Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [12]
A cat can tell us infinitely more than we can tell a cat, and certainly more than the great leaders can tell each other across the language barrier. A cat has, for instance, thirty different muscles in its ears, making them expressive of the subtlest shades of interest and disapproval, while we have only six and most of us can’t use any of them. If we live with a cat, and the cat holds its ears in a certain position, we know without thinking about it that the cat is cross, or that it hears something across the room. How do we know? We just do. Perhaps we aren’t so dense after all.
The whole cat is an instrument of communication. It has forty more bones in its flexible body than we do; the bones of its spine are connected by muscle instead of ligament, so that even its back communicates. Its movable whiskers inform us, and the pupils of its eyes expand and contract with mood as well as with light. The hairs of its back and tail rise up for threat or fear, accompanied by the international Esperanto of growls and hisses. A sound that Colette spells “Mouek mouek mouek, Ma-a-a-a” and B. Kliban spells “wacka wacka wacka” means “I see a bird, and I wish I could catch it, but birds are hard to catch, not worth making a fool of myself over, and that makes me furious.”
Without trying to decipher the meaning of “meow” we can understand a good deal of cat. How does the cat understand us? No mere human can begin to realize the scope of smell for animals that can use it; it’s a whole lost language for us. Through a haze of cigarette smoke, garlic, bath soap, and cologne the cat can smell on our skin subtle pH changes from fear or anger and heaven knows what else. Any illness changes our scent, grief changes it, and the cat reacts, sometimes with motherly comforting and sometimes with panic and anger. Posture, energy level, tone of voice; all this is easily read. And language? Words?
Does not being able to speak them mean not being able to understand? Conservative science holds that human speech in the cats’ ears is only a formless river of intonation and inflection, and no cat can make the intellectual connection between the sound itself and the indicated object, only learn from long experience, from the speaker’s body language and tone, to make a few tentative inferences: “Bad!” doesn’t mean “bad” but is only a sound, like a growl, that comes from the human when you rip up the couch. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty” is a sound preliminary to dinner. The dog that comes when called doesn’t understand his name as meaning him, only as a sound that means his owner wants him, accompanied by subtle tonal qualities that help him identify it; he may not even recognize it in another’s voice. A name is a word. Animals can’t grasp the concept “word.”
Gone with the Wind was playing on television. Barney was sound asleep. The little girl was riding around on her pony, about to break her neck, and for several minutes the set rang with cries of “Bonnie! Bonnie!” The cat woke up and looked at the television, but nothing on the set related to him. “Bonnie!” they cried, and he turned and looked at me, first inquiringly, then angrily. Someone, somewhere, was teasing him. “Bonnie!” He got down off the couch and left the room in a huff, and I remembered his first owner and her soft southern voice. “Bahney,” she called him. “Baahney.” If I hadn’t had the spellings in my mind, I couldn’t have told the sounds apart. And in Barney’s ears it was a word, and meant whatever he thinks of as “him,” and had nothing to do with recognized inflection or tone; he has never even met Clark Gable.
If “Barney,” then what else? I’m not suggesting we