Fern had very tall ears. Satellite-dish ears, the neighbours called them. Ears that could hear a crisp packet rustling three gardens over, a spider crossing a stone, the precise moment a tap was turned on inside the house. They were useful ears. They were also, sometimes, a great deal.
Tonight, Fern sat on the garden fence between four other cats: Mop, Gristle, Two-Socks, and the enormous fluffy one nobody had ever properly named. The sky above them was going purple and orange and deep, deep blue. The other cats stared at it with the serious expressions of cats watching something magnificent.
Fern's ears swivelled left.
*Tink.*
She swivelled them right.
*Tink-tink.*
There it was. Small and rhythmic and coming from somewhere down in the dark garden below. *Tink-tink-tink.* Like something tapping, very politely, against glass.
Fern looked at the others. Mop's eyes were half-closed. Gristle was pretending to be a statue. Two-Socks had not blinked in quite some time. None of them could hear it. Fern's ears flattened once, then rose again. A sound without an explanation was not a sound she could ignore.
She dropped down from the fence into the long grass. The blades were cold and damp against her paws, and they smelled of earth and something faintly green and crushed. She stood very still. *Tink-tink-tink.* Still there. Coming from further in. She moved toward it — slow, deliberate steps, one paw placed carefully in front of the next.
She nosed past the big terracotta flower pot. Nothing. She circled the smaller one with the cracked rim. Nothing behind it but a woodlouse going very fast somewhere urgent. *Tink-tink-tink.* Her ears tilted forward like two radio dishes finding a signal. Closer. Definitely closer.
Around the side of the shed, the air smelled different — cold metal and old wood and something damp underneath the drainpipe. Fern pressed on. A moth blundered past her left ear and she flinched sideways, regained her dignity, and kept walking. The moth was not the mystery.
The garden tap stuck out from the shed wall, dull silver in the last of the light. And there, rolled against its base, catching the faint glow from the kitchen window — a jam jar. Round and glass and sealed with a thin film of dried strawberry. And inside it: something small. Something bumping its head, very gently, against the side.
*Tink. Tink. Tink.*
Fern lowered her nose to the glass. A beetle stared back at her. Small. Dark. Wearing the expression of someone who had made a poor decision and was being very dignified about it. He bumped his head against the glass again. *Tink.* Then stopped. Then looked at Fern with what could only be described as hope.
Fern considered the jar. She placed one paw on its curved side and pushed — slowly, carefully — until the open end tipped toward the ground. The beetle walked out with considerable composure, paused on the damp soil, tidied both antennae with his front legs, and then disappeared into the dark with one small wave.
The *tink-tink-tink* did not come again.
Fern sat beside the tap for a moment. The air was cooler now, and very quiet. A good quiet. The kind with nothing hiding in it.
She climbed back up to the fence. Mop shuffled sideways to make room. The sky had gone almost entirely dark, and the first stars were showing, cold and sharp and far away. Fern settled between Two-Socks and the enormous fluffy one. She tucked her paws underneath her. She closed her eyes.
Her ears, for once, were still.
