Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [72]
They’re comfortable cats, the black-and-whites, and will never run up the grocery bill by demanding designer food. Mr. Eliot’s amiable uncomplicated Jellicle cats are good examples.
So many blue-eyed white cats are deaf that an impressive weight of authority holds that all blue-eyed white cats are deaf, even that white kittens born blue-eyed whose eye color changes later stay deaf for as long as their eyes stay blue, miraculously developing hearing only after the color turns. Barney is a blue-eyed white cat.
Barney can hear a cat chow drop three rooms away. Barney can hear the difference between milk and water being poured into a bowl.
He can hear his name whispered a block away. He can hear paint drying, grass growing, hair turning gray, time passing. He can hear words that have never been spoken and songs that no one else will ever hear.
He can hear me thinking about him.
I hope that clears up the matter.
Striped cats are basic. Stripes are so essentially cat that they’re the bane of breeders, and come creeping forward out of the buried generations to flower in shadowy bands down the legs of cats that aren’t supposed to have stripes. Stripes are the irresistible jungle that keeps on whispering in the well-bred ear.
Striped cats are satisfying to look at, with their elaborate, inscrutable details, the lavishment of necklaces and bracelets, the M for Mau inscribed on the forehead, and the infinitely pleasing shades of cream and tawny around the eyes, the nose, and the whisker pads with their dark freckles marking the base of each hair. Striped cats are household hieroglyphics, undeciphered messages washing their paws after dinner and waiting to be read. Is it our fault or theirs, or the strange language they’re written in, that no one seems to have a deep personal relationship with a striped cat? The experts, agreeing for once, say that the striper is closest to the wild; several say that of all the colors of cat this is the best able to survive on its own, and that it’s noticeably more independent and predatory than its siblings, and makes the best mouser. Is it true? It sounds about as scientific as that blondes have more fun. Could it be that we believe it ourselves, and treat the striper differently, more respectfully but less intimately, because this is serious cat here, not an extra child to be cuddled but the Cat by its Wild Lone, and the cat reacts aloofly? Or did it start out a bit more distant, a bit less cheery and loving, than its solid-color littermates? All I know is that none of the striped cats in my life have ever been intimates, just respected associates.
Not that they’re unfriendly. There’s a photograph of the older Ernest Hemingway sharing his dinner and apparently conversing with a striped cat on his table; it’s just that it was probably Hemingway and not the cat who started the conversation, or else the cat was merely listening, or pretending to listen.
As to whether they survive better on their own, proving this would involve getting a number of cats of the same age and different colors and dropping them off in the woods, and coming back some months later and rounding up the survivors and weighing them. It sounds impractical.
They are very wonderful to look at, though. The sheer luxury of their design and shadings puts all human attempts at personal decoration to shame. And even considered as the humble necessary mouser of the millennia, the unassimilated cat of barn and kitchen and cellar and granary, is that an unworthy calling? The striped cat is first of all a cat.
I’m looking at a photograph I took of two cats that I