Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [31]
The most obvious form of expression it has is what I suppose I must call defecation. Cats invest heavy emotions in their toilet functions. A cat outdoors finding the right place to use, and using it, is a busy and seriously involved creature. Indoors, the litter pan is an important element in life. Sidney even has a special noise, or song, he makes when he’s about to use it, and another, victorious song that means he’s done so; sometimes he tears around the house afterward ruffling up the rugs with a wild light in his eye.
In my unfeeling youth I kept a lone and lonely cat in my apartment and went off to work every day. Sometimes I went out after work and was gone all evening as well, and when I did this the cat would leave me a small pile on the floor directly beside the litter pan, no more than half an inch from it, to underline that this was no thoughtless accident but a deliberate message of anger and loneliness.
My grandmother’s Siamese went further. My grandmother was old and ill, and a nurse-companion was hired to live with her. Nurse-companionship isn’t a very desirable career, and the people who go in for it are not always the best and brightest. This woman was slovenly, cross, and disagreeable, and resented the extra work of feeding and opening doors for a cat. No one knows in what ways she revenged herself on the cat, but the cat retaliated with the only weapon she had to hand. She slipped into the room where the woman slept and left her weapon on the pillow, not once but several times. Maybe it was only simple vengeance; more likely she took it a step further and hoped that the woman, rather than sleep in a pile of feces, would simply go away.
She didn’t, of course. Nurse-companions, even horrid ones, are hard to find, and it was the cat herself who went away to a shelter.
A cat who uses secret, hidden places as a toilet has some other and deeper problem, but a cat who leaves the matter in plain sight has something important to say. No matter how thoughtfully we care for it, there is always that element of helplessness in communication that forces the cat into infantile behavior, but I don’t think we need to interpret this as a relationship of childish dependence.
In fact, it sometimes seems quite the opposite, and the cats, especially females, treat their humans with the worried protective bossiness of anxious mothers, and fret inordinately over illnesses or accidents. Blueberry used to try to rescue me from the bathtub, lest I drown. When my children were young, their cuts and scrapes and howls of pain drew cats of both sexes, distressed and fussing and interfering with the first aid. Many are the stories of cats watching tirelessly at sickbeds, of cats alerting their people to fires or choking babies, even of cats hunting and bringing back small game for people trapped or in wartime peril or famine: are these dependent children, or responsible adults in the family?
Few things about the cat can be exposed to the daylight of reason, least of all how it stands, in its own eyes, in its relationship to us.
Why do cats bring us things? Country dwellers are accustomed to the rows of corpses on the morning doorstep, mice and moles and the occasional bird or baby rabbit. People in apartments whose cats don’t go out may wake up in the morning beside a row of small objects, socks and matchbooks and the like; a friend of mine woke up with a dead rat on her chest. My daughter’s cat Hector, living illicitly in a college dormitory, foraged around and brought things back to her in her room, underwear and earrings and, once, a dollar bill. Blueberry, an apartment cat, never showed the least interest in hunting even when