“I don’t understand,” he thought, panting, with his tongue hanging out. “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 of something. 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 lead 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 understand 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 was greatly 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 round 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 learnt the word walk straight away. 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 ears pricked, only to be disappointed. Basil howled with laughter.
“No go, Rat. Auk, hawk, fork!”
In fact, Basil did Sirius a favour, because he taught him to listen to the beginnings of words. By the end of a 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 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 any more,” 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 learnt 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 were clever 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 round 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 collar when 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 manoeuvring 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 bed!” Then she added, much more reasonably, “What on earth are you doing, Leo?” After that, she switched on the light and came and looked. “You silly little dog! How did you get into that pickle? Hold still now.” She unhooked Sirius and dragged him out from under the bed. He was