Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [42]
I would have assumed that all the members were male, like Shriners, but animal psychologist Dr. Michael W. Fox thinks not. In his splendid book Understanding Your Cat he says, “Gatherings of cats, which have nothing to do with mating, often occur at night. They are purely social … Male and female cats will congregate at a meeting place not far from their home range where they sit quite close, even engaging in mutual grooming and licking. Occasional hostility may be seen, such as hissing and ear flattening, but these gatherings are generally peaceful and, interestingly, occur outside the mating season. Around midnight the meeting may quietly disperse and each cat will return to its sleeping quarters.”
And these are the same creatures that go to such lengths to avoid even crossing each other’s paths in the woods?
Boy had no interest in other cats and gave his undivided attention to me. As other household cats came and went he walked among them apparently barely distinguishing one from another, and washed his own ears.
Then we rented a house in a seaside town for a month in the summer, and took Boy with us. I let him out, and he sniffed the premises and presently came back. Within a few days, however, something had happened. He had to go out, urgently, every evening at nine o’clock, and he returned promptly at five in the morning, somehow scaling the side of the house and scratching at the screen of the window over my bed. He slept most of the day, and in the late afternoon began prowling the windowsills, looking out. It rained a lot that month, and whatever it was was canceled if it rained. If it was still raining at six or seven he seemed quite frantic, checking the sky from every window as if he had planned a picnic for forty people that might have to be moved into the living room. If it was still raining at nine he gave up and slept that night on my feet, where he had always slept before. Otherwise he hardly noticed me.
I was hurt. This was my major cat, my close friend, and he had never before followed any routine but mine, going to bed when I did and getting up with me in the morning, and now something in this temporary town was more important to him than I was.
I have no evidence that a group of cats, probably many of them vacationing transients and strangers to each other, met every night in Stone Harbor, New Jersey; that Boy, a lifelong loner, was invited to join, and did; that they met by prearrangement at a certain hour and broke up just before five in the morning; but I haven’t got any other explanations, either. On previous vacations in the country he’d gone out only casually, and slept in my bed at night. He was not equipped for making love, and there was no evidence that he went hunting; he never hunted. Sometimes a cat will take on a second home, and two families, unknown to each other, will feed him and consider him their own, but why visit so late at night when most humans are sleeping, and who would let him out again before dawn? Besides, he was my cat as no other cat has ever been, and I can’t suspect him of disloyalty with other humans. But something out there took him away from me every night unless it rained.
And it was important to him. Instead of strolling out the door, pausing to consider the prospect and inspect objects of interest, he hurried away like a man with an appointment, and always in the same direction. He was black all over, and he would have been in deep trouble in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it would have been my duty, anyone’s duty, to kill him instantly if he’d hastened away like that on St. John’s Eve, or the second Wednesday in Lent, or All Hallows’ Eve, or most of the nights in between.
At the end of the month we went back to the city and took up our normal lives, and he slept in bed and never even glanced out of a window. Still, there had been that month, and I thought about it. I assume that, if there ever really were demonic cats out covening, by now and