Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [44]
In an area with nothing to climb and loose dogs prowling in
pairs or teams, we might worry. But indoors, within the family, as often as not it’s the dog who gets bullied. Poor scruffy Vicky was intimidated by cats all her life until the kitten Gregory came. She’d always admired cats, and here finally was one that didn’t scorn her company. A childless dog, she took him for her own, and held him between her paws and washed and washed him, crooning, until he was sopping wet. When he’d had enough he escaped to barricade himself behind a row of cookbooks for a nap, while Vicky sat in front of the shelf and mooed lonesomely for him. Alas, when he got older he realized it was an undignified relationship for a cat, and scorned her like the others.
Cats and dogs rarely fight like cats and dogs. Beyond a temperamental difference, there’s no real reason for war; cats and dogs aren’t items in each other’s diets, and they aren’t rivals in the hunting field like cats and owls. (Cats can be an item of owl diet, which is why a wise cat checks the sky before leaving the house, and why a nervous cat likes to be under something, and why the approach to a strange cat is from its eye level instead of from on high.)
It’s natural for a dog to chase small animals that run away, but the dog may not be thinking “cat,” as distinct from “rabbit” or “squirrel.” Since nothing else chases a cat on foot, the cat may be thinking “dog,” and Morgan is categorically afraid of them, though that might be maternal teaching. The others stand their ground: if they run the dog will run after them. It’s traditional.
In the town of Chanhu-daro in India, a dog chased a cat across some fresh-made bricks before they dried, and their paw prints are still there, the pursuing dog’s pressed in over the fleeing cat’s. They’ve been there for four thousand years.
6
The Cat’s Early Years
Nobody seems to know for certain what a cat is or where it came from, though everyone has a theory.
Pliny tells us that, some six hundred years before the Prophet, Arabs worshipped a golden cat and believed that there was such special cleanliness and purity about cats that their origin must have been distinct from that of ordinary creatures. One Arab version has it that one of the lions on the Ark sneezed and brought forth the cat to control the shipboard mice; another, less ethereal, holds that the male monkey got bored with his watery confinement and took to playing around with the lionness, their relationship producing the first two cats.
In classical mythology Apollo created the lion to scare his sister Diana, and to tease him she mocked his invention by creating the cat.
In the West of Ireland they say that at some turning point in the world’s history the snakes turned into cats, which is why the cat’s bite is venomous.
More prosaically, in the beginning was Miacis, a weasel-like creature of the Eocene age some 40 or 50 million years ago, who branched out into various specialties; some of them were small cats. Cats developed early in mammalian history and guessed right the first time; they looked like cats back when most mammals’ ancestors were still unrecognizably experimental. Between 7 and 40 million years ago, depending on which book you read, a cat was already a cat.
That much seems widely believed. But when we narrow it down to the present-day house cat, all is confusion.
The first famous cats were Egyptian, which proves only that imperial gods leave records that endure for five thousand years and house pets don’t.
Was the Egyptian cat the same as our cat? Were there two Egyptian cats? Some scholars insist that there are