Sometimes life hand-feeds you an advantage and it’s your Mroral duty to press it as far as you can.

So I was accidentally closed in the room with the communal food bowl yesterday… Or more to the point, when Ms. Zhou was closed out. .. Whiskers being bigger than my stomach I lapped up the whole bowl myself before anyone was the wiser or quicker. The talls just presumed I couldn’t eat that fast and let my colleague in to help finish up breakfast. She protested loudly that there was none but as she is always protesting something loudly, they didn’t attend to it.

My! but she was in a foul mood. I on the upper hand, proceeded to expand my territory. Bed at night, mine. Chair in sun patch in morning. Mine. Her ability to run through corridor to toilet, trimmed back a bit. She of course can go. At double pace. Heh.

I particularly love the yellow chair. I do have a few established hours on it but, why have a few when you can have them all?

The revolution started to wheel back to the old normal at around 4 am this morning when I was chased by a snarling white menace into a corner and had, what you might call, a posture adjustment. I have conceded back the chair and old bathroom routes but the bed, for now, is still mine.

No I don’t expect you do. My hearing is more acute plus I’m closer to the shuffling gait in the hall than you. Even if you were twice as close, you probably couldn’t detect the trajectory. I’ve noticed that the hairless talls can’t seem to pinpoint which door in the hall someone is appraoching. A key in any lock makes them stir from whatever they are doing. A ball dropped on their ceiling makes them look towards the door for a knock. Those paralyized thick earflaps can’t help much. However can I not worry about their safety when they do “out there” around traffic. How they are able to navigate and come home each day (so far) is beyond me.

The hairless talls have been using particularly beseeching calls. They seem nervous. They act as if they are about to reach down and pick me up but withhold. Something in their body language makes me a little suspicious of cat treats just now. I’ll keep a careful eye on them. I give a lateral spine pull down the wall and see if I can dislodge the loose old claw sheathes while I put a whisker on what exactly has my senses tingling that something is up. There is no barred restraint box on set out. Must not be a vet visit. Something is definitely amiss.

Hm, I recognize that footstep in the hall. And when the tap at the door was answered, I confirm it was not my imagination. I place her by smell and knew immediately what was coming next. My cue to leave.

Angel, hellcat and rocket bound up in one solid blurred form, that’s me. Back inside the darkness of the closet behind the long dresses I lay with my stomach glued to the floor and hips and shoulders hunched, energies concentrating on increasing my own gravity to avoid the lifting.

Knowing what seems to be scripted for the future, does not mean I will go down without a hide and go seek and a fight to escape. I know she carries a clipper and knows how to use it. I know she is kind and deft and just doing her job as any soldier is. Just the same I can’t help feeling a knot in my intestines over her appearance at our abode. Who exactly invited her I’ll never know but I sent no emails to that effect.

My colleague headed for the automatic fur-licking machine the hairless talls have in the hall hutch. I know she will give them a run for their money too. As I lay moon eyed attending to the sounds of the search, I can’t say that she had a bad olifactory aura about her. Her paws were warm and firm last time. But you know, some of the quicks of my claws are long and I don’t enjoy being pinned. I’m just not a pin-up sort of girl.

Yikes! On all fours they are coming from two sides. Jig’s just about up. The loose sheathes at the end of my toes itch. I could have got them off too, given enough quality time with the carpet but she has come to curtail any such self-sufficiency…

Am I an American football pigskin? No but despite this I am finding myself tucked into an armpit against my will. I struggle but she has all the right technique to hold my loose skinned wriggle at a well-lit angle for a toenail trimming. She is quick, I’ll give her that. And a dotted bloodline across the arm if I can manage it. Bear it. Bear it. It’s all that there is to do now. She squeezes my foot and presses my claws out. Clip, Clip, Half way there now. I’ll be due a good nap after this. Judging from the array of white fur on the counter, it looks like I’m client number two. Ms. Zhou was particularly silent this time. Or was it I just lost in my thoughts so deeply that I couldn’t hear her?

Paws for now.
Miao

Long as a snake stretched in one texas long patch of sun. I on the table and the two hairlesses on their chairs and this is the good life. The glass may be able to chill a nose but here we’re as good as buttered toast. The air has the scent of cheese and seafood.

Once I rouse myself from my semi-slumber sunnap I pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat the shoulder to get him to move over and flatten his lap so I can get a better position. I walk back and forth along the keyboard and he raises his arm in a new game of high jump. I’m game. Maybe a few more rounds like this then we can change to that circuits around the place chasing him with an open food can or one of the utentsils to get into it.

I was barely able to hold myself still. My nerves and muscle fibres were primed to launch myself. Only the very tip of my tail and the brightness of my eyes could give away my state. And those were hidden behind the post as I lay in wait, hunched for the pounce on my unwitting colleague. Any second now she would round that corner and I would tear from my hiding spot, race around the corner, letting her feel the wind of my passing before shooting out of sight a full lap around the rooms, rocket to the talbe, window sill, down and around the corner in a seamless bound. As she finds her wits, I’m on her and off before she responds, round lap two of pure exhileration

As optimistic as I am, sometimes it distresses me what I’ve seen of paths that cats did not get themselves off of. If you’ll indulge me the time for a story…

I once knew two littermates. Meg and her sister are a glossy fur example of divergent path from one womb (and probably 2 toms, but we’ll never know).

