Tense minutes would trickle by until finally, losing all patience, Alice would spring onto the desk, smack in the middle of my papers, and stick the world under my nose: fresh snow, bits of leaves, the smell of the cedar trees in her fur.

Work was now out of the question. I followed her to the back door to see what was so urgent. Usually it was a bird in a branch or a sudden summer downpour; maybe the first slow fall of heavy snowflakes had come or a burst of midwinter sunshine was floodlighting the yard. I had ceased paying attention to these things.

Night after night I tried to practise coming out of hiding, venturing into the place where Alice was. Sometimes, for split seconds, I had a glimpse of somewhere that existed outside myself; the spot that was just here in the room with Alice.

I realized that Alice was always in the room. I was living in a spot about two inches above my head, watching.

Death had put me in that spot. I was watching out for him. But Alice managed to pull me down a couple of inches into the business and bustle of her life. So I began to watch her.

***

Placing myself under Alice’s tutelage sealed forever the change that was already occurring in our relationship. It had become apparent to me for some time that Alice did not think of herself as a domestic cat. Rather, she regarded herself as another person in the household and expected to be treated as such. After a few years of our hanging out together, she succeeded in convincing me of that fact: she was a person.

I did not think of myself as an animal. All my life I had heard it as a term of abuse, a put-down. A brutish person is one dictionary definition. On the other hand, to be human is to be kind, considerate, or even humane – like the organizations we create to take care of animals abused and abandoned by “humans”.