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the faint sound of the cats’ voices softly laughing and talking, these cats who were like themselves.
    This was the clowder in which Kit had grown up, the band whose leaders had so tormented her. The band she had left the moment she was big enough and brave enough to go out on her own—and the moment she discovered a pair of true friends among some very special humans. Oh, that had been a change in her life, to come to live with humans she soon learned to love, to live in a warm house with wonderful food, and music, and with all the joys of the human world.
    Kit did love her life, and surely she loved her housemates. But still, sometimes, she missed the clowder. Sometimes, despite all her domestic pleasures, she felt stronglydrawn back to that wild life. When, this morning, high up in the hills near the ruins of the old Pamillon mansion, she and Dulcie saw five wild, speaking cats slip up over a nearby crest and pause to look down at them, Kit had felt a thrill clear down to her paws. Watching those members of her old clowder, she’d reared up, staring at them—and staring straight at the tomcat who had once been her love, and from whom she had parted.
    It had been only a few months ago that Sage, badly wounded, had been brought into the village where Kit’s human friends cared for him—and where he asked Kit to be his mate. She had refused him, had realized that she loved him more like a brother. But now, watching Sage, whom she had so painfully rejected, she considered intently the small, buff-colored female who crouched beside him.
    Was this Sage’s new love? This scrawny, bleached-out, nondescript young cat as thin as a sick rabbit? Kit stood tall on her hind paws, looking. Did she even remember this waif of a young cat from among the clowder? For a moment, despite the fact that she had jilted Sage, Kit was riven with jealousy.
    But then she thought, startled, had she seen that scrawny cat in the village? Had she seen that little cat among humans? Oh, but that wasn’t likely. The clowder cats never went there unless in a terrible emergency. And then it was only brave Willow who would come seeking human help. Certainly that scrawny, nervous young cat would never come down into the human world.
    As she watched, the pale cat reared up, too, and opened her pink mouth, staring down at them, intently interestedin Kit and Dulcie, her thin little face filled with excitement—until Sage nuzzled her and pushed her away.
    But even as Sage bossed the little buff-colored cat and demanded her attention, she ignored him and continued to stare—and Kit could see clearly the younger cat’s wild yearning. She seemed to know at once that cat’s dreams.
    She’s like me! Kit thought with surprise. Not just that she can speak, we’re all alike in that. She feels the same hungers that I do, she wants to understand the whole world the way I always did, she wants to know everything. She isn’t content in the clowder, she wants to see and smell and taste everything in the world, she wants to know more than she’ll ever learn running with the clowder, she wants to know human ways…
    The words of an old English tale filled Kit’s mind. “…A pretty little dear her was, but her wanted to know too much…” And Kit’s heart had gone out to the young cat. She’s like me when I was her age, she wants to know what it’s like to live among humans and hear music and ride in cars and have more wonderful adventures than a clowder cat can ever know. And Kit yearned for the young cat as she would yearn for the ghost of her own younger self.
    Beside her, tabby Dulcie watched the silent exchange, saw Kit’s jealousy but then, far stronger, Kit’s fascination with the buff-colored cat. Dulcie had been a grown cat when she and Joe found Kit up on Hellhag Hill. Kit had been just as thin and scrawny and half starved as this little waif—and as full of