What-the-Dickens felt the dawn nearing. He sensed it by instinct, not by prior experience.

Something was coming of instinct, then. Maybe something more. He listened carefully.

Bugs. Grasses curling earthward with a billion papery sounds, as the ritual of condensation set small but heavy beads of moisture on every available blade. Things dripping from trees. Animals in burrows retiring their dreams till tomorrow night, if another tomorrow night would come for them. Other animals, the nocturnal brigade, waddling home, slithering home, sluicing home through the currents of freshening air.

The world belongs to the animals, thought What-the-Dickens, and no one knows it, not even them.

Other skibbereen, braver than What-the-Dickens, might have turned back to attempt a daredevil rescue of Pepper. But dawn was nearly here, and the orphan skibberee had no time to worry over his choice. He would keep his word to Pepper. He would deliver the tooth he had collected from young Lee Gangster. Toward Undertree Common he headed, as directly as his navigational instincts could lead him.

Instinct might be good for some things, but not for everything. What-the-Dickens flew for a few precious moments before realizing that he had headed in the wrong direction. He’d started toward the highway, and that was the direction — northwest — back toward the fussy antiseptic house of the Tavenners, where Pepper was caged. So he veered to go the other way, counterclockwise, over the zoo and up toward Undertree Common from the opposite direction. Completing a circular route.

Passing within range of the zoo — so near he could hear the rumble of elephant stomachs anticipating breakfast — What-the-Dickens had his brainstorm. Though he couldn’t rescue Pepper, he could do more than secure her reputation.

He could make her a legend.

It would mean lying. But he was a rogue and a rebel, so what did he care?

He swept down toward the zoo. Free the tooth! Free the tooth! Hah, he’d had some instinct he was a tooth fairy from early on, hadn’t he? Free the tooth was just what he’d done, first time out, without a single nursery lesson about it.

I’ll reclaim that tiger tooth I hid there, if it hasn’t been cleared away. When I get back — just before dawn, if my timing allows it — I’ll present Old Flossie and Doctor Ill with the tooth of Gage Tavenner, and the tooth of the young Lee Gangster, and then I’ll toss on the table my big kahuna, my winner-take-all bauble. I’ll say nonchalantly, “Oh, yes, and Pepper picked up this in her spare time, and sent it on as a memento. You can’t identify it? Tiger tooth. Come nearer — it won’t bite. Ha, ha! Plant this baby and see what comes up. Maybe not your garden-variety wishing candle. Maybe a wishing torch.”

He found the stand that sold cotton candy, ice creams, popcorn, soda pop, and beer. There was the tooth, right where he’d left it, just inside a mousehole where a respectable clan of mice huddled. (Could they be distant relatives of Muzzlemutt?)

They scurried over one another and rubbed their paws, fretting. How much it must have cost them, to guard this gargantuan tooth. He nodded at them as he grabbed hold of it but he didn’t bother to speak aloud. The languages of animals were kept secret from human and skibbereen alike. The silliness of him, trying to talk to McCavity. How young he’d been when he was first born. Dreadful, really.

But what a tooth this was. Still powerfully rank, notched as if by an awl, a monolith of dead bone designed to rend flesh from flesh.

Now that he knew skibbereen weren’t programmed to approach animals for their teeth, What-the-Dickens had the sense to be terrified of his earlier bravado with the tiger. He almost retched with the memory. What had he been thinking about?

Not much — clearly. He’d been looking for McCavity and he’d gotten distracted by an apparition.

He was going to have to fly more slowly this final leg, for the tiger tooth wouldn’t fit in his change pouch. He’d have to clutch it to his chest with his hands. So he wasn’t even able to wave at the family of mice who followed him to the door of the mousehole.

He launched awkwardly, bumblingly. He was halfway over the tiger house when something peculiar happened.

The intermittent spritzing and fritzing of his wings — the instructions from headquarters that he’d never been able to interpret, and so he’d learned to ignore — began to bite at him, from inside. It was as if the carbonated sizzle suddenly took on a meaning. It began to ebb and course with a pattern.

Complete with punctuations — pauses — periods. Only this wasn’t a written language, and it wasn’t messages from Central. Come here, it said. Come here.

“I’ll be late,” he said aloud. The mice below, more or less waiting to see him disappear, seemed to wave.

Come here, said the message in his wings. I want to see you.

“I haven’t come this far to be distracted now,” he said. “I mean, can’t this wait?”

COME HERE!

“Okay, okay,” he said, though he didn’t know to whom he spoke.

He dove in, following the call by assessing the strength of the impulses in his wings. The call took him through a window with iron slats in it. There, wise as wilderness and fierce as fire, sprawled the Bengal tiger known as Maharajah.

The tiger asked, Did you take my tooth out?

“Yes,” said What-the-Dickens. “Do you need it back?”

No, said Maharajah. I just wanted to know.

“Oh,” said the skibberee. “Well, you’re welcome. You don’t want to eat me or anything?”

You can go, now that I’ve said my part.

“But how can I understand you?” said What-the-Dickens. “Animals can’t talk, and I can’t talk animal.”

I don’t bother myself with questions like that, said Maharajah. He sniffed the air as if detecting the aroma of zookeeper making her predawn rounds with buckets of raw meat for breakfast.

I will say, continued the tiger, I am not talking, strictly speaking. I am growling rather low in the back of my throat. If you’re able to interpret the growl, that’s your talent at language, not mine.

