When Corky accompanies our pack on the circuit down to the beach, he has a game which I call dive bombing. As we walk the wooded path to the beach, he dashes past us with hopping steps, like a march hare, holding his tail in the air like a flag. I have never seen a cat run with his tail straight up before! He didn't do this during our winter walks, and now comes this exuberance on sunny spring days. As he runs past, he never fails to brush my pant leg or Janie's flank. Having passed us, he sits beside the trail licking a paw and waiting until we pass by him. Then he dive bombs us again. On the steep sections of the trail, the slope adds momentum and he remains airborne longer during his leaps. This is what basketball fans call "hang time." I worry that these leaps are dangerous for him.

Yesterday I saw the most spectacular series of leaps ever. I blamed myself, because I laughed at his first pass and that encouraged him. On his second pass he landed with a flying leap near Janie, slunk between her legs, then bounded up again. On his third pass he tried a new trick, making a running leap onto Janie's back, then spring boarding from there. Unfortunately, he had not reckoned with Janie's leash. As he sprung from Janie's back, the leash caught him in the chest; this caused him to flip around 270 degrees and land heavily on his side with a thud. We finished the walk to the beach, and he plunked himself down. I petted him and exclaimed over him. He was acting strangely, rolling on his back, still exhibiting the wildness of his leaping display. I walked down the beach and kept looking back for him. Usually we walks partway down the beach with us, until he comes to his favorite perch on a slanting tree. I've never seen another cat run up a tree for purposes of beach gazing!

But this time he did not walk with us, perhaps because he was shaken by his fall. This is a cat that actually takes risks out of pure foolishness!

A few days from the end of my housesit, I finally saw Corky come down the ladder from the cupola. He likes to sit on the window ledge up there and gaze out over Oyster Bay. He has made that window ledge his own, with seven years of silky angora hairs. He was having a daytime sleep up there, and I called for him. His head appeared at the hatchway and he meowed down at me. The ladder goes up one wall of the cupola, so he had started from the rim at a 90 degree angle from the wall. He poured his lithe body into the space between the ladder and the wall, braced his paws against a lower rung, then let himself slide down the wall behind the ladder. Then he reached his front paws down to brace himself on the rungs below, making a shimmying movement with his chest. He seemed to bask in my adulation when he reached the bottom, looking at me and opening his mouth in one of his silent meows. Though I saw it with my own eyes, I cannot remember the tricky, precise shimmying motion he made. I have never been lucky enough to see him go up the ladder, because he climbs up at his own promptings.

I am really going to miss Corky, And I'm going to miss Xena-cat who makes me walk halfway up the driveway to get her when it's time to come inside in the evening. I'm going to miss Xena's solicitations as I sit at the computer, the way she rolls on her back beside my chair so I'll lift her to my lap. She has not been digging her claws into my thighs the past couple of months as she did before.