Chapter 4

When we finally reached the cabin—I'd had to check the beacon twice more, the first time I'd gone off-line by a couple of compass points, the second time I was dead on—my first thought was that I ought to check this little fellow out. He hadn't been bleeding, he'd seemed fine on the way, but after all just before I found him a bear had been snuffling at him, and...

For a moment it seemed like the thing to do, in fact I could almost feel a yearning to do so. Maybe I'd even need to take him to a vet—

But no, I decided. Hell, he'd been fine for the long walk home, he was OK. "He?" I wondered if I was using the right pronoun, was this a little girl cat? Ah, phooey, who cared?

Water, however, was definitely on the agenda. And food; God knows how long this kitty had been on the loose, and he had to be hungry. I got a couple of soup bowls out of my pantry and filled one of them with water and set it down. The cat, who'd continued to ride my shoulder even after we got in, jumped down for a drink. I left the bowl on the kitchen floor and walked out of the room; it seemed, well, sort of intrusive to actually stand over him and watch him slurp it up.

In time he got done and came out to me, stropping himself on my leg and twining his tail around it. But there was still the matter of feeding him. What did cats eat? I thought about tuna, I had a couple of cans in the cabinets and weren't cats partial to fish?— But no, that didn't seem like a good idea. I put the cat back on my shoulder and went to look at my fairly meager larder. Nothing in the canned food struck me, so I checked the refrigerator. Ah, fresh asparagus, just the thing. Anyhow, it seemed so to me at the time, but what did I know about cats?

I pulled out three stalks—no, make it four, no, five—and chopped them up and put them in the second bowl. That'd make a good meal, I thought. I set it down for him and again decided to give him a little privacy for his meal; watching people—well, anything—eat is impolite, I thought. When I got back to the living room it struck me that this wasn't the most sensible thought I'd ever had, I mean you share meals with other people all the time, and anyhow this was just a dumb animal, but it still seemed somehow right not to intrude.

In due course he emerged from the kitchen, came right up to me again, and I thought it might be time to let the creature go outdoors to do his business. He seemed to agree, and trotted right out when I opened the door. It never really occurred to me to worry about him running off, he'd had plenty of time to do that already and besides, if that was what he wanted then let him go.

While he was out I made a quick pit stop of my own, and when I got done he was waiting patiently at the door for me. I picked him up again and was rewarded with another purr, and he settled back down on my shoulder.

For a few minutes I paced around restlessly, trying to get my mind around an idea I'd begun to have. My beacon had, as usual, worked fine, guiding me home without a hitch, but I'd suddenly had the thought that maybe there was a better way. The longer I thought about it the more it seemed to come together in my mind, and pretty soon I was pulling out a pad and a pen and starting to work up a schematic.

At first it went slowly. Within half an hour I had six or eight crumpled sheets on the floor, false starts that didn't look right. But then I began to get the hang of it, and my penstrokes became surer. Yes, this here, a resistor there, double that circuit for redundancy, and I kept drawing.