Bohemian Antiks Continue

Cat One & The Enemy Stray

In this story the writer discovers the inherent problems in her chosen system of identity obscurification. 

Cat One is old as the hills. Old as our marriage.  She is fiercely affectionate to us humans, and fiercely fierce to everyone else.  She particularly hates cats.  Well, until today.

Her brother,  Cat Two,  died, we assume.  He went missing when we were away on holiday and a friend was feeding them, and we never found him.  I was devastated.  I hoped and mourned for months. Not knowing what happened is the worst. This was  way back before we had any of the other animals.  Sister and brother had had a special bond. They would come for walks in the forest with us, in the days before we had Dog.

Since that time Cat One has survived all the other cats who have come and gone.   Cat Three - the ginger boy we got to replace her brother "as if you can just replace one cat with another", she said.  The little ginger kitten - Cat Four -  our friend found in his car.  The little black thing - Cat Five - that Man found in the river. 

We called her little frog - Cat Five.  I had been teaching in the town and Man had been taking Dog for a walk through the valley park next to the town, when he heard a tiny kitten crying from the other side of the stream.  There was nobody else around. He looked up and down the stream and there was no bridge anywhere near he could see. He had no choice but to sit down to take his shoes and socks off so that he could paddle over to rescue her.  But right at that moment the tiny black thing threw herself into the water and swam across to him.  Dog was very excited.

The creature was hugely distressed, probably having escaped from a kitten drowning incident.  Man scooped her up and put her on his shoulder and set off back to the classroom where I was teaching.  At some point in the journey across the old town, the tiny shouting kitty pooped all down Man's back.  Luckily my kind student did not mind finishing the lesson early so that I could help with the tiny, screechy kitten.  She did not stop shouting for an entire hour after we had rescued her.  Tiny, but powerful.  She was not weaned, but we'd learned how to do that from the car kitten.  She only lived a couple of years, but we loved her as much as we could.  Well, everyone but Cat One. Who hated all cats.

Until today.

Cat One had come to us from a home that had become overrun with human babies, irreplaceable replacing the fur babies.   For the first three days she was with us she stayed resolutely behind a fireplace upstairs.  She loves hard, this cat, so I know this abandonment was a traumatic time for her.  For the next month she did not venture outside the house, and once she finally stopped using the cat door as only a window, she seemed absolutely terrified to walk on grass. Outdoors was not her scene. 

Cat One had seen out the others, and after ten years of life with the ginger imposter Cat Three,   they had formed some kind of uneasy friendship, but it was just too much fun to terrify Cat One.  You could, for example, jump on the bed, suddenly, in the middle of the night, causing her to hiss and scarper.  Cat One is very startleble.  Cats Six and Seven, after exhausting their almost endless supply of potential love to offer Cat One - she was seriously not interested in friendship with these new, fluffy monsters -  soon discovered this fun game. After making gallant and ongoing efforts to befriend Cat One, they realised that the only reaction they would have from her was hissing and spitting.  She loved humans unconditionally.  A bag of love who would seek out any person who had momentarily stopped using their legs, and love them with her whole body, with her entire persona.  It was endearing, but also somewhat  annoying.  If only she would accept affection from the other animals.  Thankfully we usually have many visitor to spread the love.  But cats, those creatures she hated with the same vehemence that she loved all humans so unconditionally.  Maybe it was a case of internalised speciesism.

At the loss of Cat Six, we were distraught.  She was such a beautiful animal.  Simply the most gorgeous cat to ever walk the Earth.  She was fluffy and grey and loving and she was still practically a kitten when she was taken by the road.  Too beautiful for this World.  Again I was depressed.  It had been hard to lose Cat Three, but at least he'd had ten good years with us.  Poor Cat Six was just a babe when we lost her.  I immediately locked the cat doors so that Cat Seven could no longer go out.  I could not cope with another loss.

This is one problem with designer cats - the kinds of cats that have contracts on their heads - contracts which say that they can only go outside on supervised visits, bound to a human or enclosed in a cage.  Normal cats have had decades to adapt to modern life. Many generations of darwinism effect their behaviour so that they are avoiders of cars.  Cat Three was an a avid hunter and kept tight control on the possible population of rats and mice - as evidenced by the body count of discarded bile ducts or neat piles of half-digested and then vominted corpses (a favourite early morning bedroom pass-time) which, blurry eyed, we were forced to deal with.  But he survived for ten years without being hit by a car.

Our road is scary.  There is little traffic. But what there is is fast.  We are on some secret route for huge trucks, so fifty percent of the traffic is huge and thundering, but very intermittent.  So hard for a cat to learn about.  We made the decision to give cats Six and Seven the same freedoms that the rest of our animals were allowed.  Not only that, but they had, within a few weeks, learned how to bypass our security systems. But at least it works to keep out the Enemy stray.

This morning I was awoken by the yowlings of an unhappy cat.  Cat Seven - aka the fluffy complainer - likes to yowl.  He likes to wake up and walk around the house having a good old moan about life, no matter what time of the day or night.  He returns from his adventures in goose grass and yowls some more.  But this yowling was different.  Not general in tone, but specific, the yowls that warn of an encroaching enemy.  I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs in my pink djelaba (hooded nightshirt).  Cat Seven was sitting at the cat door looking out. "Yowl" he said again.

I opened the door and caught a glimpse of the Enemy Stray dash away.  I'd actually captured him on a previous encounter, when I'd opened the door and  he'd darted into our house after Cat Seven.  He was not actually a stray, but he was not from our village, and his owners had not bothered to get him fixed.  Kitten drowning was still not unusual around these parts for cat population control.

Cat One was casually sitting on the front porch. Looking more than a little smug.

"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" she said.  Cat One is wise and well-read.  But this level of disloyalty? I was shocked. Cat One was not the creature who had to take Cat Seven to the vet FOUR TIMES to have the bite wound in his tail treated.  Four times I'd had to take Man out of the office so that we could go and sit in a queue at the vet behind eight dogs, one cat and a lizard, because of the Enemy Stray.
But Cat One, she's made friends with him. At least at last she has a cat friend.