Picking up The Magic Mountain, Qwilleran thought a good read would relax his mind, but he was unable to find his place. Yum Yum not only untied shoelaces; she stole bookmarks.
Either Koko lost interest in the mating rituals of Brazilian beetles, or he knew he was on Qwilleran’s mind. With a stretch and a yawn he deserted the tube and hopped onto the other bed, saying a cheerful “Yow!”
“Yow indeed!” Qwilleran said. “Is that all you have to say? When you sniffed the label on the sherry bottle, were you getting high on the adhesive? Or were you trying to tell me something? And all the time you were wallowing on the floor in front of the Fitzwallow huntboard, you knew there was something of interest underneath it. Was it the dog’s toys? Or the ash-blond hairball?”
Koko’s large black eyes—black in the dim lamplight of the motel—were brimming with concentration, and Qwilleran told himself, He’s trying to transmit a thought; I must relax; I must be receptive.
Koko was concentrating, however, on a spider crawling up the wall, and after springing at it and knocking it down, he ate it.
“Disgusting!” Qwilleran said and went back to his own thoughts, recalling his incredible week in the Potatoes: getting lost in the woods, the unpleasant episode at the golf club, the horrifying accident at the waterfall, the pain and incapacitation that resulted, the washout and the prospect of being marooned on Tiptop, the ordeal on the muddy trail . . .
“I don’t know why I came to the damned Potatoes in the first place! Do you know, Koko?” Then he answered his own question. He remembered the party celebrating his inheritance . . . all those good friends . . . all that mediocre food . . . someone suggesting the Potato Mountains for a vacation . . . himself jumping at the idea and pursuing it like a fool, persevering against odds, agreeing to pay $1,000 a week for a white elephant. Why? What attracted him? How could he explain his stubborn resolve?
Koko was watching him with twitching whiskers, and Qwilleran put a hand to his own moustache. Slowly the cat rose from his lounging position on the bed. He arched his back and stiffened his tail and pranced, stiff-legged, around the mattress. Qwilleran watched the performance and wondered what it was supposed to convey, if anything.
Round and round Koko paraded until Qwilleran recalled the revolving circle on top of Little Potato—the silent marchers with lanterns, believing in the power of thought and fervently willing their kinsman to be returned to them.
No! he thought. How could their influence be felt in Pickax, many hundreds of miles away? “Impossible!” he said aloud, and yet he stroked his moustache with a heavy hand, and as he pondered the cosmic conundrum, Koko caught another spider.
The Cat Who Moved a Mountain Page 23