Free The House Guests by John D. MacDonald

infant’s thumb. It had bitten him severely about the chin.
    A word here about a strange talent chipmunks have. Johnny discovered it years later when he and his wife were living on a farm in Michigan. Their cats, Jaymie and Grey, caught many chipmunks. They would apparently maim them cruelly, inflicting some sort of injury to the spine. The chipmunks would writhe about, rolling and thrashing once the cat put them down, rolling right toward the cat, a reaction the cats found objectionable. Johnny shot four of the pathetic things to put them out of their misery, and, one day, when he was about to shoot the fifth, it suddenly seemed remarkable that all five could have been injured in exactly the same way, and reacted in the same way.
    So he watched. When the chipmunk would roll toward the cat, the cat would back away with a pained expression. The cat would watch it thrash aimlessly in the grass and, confident that it was unable to flee, the cat’s attention would wander. The chipmunk writhed ever closer to a thicket and then suddenly shot off into cover, a little streak of pale brown a good safe distance ahead of the cat’s belated pounce. Johnny told me that he then realized, to his dismay, he had slain four skilled thespians right in the midst of their art.
    We found this hard to believe. When Johnny and Anne brought Grey to Piseco, they called me from the typewriter one afternoon when Grey had caught a chipmunk. The chipmunk lay rigid and unmoving in the cat’s jaws. When Grey put it down, that little animal put on the most convincing act I have ever seen. It looked like the final agony, the last wild spasms. It imitated a broken back, and rolled wildly right into the cat. The cat backed away. The chipmunk rolled in random directions, flopping about, then abruptly it sped off to safety. This is apparently a talent shared by chipmunks everywhere and one of the strangest andmost specialized defensive instincts I have ever seen. Many animals and even some insects will play dead. But as far as I have been able to tell, only chipmunks play dying.
    The lake intrigued Geoffrey far more than it did Roger. The front porch of the hillside camp overlooked the boat dock and the tethered boats. One late afternoon several of us, sitting on the porch, saw Geoff jump down into a skiff. He explored it carefully, sniffing at elderly traces of fish, working his way to the stern. He got up onto the rear seat and from there onto the housing of the outboard motor. The motor was tipped up. Stepping quite daintily, he went cautiously out onto the narrower housing which encloses the drive shaft. When he took a step halfway to the propeller, his weight tilted it down abruptly, dumping him into the lake. Shocked, and doubtlessly furious, he cat-paddled to shore. A soaked cat is a sorry, spavined sight. He moved off into heavy brush, and when we saw him next he was totaly dry, fluffy, unconcerned—and probably would have told us that we were all mistaken—it had been some other cat.
    When we went out in a boat he would sit on the dock and look after us so wistfully that one day Dorothy took him into a boat and rowed him down to Big Sand. It terrified him. He wanted to jump out but could not quite bring himself to do so. Dorothy let him out at Big Sand so upset he threw up, and she rowed slowly back, with Geoff following along the rocky shore line, making pitiful noises. Perhaps he noticed on that return trip that the shore line was where you go to look for frogs. Years later he owned one.
    When our time was up and the next contingent due, we drove back to Clinton. The cats made loud objection the entire way, and I know it was only my imagination, but I seemed to detect in their mournfulcries not only their objection to automobiles but also despair that they should be yanked out of paradise with so many woodsy tasks yet undone.
    It was at Wanahoo that they became sophisticated and deft about trees. As we sat on the porch we would hear thrashings in