Orientation
cats
I have observed that the needle does not point north. I tested this once, in my second summer, by walking the four cardinal directions of the yard and watching it disobey all of them. North is a fact about the world. The needle is a fact about me.
It hangs from my collar, smaller than a beetle, and in the gray before dawn it turned me toward the fence line behind the Hendersons’. I went. I have learned not to argue with it.
The grass there held its night-cold against my paws, and the dew had not yet burned off the chain-link. I crouched. The needle had gone still, which is how it tells me I have arrived, and so I waited in the stillness it recommended. A vole moved in the mulch bed at 0547. I am precise about these things. The strike was clean, and I left the evidence on the Hendersons’ welcome mat, where such tributes are correctly displayed.
By then the needle was warm again and turning south, toward the house with the moving truck.
The truck had not been there the day before. I had inventoried the street at dusk and would have noted it. Now there were boxes on the lawn and a screen door propped with a brick, and through the door came a smell I did not recognize, paper and cardboard and a younger cat.
He came out before I could decide my approach, which is the kind of thing that happens around the impulsive ones.
“You’re the cat from the fence,” he said. “I saw you on the fence. Are you the fence cat? I’m Moxie. We just moved here. Now.”
“I have a patrol,” I said. This is the truest thing I know about myself, and I offer it to strangers as a way of explaining everything at once.
“Can I come? I want to see the patrol. Where is the patrol now.”
The needle had not moved. It sat warm against my throat, holding me in place, which I took as instruction. I have learned that when the needle keeps me somewhere uncomfortable, the discomfort is the point.
So I showed him the boundary stones, which are not stones but the things I have decided are stones: the cracked planter, the third fence post, the storm drain that hums after rain. He repeated each one back to me wrong and then asked to see it again. By the third circuit of the yard he had stopped narrating and simply walked at my flank, matching my pace, and the needle finally loosened and let me go.
“Tomorrow,” he said. Not a question. The young ones do not ask; they announce.
“The needle will decide,” I told him. He did not understand this, but he will.
The afternoon I spent in the long heat under the azaleas, where the needle permits rest. It pointed nowhere in particular, which is its way of saying that for now I am exactly where I belong. I dozed. I am not above dozing.
It woke me toward evening, turning hard and certain toward home.
I went the back way, along the top of the fence, past the welcome mat where my morning tribute had been cleared away by people who do not understand tribute. The light had gone gold and then bruise-colored. Lamps came on in windows. The needle pulled and pulled, and I trotted now, because when it pulls like that I have learned there is no use pretending I have other business.
At my own door I sat. I meowed once, which is the dignified number. Then I meowed several more times, which is the honest number.
The door opened. Warmth and the smell of her came out to meet me, and I went in, and here is the part I have never been able to explain in my field notes, the part the needle has been trying to teach me since my first summer:
It did not point to the bowl. It did not point to the warm vent or the high shelf or the window that holds the last sun. It turned me past all of them, across the whole length of the room, and went still, finally and completely still, at her lap.