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Alice stepped through the golden door and found herself looking up at an enormous set of whiskers. "Only they are normal sized whiskers, they look so large because I am small," she reminded herself.
The dream of walking hand in hand with Dinah came to mind. The cat, who was not Dinah yet reminded Alice of Dinah quite a bit, was staring at her intently. She had seen Dinah stare just so at many little creatures who then ended up as Dinah's playthings or, worse, Dinah's dinner. "It would be so very tiresome to be a meal for that cat," Alice said to herself. "There must be something I can do." And she had better do it quickly, as the cat's haunches had begun to waggle in just that way that meant the cat might soon pounce.
A dew-drop sparkled on a nearby leaf. "If I drink this drop, I might change into a cat myself," Alice thought. She drank it, and felt herself not telescoping, as she had before, but turning a strange corner inside herself, and fur bristling out of her skin. Whiskers popped from her cheeks with audible pops. A tail burst from her backside and curled upward just as Dinah's tail did when in the very best of moods.
The cat pounced, and Alice found herself rolling over instinctively into a defensive position. She knew somehow just the right way to protect herself. She bit an ear, kicked out with both hind legs, and sprang to her feet as if she contained a gyroscope. Four times four is forty-two, she thought. "Do you know Dinah?" she tried to ask the strange cat before it might attack her again.
The words came out rather meowish. "Myoo nyoo mow Meainah?"
"Of course I know Dinah," the other cat said. His voice, as Alice could only imagine the owner of such a very deep voice as a tom, unfairly did not sound meowish at all. This made Alice rather ready to turn back into a girl again. She did not like being at such a disadvantage in speech. "How do you know Dinah?"
"Meesh my Nyat," Alice said, trying to say she's my cat.
"How can a cat be another cat's cat," the cat replied, not completely nonsensically, sitting upright and curling his tail around his haunches.
Alice tried to insist that she was not a cat, but she could see that it would not be believed. Before she could even begin to think of a successful way to argue that, as the cat had likely seen for himself, before she was a cat she was a girl, and that was when Dinah had been her cat, a bird flew by, distracting them both.
The cat was up and chasing the bird. Alice followed.
They leapt into the air, nearly able to reach the bird. A feather drifted down onto Alice's head. When it alit, she felt more changes, as all her fur changed to feathers, and her forepaws became wings.
She was very nearly the cat's meal again, but she fluttered up and away just in time. At the top of a tree, she clutched a twig and clung on. It swayed beneath her. Alice kept balance with her wings. How will I ever become a girl again, she wondered, and if I do, how will I ever get down from this tree?
A dark cloud drifted by and cast her into a slow half-shadow. Alice tried to recite a poem she had learned about a little bird, but it came out wrong in the first bit, and she stopped as rain began falling from the cloud.
Her grip on the tree branchlet slipped, and she fell. She tried to fly, but the rain was washing away the feathers, she found, and by the time she landed upright in a soft armchair, she was herself again. "Mary Ann!" the White Rabbit shouted. "Where had you got to?"
Oh, Alice thought. I suppose I'm back again. "Do bats eat rabbits?" she asked him. He hadn't known about cats, but maybe he would know that.