Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [34]
“Let her sit beside you, then. Invite her up.”
Instead Jane scooped up the cat and carried her to the basement door. “She can stay down there. She’s a useless cat and I’ve got a good mind to get rid of her. I got her to catch mice. The people said her mother was a great mouser, and does Esmeralda catch mice? Hell, no. She plays with them. She’s made friends with them, I caught her sharing her food with them.” “What?”
“You heard me. I opened the basement door and there they were, there she was by her dish and there were two or three mice with her, and they ran away when they saw me. She was letting them eat out of her dish. I’d just like to give her back to those liars who gave her to me, it would serve them right.”
The stairs down to the basement were steep and long, and Jane had a bad knee, but every day she carried Esmeralda’s dinner dish down those stairs and set it next to the litter pan, an uncongenial arrangement to say the least, rather than share her big bright kitchen with a cat. Alone in her living room Jane watched television and complained of loneliness. Alone in the dark basement the cat, desperate, made friends with mice like prisoners in the dungeons of song and story.
“Damned useless cat.” Jane slammed the basement door. “I expect she does it just to spite me, she knows I hate mice.”
And so they lived together there for several years, woman and cat, until Jane died of the various complications of loneliness and relatives drove Esmeralda to the vet to be “put to sleep,” as we like to call it.
If we don’t expect to love a cat, we should be careful to find out what the cat expects. And if we don’t plan on a personal relationship, we must at least arrange for it to have some company, some friendship. The cat goes hunting by itself, because that’s the way a cat has to hunt, but it doesn’t choose loneliness. It seems to contain great secret lakes and continents of generous affection, much of it, surprisingly, for us, and it shouldn’t have to pass its days in such miserable solitude that it shares its food with mice.
5
Cats with Cats
Relations between cat and cat are as complex and stylized as Chinese ideographs. It’s easier, really, for cats to get along with people. Friendships between cats and people come naturally and are simple enough, sometimes dangerously simple, to establish. Just leave the door open a minute too long on a dark and catless night, then turn back into your house and it has a cat, like a puff of fog blown in, and it turns out you’ve met before in an earlier life. The cat was born knowing how to arch its back under your hand, and your hand knows how to smooth itself along the cat in a gesture clinically proven to soothe you both. The cat will settle down with its paws folded under its breast and accept you with its eyes, and be perfectly at ease in your presence. You are natural companions.
Getting along with other cats takes teaching. Cat manners and communication are taught positively by example and negatively by direct, sometimes very direct, instruction from any other cat close enough to aim a slap. Some of it does come built into the cat; a kitten with a safe and happy mother never saw her fluff her tail and hiss, but surprise this infant in its box and it swells into a spitting pincushion. The smaller the kitten, the more thoroughly it can fluff itself to look bigger. A grown cat expands its tail and a ridge of fur along its arched back, turning sideways to the enemy to show the full effect, but the kitten bristles all over. You can say a lot with fur. Lions, instead of turning sideways, face the threat head-on to show the splendid intimidating mane and hide the absurdly unimposing leonine rear. Dogs’ hackles are confined to the back of the neck and frontal spine, and raising them means the same thing. A friend of mine has a Rhodesian ridgeback whose hackles are permanently raised, stiff as a hairbrush even in her sleep, and this gets her in trouble, as if she were a human waving a loaded shotgun. On her most peaceful country strolls, farm dogs see her and react