ILLUSTRATIONS BY S. D. SCHINDLER
A CATWINGS TALE
Ursula K. Le Guin
Catwings
Catwings
Also by
Ursula K. Le Guin and S. D. Schindler
CATWINGS RETURN
WONDERFUL ALEXANDER
AND THE CATWINGS
JANE ON HER OWN
Ursula K. Le Guin
A CATWINGS TALE
Catwings
ORCHARD BOOKS
·
NEW YORK
An Imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Illustrations by
S. D. SCHINDLER
Text Copyright © 1988 by Ursula K. Le Guin
Illustrations copyright © 1988 by S. D. Schindler
All rights reserved. Published by Orchard Books, an imprint
of Scholastic Inc.
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e-ISBN 978-0-545-82653-2
First edition, September 1988
The text of this book is set in 14 point CG Cloister.
The illustrations are pen-and-ink drawings and wash.
To all the cats I’ve loved before
— U. K. Le G.
Catwings
CHAPTER 1
MRS.
JANE
TABBY
could not explain
why all four of her children had wings.
“I suppose their father was a fly-by-night,”
a neighbor said, and laughed unpleasantly,
sneaking round the dumpster.
“Maybe they have wings because I
dreamed, before they were born, that I could
fly away from this neighborhood,” said Mrs.
Jane Tabby. “Thelma, your face is dirty; wash
it. Roger, stop hitting James. Harriet, when
you purr, you should close your eyes part way
and knead me with your front paws; yes, that’s
the way. How is the milk this morning,
children?”
“It’s very good, Mother, thank you,” they
answered happily. They were beautiful
children, well brought up. But Mrs. Tabby
worried about them secretly. It really was a
terrible neighborhood, and getting worse.
Car wheels and truck wheels rolling past
all day
—
rubbish and litter
—
hungry dogs
—
endless shoes and boots walking, running,
stamping, kicking
—
nowhere safe and quiet,
and less and less to eat. Most of the sparrows
had moved away. The rats were fierce and
dangerous; the mice were shy and scrawny.
So the children’s wings were the least of
Mrs. Tabby’s worries. She washed those silky
wings every day, along with chins and paws and
tails, and wondered about them now and then,
but she worked too hard finding food and
bringing up the family to think much about
things she didn’t understand.
But when the huge dog chased little
Harriet and cornered her behind the garbage
can, lunging at her with open, white-toothed
jaws, and Harriet with one desperate mew flew
straight up into the air and over the dog’s
staring head and lighted on a rooftop
—
then
Mrs. Tabby understood.
The dog went off growling, its tail
between its legs.
“Come down now, Harriet,” her mother
called. “Children, come here please, all
of you.”
They all came back to the dumpster.
Harriet was still trembling. The others all
purred with her till she was calm, and then
Mrs. Jane Tabby said: “Children, I dreamed a
dream before you were born, and I see now
what it meant. This is not a good place to grow
up in, and you have wings to fly from it. I want
you to do that. I know you’ve been practicing. I
saw James flying across the alley last night
—
and yes, I saw you doing nose dives, too,
Roger. I think you are ready. I want you to have
a good dinner and fly away
—
far away.”
“But Mother
—
” said Thelma, and burst
into tears.
“I have no wish to leave,” said Mrs. Tabby
quietly. “My work is here. Mr. Tom Jones
proposed to me last night, and I intend to
accept him. I don’t want you children
underfoot!”
All the children wept, but they knew that
that is the way it must be, in cat families. They
were proud, too, that their mother trusted
them to look after themselves. So all together
they had a good dinner from the garbage can
that the dog had knocked over. Then Thelma,
Roger, James, and Harriet purred goodbye to
their dear mother, and one after another they
spread their wings and flew up, over the alley,
over the roofs, away.
Mrs. Jane Tabby watched them. Her
heart was full of fear and pride.
“They are remarkable children, Jane,”
said Mr. Tom Jones in his soft, deep voice.
