped to stand on her hind legs, peering away over the grass toward the far hill. She smelled the garden. She galloped on, and soon she smelled a faint turpentine and oil scent caught on the breeze, speaking to her of a particular house. Wildly she fled along the edge of the highway, then crouched and sped across between cars, shaken by the cars’ wind as they passed her. On the other side she slipped into the briar tangle at the base of the hill.

She climbed the hill beneath the briars, using a path worn by other cats and by rabbits. At the top, she came out behind the center house. Her whiskers twitched with interest at its scent, and she stood looking. But she did not approach the house. She went on past it, up through the garden, alert for the cats whose scent marked this territory as theirs. She could smell, ahead, the cup-of-gold vine and the ancient door, and she approached eagerly.

Olive Cleaver, standing at her window looking out at the garden, glimpsed a flash of calico and white move between the bushes. Startled, she waited for the cat to emerge. Strange that a neighborhood cat would have the nerve to come into this garden, where the other cats were so possessive. Strange that it was a calico. She had never seen a calico cat near the garden or in the neighborhood. The cat soon appeared nearer her, higher up the hill. She watched it slip through a tangle of nasturtiums and disappear beneath the jasmine bush before the tool shed door. Olive put down her book, watching for it to come out.