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week, Sirius was watching for the noise humans made by pouting their mouth into a small pucker. It looked a difficult noise. He was not sure he would ever learn to make it himself. But he now knew that when
ork
began with this sound, it was real, and not otherwise. He did not respond to
fork
or
talk
and Basil grew quite peevish about it.
    “This Rat’s no fun anymore,” he grumbled.
    Kathleen was relieved that Leo had almost stopped chewing things. Sirius was too busy learning and observing to do more than munch absently on his rubber bone. He ached for knowledge now. He kept perceiving a vast green something in himself, which was always escaping from the corner of his eye. He could never capture it properly, but he saw enough of it to know that he was now something stupid and ignorant, slung on four clumsy legs, with a mind like an amiable sieve. He had to learn why this was, or he would never be able to understand about a Zoi.
    So Sirius listened and listened, and watched till his head ached. He watched cats as well as humans. And slowly, slowly, things began to make sense to him. He learned that animals were held to be inferior to humans, because they were less clever, and smaller and clumsier. Humans used their hands in all sorts of devious, delicate ways. If there was something their hands could not do, they wereclever enough to think of some tool to use instead. This perception was a great help to Sirius. He had odd, dim memories of himself using a Zoi rather as humans used tools. But animals could not do this. That was how humans had power of life and death over them.
    Nevertheless, Sirius watched, fascinated, the way the cats, and Tibbles in particular, used their paws almost as cleverly as humans. Tibbles could push the cover off a meat dish, so that Romulus and Remus could make their claws into hooks and drag out the meat inside. She could pull down the catch of the kitchen window and let herself in at night if it was raining. And she could open any door that did not have a round handle. Sirius would look along his nose to his own great stumpy paws and sigh deeply. They were as useless as Duffie’s feet. He might be stronger than all three cats put together, but he could not use his paws as they did. He saw that this put him further under the power of humans than the cats. Because of their skill, the cats lived a busy and private life outside and inside the house, whereas he had to wait for a human to lead him about. He grew very depressed.
    Then he discovered he could be clever too.
    It was over the smart red jingly collar. Kathleen left it buckled around his neck after the first walk. Sirius hated it. It itched, and its noise annoyed him. But he very soon saw that it was more than an annoyance—it was the sign and tool of the power humans had over him. One of them—Basil for instance—had only to take hold of it to make him a helpless prisoner. If Basil then flipped his nose or took his bone away, it was a sign of the power he felt he had.
    So Sirius set to work to make sure he could be free of that collarwhen he wanted. He scratched. And he scratched. And scratched. Jingle, jingle, jingle went the collar.
    “Make that filthy creature stop scratching,” said Duffie.
    “I think his collar may be on too tight,” said Robin. He and Kathleen examined it and decided to let it out two holes.
    This was a considerable relief to Sirius. The collar no longer itched, though in its looser state it jingled more annoyingly than before. That night, after a little maneuvering under Kathleen’s bed, he managed to hook it to one of Kathleen’s bedsprings and tried to pull it off by walking away backwards. The collar stuck behind his ears. It hurt. It would not move. He could not get it off and he could not get it on again. He could not even get it off the bedspring. His ears were killing him. He panicked, yelping and jumping till the bed heaved.
    Kathleen sat up with a shriek. “Leo! Help! There’s a ghost under my