“Oh, my,” said What-the-Dickens, and he realized the tiger was telling the truth. It was the pulses in his wings that were forming into impressions of thoughts, structures of meaning. The tiger hadn’t even opened his mouth.

One thing more, said the tiger.

“Yes?”

If I taught you one more thing, that would make —?

“Two?” said What-the-Dickens. “Two things?”

Exactly.

“Enjoy your breakfast,” said What-the-Dickens. “I gotta fly.”

And fly he did.

As he lifted up, he found himself wondering, Did I hear something no one else can hear? Or did I imagine it? Did that really happen? Did Maharajah summon me? And did I obey? Is it a talent at language, like he said? Was it a vision?

You never can be sure with cats, can you?

Who would ever believe me if I tell them I’ve talked to a tiger?

And what task or privilege does that put on me, if I did?

Now the eastern sky was less like grey and more like glass — colorless, ready to take an impression. Had there been clouds in the sky, they would have been stained with coral and gold. As it was, the last few stars winked out in the west as the horizon began to steam with the advent of the sun. In a little while, a stain of light would break over the hills. Then that first lancing beam of day would pin into place for all time the reputation of Pepper: as a loser, or as a qualified Agent of Change in absentia (absent due to her untimely death), or — what What-the-Dickens most devoutly hoped — as a tiger in her own right, worth memorializing in her own pageant… .

His reflections were torn in shreds by the sound of wind through talons. Talons? Yes, the claws, strong as bronze, of an old owl on his way home after a night of hurly-burly, and hungry as an owl can be even with the greasy remains of a small vole still smeared in his beak.

But we skibbereen aren’t terribly appealing to predators, thought What-the-Dickens, madly trying to fly faster. Are we?

Maybe not; but there was a little hint of tiger still lingering on the tiger tooth, and an owl is a carnivore… .

Help! shrieked What-the-Dickens — not with his mouth, for his head was down and his lips closed, every ouncelet of him trying to imitate a bullet. Help. Help.

Maharajah, royal creature: Break the bars of your cage and leap to help me, as I helped you… . I know you can hear me. I believe it. I believe it.

The owl bore down. What-the-Dickens could hear the wind slicking through the owl’s wings, but the air remained calm. An owl attacks without turbulence.

Help, he thought again, the kind of thought you have when there is no other thought left to have. Help, please. Help.

Help came, swifting in from the right, a crazed blob of lopsided traveler, weaving and bobbing, then intercepting the owl, and plucking What-the-Dickens out of harm’s way.

The rust-throated grisset, bumpy in her navigation as usual, lurched down to the west, and the owl was too big to bank swiftly enough to follow. What’re you doing here, you wonderful accident? said What-the-Dickens.

She answered him, in her way, which wasn’t exactly loquacious, but cheery enough, and welcome in any case. Flap flap, she said, flap flap! Home and back, home and back. Where is home? There is home. Are you my baby? I like to keep in touch. Blood’s blood, and kith is kin.

He didn’t know if these were words, or thoughts, or just sympathies without words. He couldn’t yet tell. Maybe he’d never know.

He knew what to answer, though. She was as close as he’d ever come to having a mother, even if she had once tried to feed him to her other children. Yes, I’m your baby, he said, which seemed to make her happy, though it didn’t make her fly any more directly. She lurched like a kite at the mercy of opposing winds.

The cloverleaf appeared below them as the owl circled and then decided to go home and nurse his grievances and digest that vole.

What-the-Dickens knew that if he told the rust-throated grisset to drop at once toward the arrival stump, she would mean well but probably veer astray. This was how grissets survived predators themselves, flying so unpredictably that even they didn’t know where they were headed.

So, apologetically, What-the-Dickens did a rude and graceless thing. He wrenched himself around in the clutch of the rust-throated grisset, and he opened his little mouth, and he bit her in the thigh.

Ingrate, barked the grisset, and flinched. Her grip relaxed. What-the-Dickens fell toward the ground, racing on a bull’s-eye course, and the sun readied its hems of light in preparation for its grand entrance.

Keep in touch, fluted the grisset, family-minded and a mother at heart, even when her stepchildren bit her in the thigh. Don’t be a stranger, stranger! Just call out my name and, you know, I might not hear you, but I’ll try!

Maybe she said that. Or maybe it was just her usual off-key commentary about the skittish nature of happenstance.

The skibberee kept his arms around the tiger tooth. The satchel with the Gangster tooth and the Tavenner tooth bounced painfully against his spine. Soon he was close enough to see Old Flossie and the skibbereen beginning to duck for cover in case he hit the runway full-force and splattered himself in a six-foot wave of skibberee guts.

He remembered his maneuvers in entering the slipstream of the bakery delivery truck on the highway. Now he revised them for a full-gravity encounter. He arched his wings into two canopies, imitating a parasail, or a pair of hinged maple seeds. He slowed himself down so suddenly that he dropped the tiger tooth.

Like a missile, it fell to the stump and drove in, point first, a kind of landing stump on a landing stump.

There his feet settled, as graceful as tumbling lima beans could do.

The skibbereen raised their foreheads above the floor of the trunk and peered, wide-eyed, from their places of safety. They all saw What-the-Dickens lower his wings and fold them against his back. Only then did the sun strike him straight in the face, making the point that no one present could deny. He had gotten in on time. Not a moment to spare, but on time nonetheless.