The dog sat down too, grinning. «Be a bird now," he called to Gordon. «Let's see you be a bird and fly away.»
Normally, Gordon could easily have stayed up in the tree longer than the dog felt like waiting below, but he was tired and rather thirsty, not to mention annoyed at the thought of being late for the faculty meeting. Something had to be done. But what?
He was bravely considering an original plan of leaping straight down at the dog, when three young mice happened along. They had been out shopping for their mother They were really very young, and as they had never seen Gordon the Terrible — though they had heard about him since they were blind babies — they didn't know who it was in the tree. All they saw was a fellow mouse in danger, and, being at the age when they didn't know any better than to do things like that, they carefully put down their packages and began luring the dog away from the tree. First one mouse would rush in at him and make the dog chase him a little way, and then another would come scampering from somewhere else, so that the dog would leave off chasing the first mouse and go after him.
The dog, who was actually quite good–natured, and not very hungry, had a fine time running after them all. He followed them farther and farther away from the tree, and had probably forgotten all about Gordon by the time the Unspeakable was able to spring down from the tree and vanish into the bushes.
Gordon would have waited to thank the three mice, but they had disappeared, along with the dog. Anxious not to miss his meeting, he dashed back to the school, slowing down before he got there to catch his breath and smooth his whiskers. «It could happen to anyone," he told himself. «There's nothing to be ashamed of.» Yet there was something fundamentally troubling to Gordon about having run away. Feeling uncertain for the first time since he had marched up the front steps, he washed himself all over and stalked on into the school, outwardly calm and proud, the best cat anyone there would ever see, Gordon the Terrible, the Unspeakable — yes, the Self–Made Cat.
But another cat — the Assistant Professor of Tailchasing, in fact — had seen the whole incident, and had already interrupted the faculty meeting with the shocking tale.
The Principal tried to brush the news aside. «When it's time to climb a tree, you climb a tree," he said. «Any cat knows that.» (He had become quite fond of Gordon, in his way.)
It wasn't enough. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing (a chocolate–point Siamese who dreamed of one day heading the school himself) led the opposition. As the Assistant Professor saw it, Gordon was plainly a fraud, a pretender, a cat in card only, so friendly with his fellow mice that they had rushed to help him when he was in danger. In light of that, who could say what Gordon's real plans might be? Why had he come to the school in the first place? What if more like him followed? What if the mice were plotting to attack the cat school, all cat schools?
This thought rattled everyone at the table. With a mouse like Gordon in their midst, a mouse who knew far more about being a cat than the cats themselves, was any feline safe?
Just that quickly, fear replaced reason. Within minutes everyone but the Principal forgot how much they had liked and admired Gordon. Admitting him to the school had been a catastrophic mistake, one that must be set right without a moment's delay!
The Principal groaned and covered his eyes and sent for Gordon. He was almost crying as he took Gordon's cat card away.
Gordon protested like mad, of course. He spoke of Will and Choice, and Freedom, and the transforming power of Questioning Assumptions. But the Principal said sadly, «We just can't trust you, Gordon. Go away now, before I eat you myself. I always wondered what you'd taste like.» Then he put his head down on his desk and really did begin to cry.
So Gordon packed his clean shirt and his leftover peanut butter and left the cat school. All the cats formed a double line to let him pass, their faces turned away, and nobody said a word. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing was poised to pounce at the very last, but the Principal stepped on his tail.
Nobody ever heard of Gordon again. There were stories that he'd gone right on being a cat, even without his card; and there were other tales that said he had been driven out of the country by the mice themselves. But only the Principal knew for sure, because only the Principal had heard the words that Gordon was muttering to himself as he walked away from the cat school with his head held high.
«Woof," Gordon was murmuring thoughtfully. «Woof. Bow–wow. Shouldn't be too hard.»
Two Hearts
Friends, family, and fans have all asked me, over the years, to write a sequel to The Last Unicorn. To each in turn I have responded with some variant of the following: «It can't be done. The Last Unicorn is a one–shot, meant from the beginning as a kind of spoof/tribute to the classic European fairytale, an homage to such beloved influences of mine as James Stephens, Lord Dunsany, T. H. White and James Thurber. Writing it was a nightmarish, seemingly endless labor, and when it was done I vowed never to attempt such a balancing act again. So thank you for asking, but no.»
It wasn't a hard vow to keep: there were other books I wanted to write, and I have always had a real horror of repeating myself. Besides, like everyone else (and quite against my own personal wishes), I grew older. The Last Unicorn is a young man's work, and I am not quite him anymore in so many different ways.
Yet here I am, writing an introduction for a sequel to The Last Unicorn.
I blame Connor Cochran entirely for the existence of «Two Hearts.» He proposed it as a bonus gift for the first 3,000 buyers of the audiobook of The Last Unicorn, and wheedled me into going along by assuring me that I needn't bring back a single one of the original cast — only the world of the novel, nothing more. So, of course, I presented him with four of the major characters, and references to a couple of others, and had an astonishingly fine time doing it. The trouble now, of course, is that I can't abandon Sooz, my young narrator. I'm going to have to bring her back and see where she wants to go … which will be, as I already know, into the real full–novel sequel to The Last Unicorn. Which I never wanted to write. Bozhe may, as my Russian uncles used to say. Heaven help me…
My brother Wilfrid keeps saying it's not fair that it should all have happened to me. Me being a girl, and a baby, and too stupid to lace up my own sandals properly. But I think it's fair. I think everything happened exactly the way it should have done. Except for the sad parts, and maybe those too.
I'm Sooz, and I am nine years old. Ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. Wilfrid says it was because of me, that the griffin heard that the ugliest baby in the world had just been born, and it was going to eat me, but I was too ugly, even for a griffin. So it nested in the Midwood (we call it that, but its real name is the Midnight Wood, because of the darkness under the trees), and stayed to eat our sheep and our goats. Griffins do that if they like a place. But it didn't ever eat children, not until this year.
I only saw it once — I mean, once before — rising up above the trees one night, like a second moon. Only there wasn't a moon, then. There was nothing in the whole world but the griffin, golden feathers all blazing on its lion's body and eagle's wings, with its great front claws like teeth, and that monstrous beak that looked so huge for its head … Wilfrid says I screamed for three days, but he's lying, and I didn't hide in the root cellar like he says either, I slept in the barn those two nights, with our dog Malka. Because I knew Malka wouldn't let anything get me.
I mean my parents wouldn't have, either, not if they could have stopped it. It's just that Malka is the biggest, fiercest dog in the whole village, and she's not afraid of anything. And after the griffin took Jehane, the blacksmith's little girl, you couldn't help seeing how frightened my father was, running back and forth with the other men, trying to organize some sort of patrol, so people could always tell when the griffin was coming. I know he was frightened for me and my mother, and doing everything he could to protect us, but it didn't make me feel any safer, and Malka did.