The sound drifted thinly across the hillside, as if congealed by the cold.
And then the sound was answered, or rather echoed, by the cat to the right, a black and gray.
It was not exactly the word "Kitty" that the cat miowed, but it was a sound so like it, so faithful to his exact intonations, that his flesh crawled.
"Kii ... eee." Again the eerily mocking, mimicking challenge rang out.
He was afraid.
He started forward again. At the first scrape of his boots on gravel, the cats vanished.
For some time he made fast, steady progress, although the going was by no means easy, sometimes leading along the rims of landslides, sometimes forcing him to fight his way through thick clumps of scrub trees. The last "Kii ... eee" stuck in his ears, and at times he was pretty sure he glimpsed furry bodies slipping along to one side, paralleling his progress. His thoughts went off on unpleasant tacks, chiefly about the degree to which careful breeding had increased the intelligence of house cats, the way in which they had always maintained their aloof and independent life in the midst of man's civilization, and other less concrete speculations.
Once he heard another sound, a repetition of the melancholy howling that had first startled him in the cave. It might have been wolves, or dogs, and seemed to come from somewhere low in the ravine and quite a distance away.
The sky was growing darker.
The rapid ascent was taking less out of him than he would have imagined. He was panting, but in a steady, easy way. He felt he could keep up this pace for a considerable distance.