“Ours will be remarkable too, Tom,” said
Mrs. Tabby.
CHAPTER 2
AS
THELMA
, Roger, James, and
Harriet flew on, all they could see beneath
them, mile after mile, was the city’s roofs, the
city’s streets.
A pigeon came swooping up to join them.
It flew along with them, peering at them
uneasily from its little, round, red eye. “What
kind of birds are you, anyways?” it finally
asked.
“Passenger pigeons,” James said
promptly.
Harriet mewed with laughter.
The pigeon jumped in mid-air, stared at
her, and then turned and swooped away from
them in a great, quick curve.
“I wish I could fly like that,” said Roger.
“Pigeons are really dumb,” James
muttered.
“But my wings ache already,” Roger said,
and Thelma said, “So do mine. Let’s land
somewhere and rest.”
Little Harriet was already heading down
towards a church steeple.
They clung to the carvings on the church
roof, and got a drink of water from the roof
gutters.
“Sitting in the catbird seat!” sang
Harriet, perched on a pinnacle.
“It looks different over there,” said
Thelma, pointing her nose to the west. “It
looks softer.”
They all gazed earnestly westward, but
cats don’t see the distance clearly.
“Well, if it’s different, let’s try it,” said
James, and they set off again. They could not
fly with untiring ease, like the pigeons. Mrs.
Tabby had always seen to it that they ate well,
and so they were quite plump, and had to beat
their wings hard to keep their weight aloft.
They learned how to glide, not beating
their wings, letting the wind bear them up;
but Harriet found gliding difficult, and
wobbled badly.
After another hour or so they landed on
there smelled terrible, and there they slept for a
while in a weary, furry heap. Then, towards
nightfall, very hungry
—
for nothing gives an
appetite like flying
—
they woke and flew on.
The sun set. The city lights came on, long
strings and chains of lights below them,
stretching out towards darkness. Towards
darkness they flew, and at last, when around
them and under them everything was dark
except for one light twinkling over the hill, they
descended slowly from the air and landed on
the ground.
A soft ground
—
a strange ground! The
only ground they knew was pavement, asphalt,
cement. This was all new to them, dirt, earth,
dead leaves, grass, twigs, mushrooms, worms.
It all smelled extremely interesting. A little
creek ran nearby. They heard the song of it
and went to drink, for they were very thirsty.
After drinking, Roger stayed crouching on
the bank, his nose almost in the water, his
eyes gazing.
“What’s that in the water?” he whispered.
The others came and gazed. They could
just make out something moving in the water,
in the starlight
—
a silvery flicker, a gleam.
Roger’s paw shot out. . . .
“I think it’s dinner,” he said.
After dinner, they curled up together
again under a bush and fell asleep. But first
Thelma, then Roger, then James, and then
small Harriet, would lift their head, open an
eye, listen a moment, on guard. They knew
they had come to a much better place than
the alley, but they also knew that every place is
dangerous, whether you are a fish, or a cat, or
even a cat with wings.
CHAPTER 3
“IT’S ABSOLUTELY
unfair,” the
thrush cried.
“Unjust!” the finch agreed.
“Intolerable!” yelled the bluejay.
“I don’t see why,” a mouse said. “You’ve
always had wings. Now they do. What’s unfair
about that?”
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish
never do. Few people know what fish think
about injustice, or anything else.
“I was bringing a twig to the nest just this
morning, and a cat flew down, a cat flew down,
from the top of the Home Oak, and grinned at
me in mid-air!” the thrush said, and all the
other songbirds cried, “Shocking! Unheard
of! Not allowed!”
“You could try tunnels,” said the mouse,
and trotted off.
The birds had to learn to get along with
the Flying Tabbies. Most of the birds, in fact,
were more frightened and outraged than really
endangered, since they were far better flyers
than Roger, Thelma, Harriet, and James. The
birds never got their wings tangled up in pine
branches and never absent-mindedly bumped
into tree trunks, and when pursued they could
escape by speeding up or taking evasive action.
