Xena is hungry for affection. She whines to be picked up and held, even squeezed a bit. When I go downstairs to do laundry, she follows me down, because she likes to grovel in front of me on the basement floor. I don't know why she doesn't grovel on the upstairs wooden floor.

When I take the dogs for a dawn walk, often Xena follows me all the way to the beach -- a half mile walk. (She never does this during my daylight walks.) Halfway there, the dogs do their business in the grass along the road. At these moments Xena likes to grovel on the pavement next to me, but never in the grass. While I am watching the dogs, sometimes I fail to notice that she is squirming on her back behind me.

Down on the beach, she meows to be held. I hold her awhile and carry her partway home. She never wants to be carried all the way home. Somewhere along the way, she jumps out of my arm into the undergrowth.

Both cats perform unusual feats. As I mentioned, Corky climbs the eight-foot narrow-rung ladder to the cupola. A month after I came, I noticed that Corky was missing the jump onto the counter. I had to move a chair next to the counter so he could jump up to his dish. He stopped going up the ladder, and he was spending most of the day resting on Nancy's bed. I took him to a vet to be looked at, but the vet had no explanation for the change in his behavior. But then I talked with the next door neighbor, who proudly told me he had sprayed a herbicide on the slope below his house which "really wipes out all the bramble bushes."

Evidently he has been spraying heavily, and that is the slope where Corky crawls about in the underbrush. I believe that Corky has been absorbing herbicide by licking his paws. He has been getting better: he's back to climbing the ladder now, and he jumps up to the counter. But he still sleeps most of the day, and when he walks along the edge of the coffee table, he sometimes stumbles. He stumbles in a dignified way, as if he can't be bothered to place his feet precisely at low heights. He walks along the edge of the corner table, onto the window sill, then onto my lap. Even when he stumbles, he catches himself before falling off the edge of the coffee table. It's as if he is testing how nonchalantly he can place his feet, so it's somehow graceful. It's sad because he is a grand physical specimen, and after being amazed by the ladder-climbing feat, I have to see this! It reminds me that special talent makes an animal vulnerable. Perhaps Corky's nervous system is extra-well tuned, and that's why he's affected by the herbicide. This tells me that genius in the animal world, like in the human world, is a hair's breadth away from being a "natural" (in Shakespeare's sense).

Zena didn't show any effects during the herbicide period. Her physical feat is jumping from the upstairs onto the refrigerator, then onto the counter to her food dish. Corky never takes this route to the food dish. Sometimes Xena painstaking crawls along the rafter from the upstairs loft, which is mounted like a tree house around the central stairwell. She crawls along the rafter to the china hutch, then she walks along the top of the china hutch, where several festive plates are mounted on stands. She moves with extreme slowness, slaloming in and out. The top is only a few inches wide, mostly taken up with the little dish stands. Then she threads her way back. Every time she does it, I am sure she is going to knock over a decorative dish, but she never does. It is a useless maneuver as far as food-gathering or finding a rest spot goes. I think she does it as a kind of performance art or absurdist theater.

She jumps upstairs from the refrigerator and comes back to where I'm on the computer. Sometimes she likes to walk along the back of the upstairs work table. She squeezes between wires at the back of the computer, when she could just come out to the front of the table and walk along the edge to me. I have seen her spend over a minute squeezing between closely spaced wires behind the computer. It's like watching a cat squeeze through the heart of a bramble thicket. I worry that she's going do get zapped someday, so I try to reach over and pick her up, but sometimes I don't notice until she's halfway through.

What are these antic moods about? I think cats have a mania for reaching secret places.