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By Root 557 0

met, if “met” isn’t too strong a word, in an isolated village on the Pacific coast of Mexico. They were a mated pair and they lived around a beachside restaurant specializing in fish; the restaurant was open to the world on all four sides, so they came and went as they pleased. People fed them from the tables, though they never asked for food in any way we know as asking. They would sit near a table, looking at nothing and no one, gazing indifferently into space, until a piece of fish was dropped at their feet; they ate it without acknowledgment as if it had fallen from the sky.

Whose cats are those? I asked. A shrug and a laugh. They were no one’s cats. They were their own cats. They lived there, that was all.

To the best of my limited knowledge, they were Egyptian Gloved Cats, the image of the cat in the temple I’d seen on television. Broken stripes of black on gray, tawny cheeks and ears, barred legs and tail, white toes. Long cats, with long, long tails that had a curiously massive and imposing shape, like a cheetah’s, narrowing as it joined the body, with broad assertive bands.

They were in splendid shape, elegant and strong. What were they doing here, these North Africans, half a world away in this scruffy, mountainous, appallingly poor stretch of western Mexico, where occasionally in the night bigger cats could be heard coughing in the hills? A pet cat here, if anyone could have imagined such a thing, would have starved along with its people.

When I approached and spoke to them, their indifference rebuked me. They didn’t respond, and they didn’t run away; they ignored me so utterly I felt rather drafty, as if abruptly disembodied, mixed with air. This is unsettling to humans. We’re used to animals who either greet us or avoid us, or in some cases attack us, not animals for whom we simply don’t exist. I felt diminished and a bit embarrassed, as if I had slapped the back of a stranger in a crowd.

This is how it was, then? Back in the beginning, with the first of people’s cats? The only animal that showed us no fear, no hostility, and no acquiescence, that simply came to eat our fish and stare past us into space? No wonder we were fascinated. No wonder we searched out the hidden kittens and cuddled them, trying to coax some acknowledgment from those remote yellow eyes—if not thanks for the fish, then at least some hint that we were there, and seen.

We succeeded. Now we have only to ask in order to have one of our own, in our house, blinking affectionately at us and purring with pleasure in our company.

Traveling by various means, sailing with Phoenicians, jumping ship in strange ports, coming west with returning Crusaders, strolling across national borders in Southeast Asian jungles and Himalayan passes and East African deserts, traded for bananas or silk or amber, mating with the locals and moving on, cats cover the earth and spring up in such infinite variety it’s a wonder any of us can be content with just two or three when there are so many others waiting to be known; a cornucopia of cats.

9

Show Business

The hall is arranged with rows of cages across its middle, seven judging rings along the sides, and things for sale at the ends. In the aisles between the cages exhibitors have set up housekeeping on folding tables and chairs and boxes and fallen to eating, napping, reading magazines, and playing cards, like a band of travelers in an airport waiting out a storm. It’s hard to push past them, hard to see into the cages to the cats. But of course that’s not the purpose of the thing; no one cares whether I see cats or not. These owners and breeders are dressed in a motley assortment of garments, as if there’d been a fire in the hotel, or all their luggage had gone astray. At dog and horse shows the people seem as much on view as the animals and size up each other’s tweeds with covert glances, but these cat people give off a thorny intransigence and have scarcely bothered to comb their hair. After all, this isn’t the big one. Madison Square Garden has already come and gone, leaving all hands with tales