A thick yellow polypropylene hawser writhed in their track. They trailed it for safety. Tonight it was strangely passive and looked white in the moonlight. It was sixty feet long, secured strongly to an after mooring-bit. You were supposed to grab it if you fell overboard and try to hang on until your mate rounded up into the wind. With the boat finally stopped, the victim might even use the hawser to haul himself back.

The line should have been dragging an empty plastic jug as a buoy astern, bobbing and dancing in his wake. But he could not see it, although the hawser itself was wagging from port to starboard. Its listlessness bothered him. He began to haul it in. When its end was twenty feet astern he could see in the glow of the sternlight that the plastic jug was gone.

He hauled the rest quickly aboard to check it. The eye he had spliced through the handle of the missing jug was still intact. The cap of the jug must have loosened, after five thousand miles dragging in their wake. The jug must have filled with water and become so heavy that its handle had broken off.

He tossed the hawser back into the wake to let it trail without the jug. He could attach some sort of buoy tomorrow, but since the line was surfacing all right without it, he guessed that he probably wouldn’t.

He was turning away when he felt rippling fur at his ankles. It was M. le Chat. Gently, he nudged the cat away with a bare foot, afraid it would be washed overboard if a wave shot over the rail.

M. le Chat was a gift to Lindy from a waitress at the Vaima Restaurant, on the Papeete quai. He had been intended as copra-rat insurance. Sure enough, they had picked up a rat in Rarotonga after the hurricane, an unassuming recluse who liked Kellogg’s Special K. Mitch had glimpsed him yesterday and chased him to the bilges, where he had disappeared between the hull and inner sheathing. He was enormous.

For this rat, the cat was as useful as a high school tackle sent in to nail O.J. Simpson. He was indifferent, or scared. The stowaway was big enough to chew him up and spit him over the side. The cat’s real interest lay in the imaginary bird chirping under the lazarette hatch.

Mitch didn’t really like M. le Chat. Now he decided to discharge him dishonorably when they got to Tahiti. He could give him back to the waitress, perhaps, and replace him with another dozen traps.

The problem would be Lindy. He organized his brief: “He still gets seasick.”

Probable rebuttal: “I still get seasick, Mitch. Are we going to get rid of me?”

“He won’t hunt for the frigging rat!"

“You won’t hunt for the leak down the mast.”

“If there’s any kind of sea, he misses his sandbox.”