Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [27]
Cats, says Konrad Lorenz, will never love you the way a dog does, but what unimaginable longing could force a cat out of a comfortable home to risk its life on such a desperate trip? And what molecular evidence has our passage left in the air to be followed; what recognizable tracks did our tires leave on I-95? What unique vibrations are we emitting from our new house two thousand miles away?
Best not to think about it.
And on the other hand, George the First quite deliberately left his home and family and moved to another house two blocks away. Our house was full of noise and small children; he put up with us for several years and then disappeared. He was searched for and mourned, and then months later my mother saw him, sitting on his new front porch looking sleek. “George!” she cried, outraged. He answered at once, and trotted over to rub her ankles and be patted and speak in his distinctive polysyllabic voice, and then he went back up his front steps and settled down again. The house looked quiet and comfortable and there was no evidence of children.
In the matter of homes, a cat can decide to better itself.
Caroline bettered herself.
Caroline was born in a part of the world where the dogs are treated more tenderly than the children and live in pampered luxury, while the cats live outside and remain nameless. Since no cat is ever vaccinated, vast numbers of them die of enteritis in infancy; but since no cat is ever neutered, there are always more. They’re attached to the property in the same sense as the birds at the bird feeder, and to wonder about the quality of their lives would be considered sentimental; to keep one as a household pet is a sign of senility. They are wild and shy, but they stay where they are, half fed, unpetted, untreated for wounds or parasites or diseases; it takes an exceptional cat to dream of something better without evidence that it exists.
The striking thing about Caroline’s arrival was that she seemed to know exactly what she was doing as she came across the yard toward the house; she moved like a cat coming home in time for dinner. She seemed, in retrospect, like some healthy, hopeful, immigrant girl approaching Ellis Island with a shabby traveling bag and a determined light in her eye. She didn’t pause or detour to inspect the trees and rocks; she headed straight for the door, and I opened it, and she came in. I had the uneasy feeling that I must have invited her somehow, or hired her, and forgotten, and here she was at the appointed hour.
Only the sudden appearance of our dog, Vicky, confused her, and she fluffed up and jumped onto the mantelpiece; apparently she’d seen the whole place clearly in her mind except for the dog. After watching closely for a while, she saw that the resident cats ignored the dog, so she jumped back down and went over to Vicky and with the prettiest possible gesture walked under her chin, arching her back against it, as a sign of friendship and perhaps apology.
The other cats accepted her as if they’d known for weeks that she was coming. She had naturally sweet manners; perhaps inter-cat civility is essential in the marginal world she came from, or life would have been chaos. She never forgot the little niceties, like the lick that asks permission to join another cat in its patch of sunshine.
She was also the only grateful cat I’ve ever known, and in foul weather sat for hours on the windowsill and looked out, and then turned and looked in, surveying the warm room, the soft furniture, the cat dishes on the kitchen floor, and then looked at me and half closed her eyes and flexed her paws.
Because of a kind of modesty in her she never became a major cat around the house; she wasn’t shy, but she never pushed her way into people’s affections or laps and seemed