The Cat-Tracker Lady of Asad Alley

Thirty feet away, the woman began craning her hooded head first in one direction, then in another, before saying softly, “There you are,” and after she spoke, the cats began to ooze from the alley, a wiggling ocean of low-slung bodies, their fur rippling wave-like as they moved in a huge phalanx of long, lean backs, lowered tails, and flattened-eared heads, coming closer and closer to the woman as she went from pan to pan, not leaving food, but merely indicating that the pans were, indeed, there.