Mister crouched tensile, low and waited for the hovering cabbage moth to settle until he could wait no more and sprang, boxing at the flitting moth until he fell back and the moth flew off. But even in failure there was no failure. The grace of the cat was a victory: the liquidity of muscle, the synapse through all its cells, the abandonment to the pressure of its intensity—as if it must leap at motion to join with it. Murchison sat at his desk watching his marvelous cat through the opened window. The cat, Mister, was a strikingly marked tortoise-shell with a thicker than usual coat, strongly contrasted striping, a puff of yellow throughout. Now he flicked his tail up and down the line of his back, cracking the tail like a whip as if to shake off from the end of it the remaining energy that had just propelled him after the moth, the discharging of a vital battery. The ionized air was brittle around him. At last the young cat walked away out of Murchison's sight, listening to the possibilities of late spring, in search of them.

The cat would circle about within the spacious two-acre plot in which the house was nearly centrally set. He went about his perimeters on a patrol, alert to rabbits, moles, sparrows, weeds. He would be gone nearly all day if Murchison was home, either in the house writing or at work in the sizable gardens. But if Murchison went into the village or drove off to the city, if for any reason he left, when he returned, Mister would come running to him like a dog. Then the cat would come into the house and stay. But mostly he remained somewhere within the two acres, hardly ever farther, and he never stayed out all night.