Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [4]
He’s called Basil now, and sometimes Bison because his head and shoulders have grown to enormous size, and he purrs like a helicopter. He’s been known to cuff an unruly kitten, but otherwise peace is his whole desire, peace and for pure heaven a little rubbing under the chin until his purr amplifies to the gurgle of a Boeing with a sea gull in its throat.
I have coaxed wild cats in from the woods before, and this is not how it’s done. It’s a long process and full of setbacks. First the dish at the edge of the lawn is ignored completely or falls to a raccoon. Then the food is eaten, but secretly, at night. Then if all goes well and no one slams a door, no far-off dog barks, no phone rings, maybe there’s a glimpse of cat at the dish at dusk. Emboldened, you move the dish six feet in from the woods, onto civilized grass, where it stays untouched for three days. You may never see the cat again, or it may eventually reappear to snatch a morsel and race with it back to the woods.
With Rupert, I began in July, and by the time leaves were falling in October he would suffer me to sit on the back steps and watch him eating from twenty feet away. After that I had to go away and my mother took over. By first snowfall she had him in the house, but now after twelve years of domestic life he’s still twitchy about it. He still disappears for hours at the sound of a strange voice. He accepts food from no one but Mother. Two years ago he took to sitting beside her on the couch in the evenings; if he lives long enough he may someday sit in her lap, but he’s still terrified of my brother. More than once he’s mistaken me for Mother, and when he realized I wasn’t, squawled with horror and fled.
Rupert was coaxed with infinite gentleness for months; Boston Blackie, who had known only shouts and occasional beatings from us, converted himself between morning and evening.
What happened? We argued it over. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? But there had been no Jekyll moments in his outlaw days, and months passed and Mr. Hyde never returned.
Sometimes desperate circumstance will force a feral cat to ask for help that it hates. Once, in the country, a nursing female came to my back door in bitter January and asked for food. I don’t know how she knew to ask, but certainly she knew she had to have help or she and the kittens would die; it’s unwise, when you’re on your own, to have kittens in zero-degree weather. There was something terribly proud and bitter in this little cat, who didn’t pretend to be friendly but only showed me her desperation, her hat-rack hipbones and dry, dangling teats. I put out food and water, and then followed her to the kittens, in the semi-shelter under a shed. They were very young, with their eyes still sealed shut. The little cat growled at me when I reached out a hand, and scratched me when I tried to gather her young up to take them someplace warmer. She had hated having to ask for food, and as soon as a break came in the steely cold she and the surviving kittens disappeared.
But Boston Blackie wasn’t hungry, and to a cat who’d survived the long Pennsylvania winter these June days with their meadows full of mice must have seemed very endurable indeed. People who extol the independent, solitary nature of the cat would have considered his life ideal.
Maybe he had had a spell of madness, or perhaps amnesia. Maybe, since there was a respectable strain of protoplasm in his shape, some racial memory had risen in his brain like a bubble. Maybe he had once belonged to people, and been a house cat, and then lost his sanity or his memory and somehow that Saturday it came back to him. “Maybe,” Judy suggested, “he’d had a blow on the head, and then he had another blow on the head and it brought back his memory.”
“Like in the cartoons.”
“Exactly.”
It was a silly idea, but it was the only one we could think of, or the only one we could admit to without making fools of ourselves.
The unmentionable answer was, of course,