The Amazing Life of Cats (8 page)
Gizmo’s various incisions were closed over and we kept him at the clinic to make sure he was recovering well while his intestines were healing. Within twenty-four hours he was much more like his old self and was showing a keen interest in food. We tentatively spooned a very soft, easily digestible convalescence food into our patient. He would have eaten more but we wanted to give little and often to ensure he could cope with it.
Gizmo coped fine and was sent home soon after he started eating. We saw him again a few days after his surgery and he was back to his bright cheeky self. We have threatened Gizmo with a full body shave to reduce the amount of hair he might swallow in future, but his owners are keen to ensure he remains as handsome as possible so are embarking on a thorough grooming regime to help prevent any more fur-ball-related dramas!
Michelle Leggeat
If animals could speak the dog would be
a blundering outspoken fellow, but the
cat would have the rare grace of never
saying a word too much.
Mark Twain
T
hose of you with long memories, or an interest in fiction, might recall or be curious to know that many years ago I wrote a story that became the title of a book of short stories—
The Powerful Owl
. That particular story has served me well, being frequently included in anthologies and earning me some extra writing dollars along the way. And yet, of course, I would much rather not have written the story if it meant I still had the main protagonist of it—a little black and white cat called Boots.
Boots came to me about twenty years ago. At the time we had no pets—hard to imagine with the menagerie of horses, dogs and cats I’ve collected around me now—but I was offered Boots by a friend of mine, Zoe, whose cat had recently had kittens. I took my mother— who was out on holiday from England—and my stepchildren to visit Zoe and her family, making hollow promises that we would not return with a kitten.
Really, we shouldn’t have taken her, because Boots was in fact too little to leave her mother, only just six weeks old, and my mother, a cat lover all her life as I’ve described, was very concerned at the tiny creature’s attempts to suckle at her hair on the first night in her new home. But we had all fallen in love with her, and Boots was carried carefully back in the car: I think I thought it was now or never, and if we had to go back for her there would be no way we would be allowed to break the no-pet rule.
Right from the start she was an affectionate little cat. She was a classic shoulder-sitter, preferring my ex-husband’s broader expanse of sitting spot and draping herself delicately around him while trying to bat his newspapers with her paws. She also loved his shirts in an almost unseemly fashion—if she found a pile of them she would throw herself into them and writhe around, demanding to have her tummy stroked.
She was mostly a perfect little companion, although—perhaps as a result of coming to us rather too young—she was difficult to house-train, and would often register her disapproval on various matters by leaving us an offering somewhere.
Most weekends, Boots travelled with us up to our beach house, and she registered her disapproval of city life by frequently going missing when we needed to put her in the cat basket for the return journey. We never had the same problem when we were leaving the city.
As she grew up, Boots developed an extraordinary habit. She could literally astrally project herself through walls as if they were not there. She started to display this talent when I was pregnant with my first child, Sam. In the later stages of the pregnancy I took to having a little nap in the afternoon if I could, and the last thing I needed during a hot Sydney summer day was a furry cat pressed to my side. Locked out, Boots would sit mournfully on the other side of the door. I would lie down and prepare for my forty winks. Just as I was dropping off, I would feel a cat land on my chest.
The first time it happened, I sat bolt upright, picked her up and threw her off the bed—except, of course, I didn’t, because she wasn’t there. Muttering to myself, I lay down again; a few minutes later there it was again, an unmistakeable thump on my chest, followed this time by the unmistakeable feeling of Boots pit-potting with her claws on my chest. But the cat was nowhere to be seen.
I got up, opened the bedroom door and looked down: there sat Boots, tail primly wrapped around her, gazing at the door for all her worth. With the door now open, she stalked through, hopped onto the bed, put her paw firmly on my arm, and settled down to sleep.
We had also recently acquired a puppy—a liver-coloured German shorthaired pointer we called Ella. Ella lived to be the subject of a book,
Walking Ella
, and numerous stories and columns have been written about her. Boots was not at all keen on Ella, but Ella adored the cat. She liked nothing better than to amuse herself by tormenting her; when Boots was thoroughly fed up, Ella would curl up beside her on the sofa in the most loving way imaginable.
Sadly, though, it was partly because of Ella that Boots met her strange fate.
Sometimes it seems to me that a domino effect is started where accidents occur, and looking back you can see this chain of events with startling clarity, so that in the end the accident reveals itself as something that would have to happen under this particular set of circumstances. Too often the overall result of these tumbling dominoes is a disaster of some small or large kind.
Whenever we went to our weekend beach house, Boots liked to climb the pergola onto the roof, which was fine, except that for some reason she was convinced she couldn’t get down again, and so we were often to be found coaxing her back down and swearing at her un-cat-like timidity. Not that she wasn’t brave in some ways. She loved to come for walks with us, and for a long time she didn’t let Ella’s presence deter her, but once we were away from the house Ella felt that it was her bounden duty to chase Boots; somewhat sadly for the cat and humans in the equation, the dog eventually won, and Boots no longer wandered up the path, playing Tiger Puss at shadows.
