• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If it outlasts us all, it will still look the same when we’re gone.

SECRETS

OF

THE

CAT

1

The Conversion of Boston Blackie

You can usually tell by looking at it what’s going on inside a dog. Except for the few Thurberian neurotics, a dog wears his insides on his outside, writ large and plain. A cat thinks at the back of its head, and the results can surprise you. No wonder cats were burned as witches; it hurts people’s feelings not to know what the lower orders are up to.

Boston Blackie was an outlaw. He was of the tribe known in the city as alley cats, in the country as feral, and in the suburbs as strays, the last word carrying a hint of self-righteous blame; to stray is to wander, ignorantly or willfully, from the proper path. It is the cat who has gone astray, wandered off from domesticity to starve, not the people who have left it behind when they moved or thrown it in a bag with its siblings from a passing car. There are millions of these. They flicker across human paths from time to time, and maybe we say, “Puss, puss,” but they vanish as quickly as the shadow of a bird, having no reason to answer. They do not live long, but there are always more.

Boston Blackie was different from most. He was more predator than waif, and his chosen prey was cats. Boston Blackie hated cats; he wanted to kill them, all of them. Coming down out of the woods and fields like the wolf in the fold, he swooped, savaged, and vanished again. My sister Judy and her husband had, at the time, thirteen cats (they now have twenty-three, through no fault of their own) and, weather permitting, these spent most of their time outdoors. Boston Blackie attacked them on their own premises without regard for age or gender, and he beat them bloody. He ripped their ears and gouged their eyes and dealt out deep, suppurating abscesses. Cat after cat was carried bleeding to the vet, cat after cat was dosed with penicillin. Yards of stitches were taken. The vet bills grew.

Sometimes we caught glimpses of Blackie; sometimes we just heard screams. His attack was most uncatlike, with none of the singsong preliminaries to a fight, no foreplay, none of the elaborate adjustment of position and subtleties of eye contact with which normal male cats defuse their aggressions, nine times out of ten breaking off to lick or pretend an interest in some distant object and drift away without a blow exchanged. Blackie just pounced, as on a mouse. Anyone around would run out yelling. Once I beat him with a rake, standing over him panting and whacking, but he went on tearing chunks out of poor Flanagan as if I were made of air. He had no interest in people. I was unnerved by the single-minded concentration of his hatred, like the legends about wolverines. Nothing distracted him from his urge to rid the world of all its other cats; when disturbed by humans he usually drove his victim under the woodshed, out of reach, to go on with the bloodshed. Not even the largest and strongest of our cats landed a blow, and Blackie himself was unscarred. Cats fight by certain rules and ceremonies, and Blackie’s bulletlike descent and mad, meaningless hatred disarmed them utterly; they never even had a chance to run. Some of their wounds were on their back legs from trying.

Except for a handful accidentally born on the premises, all Judy’s cats had been strays, and none of them had ever acted like that. Stray cats may be, and usually are, starving, lame, frightened, ill, and in hideous pain from infected wounds, eaten alive by fleas, ticks, ear mites, and intestinal parasites, but they don’t go looking for other cats to kill. Since the thirteen had all been neutered, sex could be ruled out as a motive, and Blackie wasn’t starving, either. When Judy fed her own she threw a propitiatory handful of food into the forsythia bushes where he often lay in wait, not for food but for blood.

He didn’t act like a cat, and he didn’t even look much like a stray. The standard