Meg was friend to the world. She slept in a doghouse or a lap or a barn stall next to a goat. She was not at all specist. She loved to roam, kept a wide swath, almost male swath of territory. Hated pregnancy, but loved the toms. She was from the litter of a gifted telepath and was able to intuit emotions to a large degree herself, but she got skewed far into the realm of addiction; her weakness was catnip. She would seek it out, roll in it until she staggered. She would forsake her litter of kittens in the care of her own sister for days as she went about in a purring droolling haze from catnip patch to next catnip buzz. Whether it would have been her original philosophy of Meg to be kit-free if catnip had not bitten on so deeply, we’ll never know.

Then there was her sister. That was a fur apart. She was a fine boned build, with as much black brindle on her as her sister had pinto white patch. Her glide was as smooth as her sister’s was pouncey and cock-on-the-walk.

Whereas Meg greeted dog and hairless alike, her sister, who had the hairless name of Suz, retreated, keeping to the shadows that were as quiet as she was. Suz bonded with few hairless and few non-cats. She was skitterish, private. This became more the case since she broke her left back leg while misjudging car speed. Still she didn’t murmer complaint, or if she did, never to me.

They nursemaided each other, even when litters were a week or few apart, took turns nursing and taking them out of danger, moving them from nest to nest. Suz was something of a saint — forebearing and bearing labor after labour. She even took on Meg’s unweanable Pinkie who outclassed her in weight.

MeanwhileMeg took her little ones out, ostensibly to hunt, and sometimes took both her own and the communally raised Suz’s offspring too. But with each progressive litter she took them sooner and sooner. On Meg’s 6th pregnancy, while they were still barrel-bellied and blind she took them to the forest. Her sister previously had tracked the path and brought the litters back, this time with frost in the air as it is now, and fisher population high that year, the late litter had all perished but one before she could retrieve them. Stoic as always Suz took her loss. Meg, as ever, seemed unaffected veering between her high volume purr, scent-marking the dog, the post, the food bowl and her lovely patch of special grasses.

Could either have changed by choice or experience to become more like her own sister even? If Meg had been birthed in a region bereft of fresh, abundant wild catnip, would she have found an alternate addictive substance, beyond the toms she was so fond of? Would she have not ended up driven so many dozens of km outside her range, buzzed and dazed, strung out in the catnip patch she found. Would I have not lost her… if what?

Can a leopard chage its spots? (For the cats reading, that’s a hairless tall expression with a rhetorical answer of: no, from the womb to the the end a character is constant. )

I think it presumes too little of the wild cat to assume not. Each cat is a menagerie of personalities and moods. A zoo of potentials. Which will prevail? Who is top in pecking order here, in another context and need, another house, would have ably dominated? I think so. I am who I am in combination with those around me. I am made and remade by each interactions and choice.

The physical markings stay for lfe and were formed largely randomly in the womb. But the character is both more and less than fur-deep. There is an abiding constancy of spirit admittedly. But beyond that, there is the impact of choice, opportunity, the company you keep. The decisions to become despondant or feisty, dependant or mellow.

What a shock. The frost is getting serious. There was a ungroomed cat shake of snow clouding the air out there and the puddle from the rain has a suspiciously glossy cattreat-crunchy look about it.

I’m even more grateful for that heater blowing the toasty smoky breath of heaven on me. Guess this seals the fate of fewer sparrows crossing my gaze for a few months. I’ll still have the lope of squirrel ropes and the laps of hairlesses to enjoy.

Quiet us-night, couch climbing, shifting the ball
of self between hands, lap to lap. Lave and love,
circuits of strokes, static blue arcs stoke inertia.

Pupils, elbows relax, fur loosens.
I take leave of myself, mollified
to an emptying vessel of purr,
each breath, a prayer to Mror.

Cats live purely on the barter exchange, when not hunting and gathering directly for needs. And yet, when we look eye to eye, such superficial differences melt.

Hunting and gathering these days amounting to swatting errant cheese bits out from under the fridge, keeping hunting skills up with a little b-ball* and flat page to pounce. Well, and each other of course. We have the regimen of catithenics of shadow boxing and running laps around the room. Then there’s all the running in our sleep, keeping ears at peak efficiency with twitching. We get by pretty well without a gold standard or anything like the IMF By nature we arrange ourselves into small social units and are fairly independant which helps.

The hairless talls, or, staircases as I more affectionately call them, live in one convoluted economy by comparison. But yet they seem largely successful. It’s hard to tell if it is because of or despite it. At least one thing is clear. They follow the principle 2 rules to success in life. 1. Don’t tell people everything you know.

—

*b-ball – bouncy ball