Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [37]
After breakfast they fan out like the spokes of a wheel. Zachary goes down the driveway toward the woods, Flanagan through the neighbor’s yard and around the north side of my house, Ferdie through the back hedge, Marzipan across the vegetable garden; their paths neither cross nor conflict. (Basil, having found his home, stays by it, pressed heavily against its wall to pin it down.) Indoors, no one has made an effort to stake out a particular chair or rug; presumably it would take so much defending there’d be no time for sleep. But outside there’s space enough for each to have his own, established by custom and mutual consent rather than confrontation. It’s recognized that these paths and areas are not property, to be defended, but rights-of-way only. It would be bad manners, not trespass, to use Flanagan’s path by the leaf pile; Morgan, who has very bad manners, used it often.
Close trespass is another matter. Mehitabel sat on the roof of the sheep shed to make sure Morgan didn’t come up the driveway into the space where Mehitabel is queen mother. For years she was the only female here except for her three cowed daughters, and while she ignored Barney’s and Sidney’s encroachments she stood guard against Morgan’s. Gender is important to cats. Morgan sat across the drive on a woodpile, on her own side of an imaginary line drawn straight across from Mehitabel’s fierce, beautiful owl eyes. Morgan understood; she and Mehitabel are birds of a feather in this lust for power and property.
Mehitabel’s will stretched across the driveway like an electric eye, and I crossed it apprehensively as if it might be carcinogenic, though she wasn’t hostile to me. Quite the contrary. She courted me lavishly, shamelessly; that would have been the final victory, to take me away from Morgan, to supplant her, move into her house and order her cast onto the dung heap for the crows. From the woodpile Morgan watched her, on the alert for any temporary failure of will or loss of nerve that would slacken the line and let her cross. Once, to see what would happen, I picked her up and carried her past Mehitabel; she struggled and scratched me, leaped down, and dashed back to the woodpile. In the interplay of cat and cat, humans simply don’t count. We can’t, like the Greeks’ gods, hang around the battlefield helping out our favorites; it’s a breach of etiquette and our favorites wouldn’t thank us and any victories we scored would be scrubbed from the record.
In a group as large as my sister’s there is no pecking order. It would be mathematically impossible to keep track of, especially since these rankings have a way of shifting for no apparent reason. As in any group, though, there’s always the last and least, usually the newcomer or junior member, but in this collection it’s Snipe. All of us knew a kid like Snipe in school. If Snipe were a human eight-year-old he would come from the wrong side of the tracks, whine a lot, and smell of sour milk. He would wipe his nose on his coat sleeve all winter; the nurse would send home notes about things living in his hair. His ears would be full of scabby stuff, and when it came to choosing up teams the captains would come to blows over which had to take Snipe.
He’s a narrow-chested, rat-faced, black-and-white cat with a hacking cough, made of poor protoplasm poorly put together, and no amount of nourishing food or veterinary attention has been able to improve on the hand nature dealt him. No matter who comes or goes in the household, Snipe is last, and knows it.
Among more primitive creatures like chickens or eight-year-olds, the others would simply fall on him and destroy him as a blot unworthy of existence, but Snipe goes unscathed. He is the opposite of threat. In a feline society where status is based on self-confidence, Snipe’s well-founded humility is a laissez-passer and makes him invisible, crawling beneath everyone’s notice like a low-flying plane avoiding radar. It