Some people say they don’t like cats. They say they are too independent, too standoffish; they do not offer the devotion and loyalty of dogs. This may be true, to some extent, but that is why I like them. I am wary of any creature which offers slavish and slobbering love.
Peter, my partner, declares he never understood how to love cats till he met me. We’ve been together more than 20 years now and he is a cat convert. We have two cats; Bug, who was a single kitten and does not know she is a cat, and who is so needy I sometimes shriek at her; and Smokey, the boy we both adore. He is a striped grey tiger, who will drink water only from the tap, and who requests we open the faucet at least 10 times a day. He lets me pick him up and kiss him, grudgingly, but mostly avoids being held. He likes to bite our hands, and wakes me up by chewing on my fingers.
My sister Katie has two cats also, both of them products of my erstwhile breeding experiments. I bred a blue-eyed barn cat with a Siamese, bred the result with an Abyssinian, and then bred those results with a Bengal. I have stopped now, as I could not get comfortable with selling and giving all the kittens away. I always wondered what their fate would be.
One thing we both noticed is that cats will often make attempts to share their kills with us. Bug dispatches a mouse, and meows loudly by the door till I admire it. I usually throw it away and perhaps she thinks I eat it, for she serves up moles and chipmunks as well. One time she even brought me a frog.
Katie had a cat named Mikey, who was renowned for killing large gray squirrels. Sometimes she would find a squirrel draped carefully across the cat food bowl. Unfortunately, Mikey liked to beat on the other cats ( a characteristic of Bengals) so she gave him to her son. Mikey lived near Dan and Whit’s for a time, and learned to cross the road safely. Katie’s son had to get him chipped, because he was so friendly and people often mistook him for a stray.
When her son took Mikey, Katie was left with two females, and both of them like to hunt. But nothing could have prepared her for the sight which met her eyes a few days ago.
She came downstairs in the morning and was making tea when she noticed a duck sitting in the dogs’ water bowl. You can imagine her surprise.
It didn’t take her long to come up with a plausible scenario. We both live on the Connecticut River, and are used to the sight of ducks and geese. One of her cats must have caught the duck, which was only about half-grown, and dragged it into the house through the cat door. Because it was so big and its neck was so densely feathered, the cat had not managed to kill it. In fact, the duck appeared unharmed. It may have been stunned, and when the cat departed it came to and looked for water. All it could find was the dog’s water dish, which wasn’t quite large enough for it, but what can a duck do? Water was water. It plonked itself in the dish and waited, perhaps for rain, or perhaps for them to close the dam in Wilder.
Katie was able to catch it and put it outside. Then she decided to carry it to the water, so she went out with a bucket prepared to chase it. The duck, still being young, ran right up, attracted by her movement. She carried it to the river and it swam away, without a backward glance.
This story amused us all for days. Katie even put it on Facebook, and one of her friends wrote, “This just doesn’t happen on the Upper East Side.” This comment stuck with me. It made me appreciate even more where we live.
Some thoughtful people have decided that some of us humans have a nature deficit disorder. It’s bad, especially for children, to lose touch with the cycles of nature, the production of food, the behavior of animals.
There’s little danger of that here. We are nourished daily by the sight of something wild, and nature’s lessons are always useful, if only for a laugh.
Sybil Smith lives in Norwich.