Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [93]
Aside from us primates, only cats have been tested and proven to learn from watching others, and tree climbing is definitely a case in point. Going up is instinctive; getting down is not, as many a cat owner has learned. The kitten goes up gaily, gets to the first branch, or the fifth or sixth if it’s brave and reckless, and sits on it and screams for help. Then its mother or another cat will climb up to it and demonstrate “down,” backward, to take advantage of the hooked claws, and looking over the shoulder like a rower until it’s close enough to jump. Sometimes the kitten is too busy screaming to pay attention, and I’ve watched an unrelated adult male climb and unclimb a tree three times, infinitely patient, before the kitten understood.
If we insist on keeping the kittens until their education is complete, we have that much more time to watch kittens. This is entertainment of a high order, witty, charming, and sophisticated; comic routines refined for thousands of years, dancing Geminis of stagecraft, masters and mistresses of the “Oops, where did I put it? Oh, there it is!” spin, vertical leap of pretended astonishment, king-of-the-mountain, mistaken identity, dance to inaudible pipers, and the quick over-the-shoulder glance; are you watching? are you laughing, am I charming enough, shall I have a home? Kittens play, of course; kittens play when no one is watching, but no regular audience can doubt that some of this is for us. We’re being courted as well as entertained. Watch me, watch me hide and spring out on my sister, pretend to be frightened, dance on my hind legs with my eyes wide and my paws outstretched: can you resist? If it’s agreed, then we can put some of this aside. Sign here, and we will be free to become a cat. It’s the way it’s always been.
Step by step they learn the lessons in etiquette, communication, hunting, hygiene, competition, cooperation, and friendship necessary for their lives, and frolic to charm their way into homes, and begin to change from kittens into cats.
Kittens are not cats; kittens are hardly even similar to cats, any more than caterpillars are to moths. There’s a change that takes place, if you’re watching, toward the end of the first year, that has nothing to do with sexual maturity. The kitten deepens, and takes on the resonance and shadow of a cat. Cats go on playing, they play all their lives, but we’re no longer being asked to laugh. We aren’t being courted. The relationship has changed, and if we’ve taken the time to be a figure in its life, it will want something more from us, confident in its home and focusing on us now as complete and separate beings. It wants our friendship now, a friendship between very different equals, and even something more than friendship, for reasons neither we nor it will ever really understand.
12
Practical Cats
Allergies, human: Bulletin boards are laden with notices trying to give away cats because someone’s allergic. In the Cat Hospital, a sad letter was posted by a young woman about to get married, looking for a home for a cat she clearly loved, a cat in middle age, a cat no one was going to want; her intended was allergic to it. People passing through the waiting room had added comments on its margins: “Don’t marry him!!!” “You’ll be sorry,” and “Bad trade!”
My next-door neighbor loves cats, and always stops to converse with mine when they sit on the windowsill supervising the street. She had always had cats. Alas, her husband is allergic to them, and all she can do now is chat with