[Carolyn Kunin sends the following messages.  I suggest that we end this thread with this message -- I think it's stretched as far as it can go. - SES]

Alexey,

How can the cat be chained? he walkspo tsepi krugom - I translate that as "he
walks along the chain around [the oak tree].

How do you understand it? He is tethered to the tree and walks as far as the
chain will allow him in either direction? who has chained him? or what? Baba
Yaga?

In your post below (May 4) you say "he is not chained and can go wherever he
wants" -- I am confused. Oh, ok, I see you are disagreeing with Mary Efremov.
Mary, are you a native speaker? I am not, but Alexey is.

By the way, can"kot" refer to male and/or female, or strictly the tom? When I
visited the CCCP in (I had to check with Wikipedia - I was there in August just
following The United States' Apollo 11, the first manned mission landed on the
Moon, on 20 July 1969.[
there were no tame cats to speak of - at least not in the environs of Leningrad
where we stayed as students. There were feral cats under the apartment
buildings, but they hissed at you if your tried to offer them food or milk (god,
did we get any milk? I remember one day we got an egg! that was quite an event).
Someone told me that we could not have been there for the belyie nochi, but I
distinctly remember them, and on the longest day of the year, we stayed up to
watch the sun dip below the horizon for a few minutes and re-emerge a few
degrees to the north. How could I have invented that? I also have seen the
aurora borealis in Los Angeles once during an electric storm - theoretically
also impossible, I am told.

None of the Soviets we met believed a word of that moon landing story, by the
way. And they all believed that Svetlana Allilyueva was dead, that her father,
Stalin, was great and so on. So much for Soviet "realism"!

Carolina Elisaveta, as I then was - for six bloody weeks.