Free The House Guests by John D. MacDonald Page B

help but notice that he had a strange habit, when sitting, of sometimes lifting his forepaws off the floor, sitting much in the manner of a ground squirrel. Sometimes he would adopt this posture for the business of face washing. When he was interested in what people were eating, he would sit near the table, and it took just a little upward gesture of the hand with a morsel in it to bring him up into his sitting position. The implied guarantee of receiving the scrap would keep him there, like a small dog.
    Yet after the novelty of that wore off, we did not continue it. It was a question, I suppose, of appearances and of dignity. The cat who emulates a small, supplicant dog has somewhat the same inadvertentludicrousness of, for example, a small and extremely fat man. The grin of conviviality is always a little abashed. In some obscure way it shamed the three of us to shame him in a way he accepted so solemnly, and without ever having to discuss it, we all gave it up.
    It was Geoffrey, when we lived on College Hill, who provided us with the most memorable example of reasoning power we can remember.
    It came about this way. We used to go quite often to the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica with my parents. Johnny was popular with the staff, and they would take him out into the kitchen. One of the other guests had brought in pheasant that fall, and it was being prepared for his table when Johnny went out there. One of the chefs gave him a handful of the big tail feathers of the cock pheasants. He brought them home, and the cats were delighted with them. They could be batted about, knocked into the air, chased, clawed, bitten. They were symbolic birds. In a week or so there were only a few not completely destroyed, and these had been denuded of feathers all except that tuft at the very end which has “eye” markings much like peacock feathers. They were twelve inches of heavy, naked quill with the end tuft.
    I should mention here that whereas Roger seemed to prefer co-operative play, either with brother cat or one of the people, Geoff often played alone for long periods, playing solemn and wide-ranging games of solitary field hockey, dribbling a half-bashed ping-pong ball from room to room.
    We had finished dinner. Johnny had gone to bed. Roger was sacked out. Dorothy was doing something in the kitchen. I was reading in the living room. She came in and in a hushed voice asked me to come and see what Geoffrey was doing. I went with her and stood quietly in the kitchen doorway and watchedhim. It was a very long and narrow kitchen. Geoff had invented a game with one of the remaining pheasant feathers. He would circle it and then carefully pick up the quill end in his teeth, adjusting it so that it stuck straight out in front of him. He would flatten himself into the position of the stalk, and then, ears flattened, tail twitching, he would stalk the tuft end of the feather down the length of the kitchen. When he stopped, it would stop. When he moved, it would move. Six feet from the end of the kitchen he would release it, pounce upon it, slide and roll and thump into the wall at the end, biting and kicking the hell out of it. Then he would get up, walk slowly around it, studying it, and pick it up again by the quill end and repeat the same performance. I kept count. I watched him do it seven times, and at the end he left it there and walked out of the kitchen. We could never entice him into doing it again. We wanted witnesses. When we told about it, people looked at us with that tolerant skepticism which is so infuriating. They seemed to think we
thought
we had seen Geoff do that. He would never do it again because I imagine he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of that game.
    A year or so ago I read a newspaper account of a game invented by some bottlenose dolphins in one of the Florida aquariums. Scientists have recently become very much intrigued by the physiological complexity of the brain of the porpoise, their learning speed,