"The shortest month is February," Once a Day said, testing her filed nails against her cheek for smoothness; "or the longest too."

The floor below belonged as much to the cats who walked it as to the people they walked among. I said there were cats who lived at Little Belaire; but the List seemed to live with their cats and not the reverse. They were deferred to. Houd had told me that the cats of the List were not of the same family at all as the cats I had known; these great, pacific, wise animals were descended from a race the angels invented, so to speak; a race they made out of the old race of cats, altering them by the same means we men had been altered, and for the same reason - convenience. And in the thousand generations that came after, they had been altered further by careful selection of mates. They hunted little, but ate the food made for them in the kitchens of Twenty-eight Flavors; almost never did I hear them make that eerie, tormented cry I had used to hear, like a lost baby, in the woods near Little Belaire. I said the List were grownups: but now looking down at the floor where the cats walked I thought it was the cats who were the grownups, and the people their children. And as children learn their manners from watching grownups, so the List learned theirs from cats.

I was proud of this small insight; I had no notion how close I was to the truth, and therefore I was as far away as ever.

Zhinsinura came through the way-wall, and others after her, dressed in their raggedies - winter warm-clothes piled on however to keep the cold out.

"We're going to the forest," she called up to us. "You come."

"Why?" asked Once a Day.

"A cat's lost. Help find her."

The cat's name was Puff, a very old and tired orange female with a big scruffy mane, blind in one eye. She'd been gone two days, Zhinsinura said as we struggled into warm-clothes, which wouldn't have worried anyone if it was Brom or Fa'afa, but Puff in the winter… She hurried our dressing.

It was wet, black, and hopeless in the forest, a thin rain still falling, and I didn't know how they thought they would find anything but mud and old snowbanks to fall in, but they kept on through the day just as though they had a path. We spread out, and soon lost sight of each other, and I found myself struggling along beside someone I didn't know, bound up to his eyes in gray. He slashed at the dirty snow with a stick, breathing wet clouds from his nose.

"Help me here," I said, my foot caught in something beneath the snow.

"Dog days," he said.

We pulled me loose. "What did you say?"

"Dog days." He waved his stick, indicating the forest. "February's the lean month for them. They're said, when they find nothing at all to eat, to run around in a circle till the weakest drops, and then he's it. I don't know. I guess that's fair. But usually they find something."

Like Puff, I thought, old and cold as she was. The story at Little Belaire was that all the dogs had long ago been eaten or killed, but in this forest… "Dog days," he said again, his eyes shifting from side to side above the gray scarves covering his mouth. We stopped to get our bearings. The relentless drip seemed to fill my ears, making it hard to hear other sounds. The high trees' tops were lost in fog, and their black trunks seemed rotten with wetness. The forest crackled suddenly quite near us, and we spun around: two of our number came out of the trees toward us, dressed in black like the day. We called out and kept on; and now my eyes were shifting around like my gray friend's.

For a long time we tore through a thicket of harsh bushes, clawed at by springing limbs and tripped up by roots. Beyond it the ground fell away sharply into a sort of depression in the ground, whose lowest part was filled with dark water edged with papery ice. As we came out on the edge of this bowl, he saw one thing on its far side, and I saw another.

He saw Puff, off to the left, struggling up through the snow to reach the crest on the other side.

I saw Once a Day, off to the right, also climbing, trying to reach Puff.

We both pointed and said, "Look!" at the same time. Once a Day must have been to the cat's blind side, because the cat kept on, desperately, up to her chin in snow; and just then we heard what she was running from. The noise tore through the fog, a sharp, snarling yelp made again and again that made me freeze in terror. Once a Day stopped too, but Puff kept on; the woods crackled and thrashed to the left, and there burst from cover an animal. The man next to me bared his teeth and hissed out in fear, and the animal - a dirty-yellow, skinny, big-headed thing - stopped and with great snaps of his head looked from Once a Day to Puff who was disappearing over the ridge. The woods behind him spoke, and a red one charged out; he didn't stop at all, but hunched his skinny back up through the snow. The yellow one followed. Bursting from the woods, a spotted one slipped into the water and slopped out again, climbing after the others.

Once a Day had got to the top and over, beating the snowbound dogs, and the man with me was halfway to the pool's edge, shouting and waving his stick, before I unfroze and slid after him. As we circled the pool, stepping up to our knees in black water and muck, two more dogs came yelping from the woods, and stopped when they saw us. They backed and ran to and from us as we tried to climb the bank, we not daring to turn our backs on them, shouting at them as they shouted at us. Two men now came from the woods following Once a Day's footprints, and my stick friend tore the gray scarf away from his face and waved to them, and the dogs, seeing them, ran off in another direction.

Heavy with water, sobbing painful cold breaths, we got to the top. Puff, Once a Day, and the dogs were gone. The snow, stirred and footprinted, melted out in hillocks along the wet black ground; and across the snow, starting at my feet and running crazily away in drops, was a long stripe of blood.

Cat's blood: I grasped at that. Puff's blood. Poor Puff, but old after all, still too bad, anyway it's cat's blood… The two in black passed me, hurrying on, pointing out the signs of the trail to each other. I still stood stricken. Stick came up next to me, his sodden boots squishing.

"Dog days," he said; "a lean month, and nothing's that large, if they're together they'll try it…"

"No," I said.

He went off, following the others, his head nodding rapidly side to side. "If she stayed with the cat," I heard him say, "they'd take them both, oh yes, drag them to the woods, you hear the silence now, you see what that would mean…"

No, no, no, he's not kept his head, I thought, starting after him, then turning back to look again at the snow, not kept his head about the cat's blood that it was, why does he go on like that?

"Dogs are dogs are dogs are dogs at least," said Stick.

"Why don't you just look?" I shouted at him, my feet numbly plucking mud. "Why don't you just be quiet about it and look?"

"Wood smoke," said Stick, stopping still.

I smelled it and saw it at once: a dark smudge in the woods, browner than the gray day. He ran on toward it, calling out to the others; I only stood, still trying to speak truthfully to myself, scared, not knowing what a fire in the forest would mean anyway. Stick turned and waved to me, and disappeared in a clump of trees.

There was a path through the clump of trees, and at the end of the path a cabin of logs built against an old angelstone wall; ashy smoke rose up through a hole in the roof of wattles. The yellow dog, the first one Stick and I had seen at the pond, paced back and forth before the door until he saw us, and backed away and ran as we came close. From another direction the two in black came up to the cabin, and disappeared into the darkness inside, as though walking through way-wall; they seemed to be laughing. Stick went in. I came up last, and heard them talking inside.