Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to travel abroad and tread wheat alongside this stranger when he becomes an adult. But first, Cat must grow up in the small port town where he lives with his timpanist grandfather and a father obsessed with an unsolved mathematical proof, and which, as part of the series of increasingly surreal events that characterize his life, Cat rescues from a plague of rats by his curious ability to imitate cats’ yowls. The ‘rat-a-tap, tap’ of Kutze’s step echoes through Cat’s life as he matures, moves away from the town to become a musician in the big city and, eventually, journeys further afield, across the sea.