Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [39]
The Gray Cat was an unaltered teenage male who came over regularly to play with my friend’s small male kitten. This was in the city, and the Gray Cat, who plainly had a home, shouldn’t have been allowed to travel around like that, but that’s another story. The kitten’s house was in a courtyard off the street, and he was let out to play there, with supervision from a window, and the Gray Cat played sweetly with him and taught him tag and wrestling.
There’s a law in our city about dogs on leashes, but the only people who obey it are the owners of tiny fluffy dogs like animated dusters; people with Danes and Dobermans let them gallop on ahead, and stroll after them carrying the leash looped over the wrist with casual grace as if, like the riding crop, it existed mainly to decorate the owner. The gate of the courtyard was open and the Doberman, passing, saw the kitten outside alone. He sprang for it with the speed of a panther and the teeth of the great white shark.
From nowhere the Gray Cat flashed into sight and leaped straight into his face. My friend, watching from a window, screamed simultaneously and rushed out waving her arms, but even so the dog had plenty of time to close his steel jaws just once and crush the Gray Cat to a pulp; that he didn’t must have been due to his slow-wittedness in dealing with the unexpected. His owner arrived and, after inspecting his friend for scratches and delivering himself of a few words on the unwisdom of letting cats out into a dog’s world, they departed.
Saved from the literal jaws of death, the kitten crept out from under a bush still fluffed, and the Gray Cat licked him on the head and shoulders before settling down to wash himself all over.
We can dismiss the heroism of a mother cat as mainly instinct, a blind urging in her nerves and muscles that she has no choice but to obey, but what can we say about the Gray Cat? If it had been a human that he saved, a deed of a quite different and far higher order, of course, no doubt he would have been invited to the White House and given a medal and it would have been on the evening news, but the kitten was only a kitten, and so the Gray Cat was allowed to go about his business.
If in a colony cats seem largely to ignore one another, among individuals and in smaller families they often go beyond tolerance to develop genuine personal affections for each other. All proper behaviorists base cat relationships firmly on dominance and submission, but the closest inspection of my family of five shows no evidence of it at all. Even in his sultan days Barney imposed his will on no other cat, and took no other cat’s space or food. No cat here is in charge, no cat here submits; they all have their personal crotchets, but no one seems to care who’s first. Maybe the behaviorists have studied too many families of a mother with grown children. Mothers tend to maintain their sway. Or maybe my cats are simply lazy; with more than one or two other cats around, upholding a superior position is a lot of work, which cats avoid, and involves contention, which unsexed cats avoid as destructive of peace and naptime.
My group seems to have melded itself into a family of such wordless solidarity, and to take such evident comfort from each other, that I sometimes suppress a twinge of envy. There are chronic washers and washees among them, but this is personality, not dominance; Sidney never did learn to wash himself. Barney sits apart from the others, but he’s one of them, a member if not a friend. When the little black cat was sick and got well again and came back from the vet