It was around this time that we noticed on the odd occasion a huge owl sitting on the telegraph post outside our house at night. Before noticing it for the first time I had a curious feeling I was being watched; I looked around without seeing anyone or anything, but then I suddenly noticed this looming shape outside the house, staring down at me through a high window just under the eave of the roof. At first I thought it must be an eagle—I’d never seen an owl that size, or even heard of one. I called to Rob, and we looked at it together. We flicked through our bird book, and there it was—a powerful owl. An owl with a wingspan of well over a metre, an owl that frequented the eastern coast of Australia in wooded areas, an owl that ate possums, for goodness’ sakes, as a central part of its diet.
At the time Boots was curled up on the chair near the window.
‘She’d better watch out,’ said Rob, ‘she’d make a nice little morsel for that monster.’
Of course, I was horrified at the very suggestion, and I put it out of my mind. Too far out, as it happened.
We knew almost as soon as we got Ella that this was not a dog from which to breed. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the breeders saw
us
coming a mile away. She was, quite frankly, insane. Large, bouncy, cheerful, almost untrainable, and with disgusting eating habits, she saved herself from being almost unownable (if there is such a word) by her loving nature. She adored us, she adored all the children, and she adored anybody that was connected to the family—even if the adoration was manifested by immediately shoving her nose up their bottoms as a way of saying hello. So we knew that Ella would be spayed. The vet said the operation could be done at six months, or we could let her have one season and then spay her. She was now almost six months old and I was watching her like a hawk as I wanted to have her desexed before she went into season for the first time.
Ella, of course, decided to do things a little differently, and came into season when she was only five months old. It occurred very suddenly one weekend when we were at the beach house.
Now Ella already had a few gentleman callers who were friends of hers, one of them a rather daft dog of indiscriminate breed who liked to bring us presents. Over some months these presents included a mobile phone—an early model, about as big as a large calculator— several quite fancy plastic bowls, obviously stolen from other houses, and some quite nice items of clothing. Perhaps he was wooing Ella with presents.
Suddenly, now that Ella was in season, our beach house seemed to be swarming with dogs, and it was not the right place to be with her—it had no fence, so any dog could access our property. Of course, we kept her inside (and I must say that we were as vigilant about that as we had ever been about anything—we absolutely did not want an Ella puppy), but this didn’t stop the gentleman callers. The male dogs, thwarted from seeing the object of their affections, would then chase the cat, if Boots was silly enough to be around. So on this particular weekend Boots was spending a lot of time on the roof, and a lot of time being coaxed off the roof when the coast was clear.
It wasn’t the easiest visit, because as well as Ella’s untimely puberty our son Sam, who was then six months old, had bronchitis and was on antibiotics. This, coupled with the fact that he wasn’t yet sleeping through the night, meant that Rob and I were both in a state of slightly surreal exhaustion, so I decided to take Sam into our bedroom and sleep with him there so that at least in the morning his father might not be quite as exhausted and could take over parenting duty.
We settled down for the night, and Sam, who had been coughing and coughing, finally fell asleep when I suddenly heard the piteous meowing of the cat on the roof. I lay there and fumed—at myself as much as her: I’d meant to lock her in the house at night, and I’d forgotten, and now there she was on the roof, but if I moved even a muscle I might wake the baby.
Well, I reasoned, what’s the worst that can happen? She might spend a long, cold, boring night on the roof, I told myself; she might even work out how to get down and come in of her own accord. I thought I might fall asleep and then if I woke in the night I would go out and get her.
I woke alright. At three am I heard it—a huge thump, as if a large branch had fallen on the roof, and my heart cracked. I knew, absolutely immediately knew, what had happened—the cat had been taken off the roof by the owl.
I got out of bed and went outside, but Boots was nowhere to be seen. Despite my certainty, the logical part of me kept trying to say it would be alright, it wasn’t her, so I continued searching, finally giving up when it was daylight. I went back inside and told Rob that Boots had been taken by the owl; he was sceptical to say the least. Until we called into our local garage on the way back to Sydney later that day, and the attendant remarked on my sad demeanour. When I explained what had happened, he was sympathetic. ‘We almost lost our cat to an owl,’ he said. ‘We were lucky our cat was so big, and he managed to fight him off.’
Rob got back in the car looking pale.
I, of course, was devastated. I rang the local zoo and asked them about the feeding habits of powerful owls, and they assured me that a small cat was nothing to an owl but that the death would have been quick, as quick as anything, they said; she would have felt nothing at all. The ranger informed me that the owl would have eaten half of her that night and saved the rest until the next evening, which was just a bit too much information.
But here is the comforting part of the sad tale. I went to bed our first Bootless night shaky and tearful but almost as soon as we had turned out the lights, there she was, jumping on the bed, just as she had back when I was pregnant. I reached out for her, into the cat spot beside me, and stroked her absent body.
She visited me for months, and I took some comfort in that.
I’ve never had clearer or more ongoing proof of the existence of a spirit body than I had with Boots, despite many other psychic experiences before and since, with people and animals. I think because she was already so practised at astrally projecting herself while she was here on earth, it was more comforting to me than if I had never felt her spiritual presence.
For some time after Boots’ death I avoided my local health-food shop, because it had large collection tins on all the counters in which shoppers put money to save one particular species that the shop owners had decided to support—and that was the powerful owl. Finally, though, I found a strange peace with Boots’ death, concluding that in the figure of the powerful owl, bird life had, for once, taken its revenge on the world of cats, and that I could once more visit the shop and drop coins in the tins on my way out.
And so I did.
Candida Baker
You can’t own a cat.
The best you can do is be partners.
Sir Harry Swanson
