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Why do those queer green spaces seem to be me?
    But his brain was not yet big enough to contain those spaces. It tried to close itself away from them. In doing so, it nipped the green vision down to a narrow channel, and urgent and miserable memories poured through. Sirius knew he had been wrongly accused ofsomething. He knew someone had let him down terribly. How and why he could not tell, but he knew he had been condemned. He had raged, and it had been no use. And there was a Zoi. He had no idea what a Zoi was, but he knew he had to find it, urgently. And how could he find it, not knowing what it was like, when he himself was so small and weak that even a well-meaning being like Kathleen could pull him about on the end of a strap? He began whining softly, because it was so hopeless and so difficult to understand.
    “There, there.” Kathleen gently patted him. “You
are
tired, aren’t you? We’d better get back.”
    She got up from her damp hollow in the grass and fastened the leash to the red collar again. Sirius came when she dragged. He was too tired and dejected to resist. They went back the way they had come, and this time Sirius was not very interested in all the various smells. He had too much else to worry about.
    As soon as Robin set eyes on Sirius, he said something. It was, “He’s pretty filthy, isn’t he?” but of course Sirius could not understand. Basil said something too, and Duffie’s cold voice in the distance said more. Kathleen hastily fetched cloths and towels and rubbed Sirius down and, all the while, Duffie talked in the way that made Sirius cower. He suddenly understood two things. One was that Duffie—and perhaps the whole family—had power of life and death over him. The other was that he needed to understand what they said. If he did not know what Duffie was objecting to, he might do it again and be put to death for it.
    After that he fell asleep on the hearthrug with all four paws stiffly stretched out, and was dead to the world for a time. He wasgreatly in the way. Robin shoved him this way, Basil that. The thunderous voice made an attempt to roll him away under the sofa, but it was like trying to roll a heavy log, and he gave up. Sirius was so fast asleep that he did not even notice. While he slept, things came a little clearer in his mind. It was as if his brain was forced larger by all the things which had been in it that day.
    He woke up ravenous. He ate his own supper, and finished what the cats had left of the second supper Kathleen had given them. He looked around hopefully for more, but there was no more. He lay sighing, with his face on his great clumsy paws, watching the family eat their supper—they always reserved the most interesting food for themselves—and trying with all his might to understand what they were saying. He was pleased to find that he had already unwittingly picked up a number of sounds. Some he could even put meanings to. But most of it sounded like gabble. It took him some days to sort the gabble into words, and to see how the words could be put with other words. And when he had done that, he found that his ears had not been picking up the most important part of these words.
    He thought he had learned the word
walk
straightaway. Whenever Kathleen said it, he sprang up, knowing it meant a visit to the green meadow and the crawling water. In his delight at what that word meant, his tail took a life of its own and knocked things over, and he submitted to being fastened to the strap because of what came after. But he thought these pleasures were packed into a noise that went
ork
. Basil discovered this, and had great fun with him.
    “Pork, Rat!” he would shout. “Stalk! Cork!”
    Each time, Sirius sprang up, tail slashing, fox-red drooping cars pricked, only to be disappointed. Basil howled with laughter.
    “No go, Rat. Auk, hawk, fork!”
    In fact, Basil did Sirius a favor, because he taught him to listen to the beginnings of words. By the end of a