But they were alarmed, and with good cause,
about their fledglings. Many birds had eggs in
the nest now; when the babies hatched, how
could they be kept safe from a cat who could fly
up and perch on the slenderest branch, among
the thickest leaves?
It took a while for the Owl to understand
this. Owl is not a quick thinker. She is a long
thinker. It was late in spring, one evening,
when she was gazing fondly at her two new
owlets, that she saw James flitting by, chasing
bats. And she slowly thought, “This will
not do. . . .”
And softly Owl spread her great, gray
wings, and silently flew after James, her talons
opening.
THE FLYING TABBIES had made
their nest in a hole halfway up a big elm, above
fox and coyote level and too small for raccoons
to get into. Thelma and Harriet were washing
each other’s necks and talking over the day’s
the foot of the tree.
“James!” cried Harriet.
He was crouching under the bushes, all
scratched and bleeding, and one of his wings
dragged upon the ground.
“It was the Owl,” he said, when his sisters
had helped him climb painfully up the tree
trunk to their home hole. “I just escaped. She
caught me, but I scratched her, and she let go
for a moment.”
And just then Roger came scrambling
into the nest with his eyes round and black
and full of fear. “She’s after me!” he cried.
“The Owl!”
They all washed James’s wounds till he
fell asleep.
“Now we know how the little birds feel,”
said Thelma, grimly.
“What will James do?” Harriet whis-
pered. “Will he ever fly again?”
“He’d better not,” said a soft, large
voice just outside their door. The Owl was
sitting there.
The Tabbies looked at one another. They
did not say a word till morning came.
At sunrise Thelma peered cautiously out.
The Owl was gone. “Until this evening,” said
Thelma.
From then on they had to hunt in the
daytime and hide in their nest all night;
for the Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl
thinks long.
James was ill for days and could not hunt
at all. When he recovered, he was very thin and
could not fly much, for his left wing soon grew
stiff and lame. He never complained. He sat
for hours by the creek, his wings folded,
fishing. The fish did not complain either. They
never do.
One night of early summer the Tabbies
were all curled in their home hole, rather tired
and discouraged. A raccoon family was
quarreling loudly in the next tree. Thelma had
found nothing to eat all day but a shrew, which
gave her indigestion. A coyote had chased
Roger away from the wood rat he had been
about to catch that afternoon. James’s fishing
had been unsuccessful. The Owl kept flying
past on silent wings, saying nothing.
Two young male raccoons in the next tree
started a fight, cursing and shouting insults.
The other raccoons all joined in, screeching
and scratching and swearing.
“It sounds just like the old alley,” James
remarked.
“Do you remember the Shoes?” Harriet
asked dreamily. She was looking quite plump,
perhaps because she was so small. Her sister
and brothers had become thin and rather
scruffy.
“Yes,” James said. “Some of them chased
me once.”
“Do you remember the Hands?” Roger
asked.
“Yes,” Thelma said. “Some of them
picked me up once. When I was just a kitten.”
“What did they do the Hands?”
Harriet asked.
“They squeezed me. It hurt. And the
hands person was shouting
—
‘Wings! Wings!
It has wings!’
—
that’s what it kept shouting in
its silly voice. And squeezing me.”
“What did you do?”
“I bit it,” Thelma said, with modest pride.
“I bit it, and it dropped me, and I ran back to
Mother, under the dumpster. I didn’t know
how to fly yet.”
“I saw one today,” said Harriet.
“What? A Hands? A Shoes?” said
Thelma.
“A human bean?” said James.
“A human being?” Roger said.
“Yes,” said Harriet. “It saw me, too.”
“Did it chase you?”
“Did it kick you?”
“Did it throw things at you?”
“No. It just stood and watched me flying.
And its eyes got round, just like ours.”