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the grasslands like his brethren of the savannahs, holding imaginary sway over all before him as he stood on a hillside, grass stems tickling his belly.
    The deeps of the woods also lured him. He delved at bases of trees for the secrets of scurrying beetles, and tried the strength of outer branches, feeling the intriguing breezes of the upper air swirl through the sensitive hairs of his face and ears.
    One day, after an afternoon of intoxicating freedom and exploration, Tailchaser emerged from the low scrub that girdled his woods and stopped to pull a twig loose from his tail. As he sat splay-legged, pulling at the bit of branch with his teeth, he heard a voice.
    “Nre‘fa-o, stranger. Might you be Tailchaser?”
    Alarmed, Fritti leaped to his feet and whirled around. A fela, gray with black striping, sat regarding him from the stump of a long-dead oak. He had been so wrapped in his thoughts that he had not noticed her as he passed, though she perched a mere four or five jumps away.
    “Good dancing, Mistress. How do you know my name? I’m afraid I don’t know yours.” The bramble in his tail hanging forgotten, Fritti observed the stranger carefully. She was young—seemingly no older than he. She had tiny, slim paws and a softly rounded body.
    “There is no great mystery regarding either name,” said the fela with an amused expression. “Mine is Hushpad, and has been since my Naming. As to yours, well, I have seen you from a distance at a Meeting, and you have been mentioned for your love of rambling and exploring—and here I have caught you at it!” She sneezed delicately.
    Her attractive green eyes turned away; Tailchaser noticed her tail, which she held coiled around her as she spoke. Now it rose, as if of its own volition, and waved languorously in the air. It was long and slender, ending in a tender point, and ringed from base to tip with the same black accents as her sides and haunches.
    This tail—whose lazy beckoning instantly captured Fritti’s admiration—was to lead him into more troubles than his own bounding imagination could conceive.
    The pair romped and talked all through the Hour of Unfolding Dark. Tailchaser found himself opening his heart to his newfound friend, and even he was surprised at what spilled out: dreams, hopes, ambitions—all mixed together and hardly differentiated from each other. And always Hushpad listened, and nodded, as if he spoke the dearest kind of truth.
    When he parted from her at Final Dancing, he made her promise to meet him again the next day. She said she would, and he ran all the way home leaping with delight—arriving at the nest so excited that he woke his sleeping brothers and sisters and alarmed his mother. But when she heard what it was that made him squirm and tickle so that he could not sleep, his mother only smiled and pulled him to her with a gentle paw. She licked behind his ear and purred, “Of course, of course . . .” to him over and over until he finally crossed into the dream-world.
    Despite his apprehensions of the following afternoon—which seemed to pass as slowly as snowmelt—Hushpad was indeed there to meet him when the Eye first appeared over the horizon. She came the day after, too . . . and the one after that. Through all of high summer they ran together, and danced and played. Friends watched them and said that this was no mere attraction, to be consummated and then ended when the young fela finally came into her season. Fritti and Hushpad seemed to have found a deeper congruency, which might ripen later into a joining—a thing rarely seen, especially among the younger Folk.
     
    Tailchaser was picking his way through the litter of the dwellings of the Big Ones, in the fragmented darkness of Final Dancing. He had spent the night roaming the woods with Hushpad, and as usual his thoughts lingered with the young fela.
    He was struggling with something, but did not know what it was. He cared for Hushpad—more than for any of his friends,