Homer was also apt to play much rougher than Scarlett or Vashti was accustomed to. The two of them had a favorite game, one that was mostly of Scarlett’s devising with Vashti happy to follow her lead. The game went like this: At some point when Vashti’s back was turned or she was otherwise distracted, Scarlett would leap upon her and whap her in the face a few times with her front paw. Scarlett’s claws were always retracted (retracted claws were an essential part of this game). Vashti would respond in kind, and the two of them would engage in a fullblown slap fight, whapping at each other’s faces and paws, until Vashti landed what was—in Scarlett’s opinion—one blow too many. Whereupon Scarlett would flatten her ears and arch her back slightly, a signal to Vashti that it was time for her to knock it off. Once Scarlett had decreed Game Over, the two of them would go off, unruffled, in their separate directions.
Homer was a boy, and he didn’t have much use for these kinds of subtle girly games. Homer wanted great life-and-death battles, the fierce drama of perseverance and triumph in the face of crushing odds. Homer’s idea of the perfect game had nothing to do with slap-and-retreat. His favorite game was to leap onto Scarlett’s and Vashti’s backs and pin them down while they struggled furiously, sinking teeth and claws into whatever he could reach.
He didn’t intend to hurt them by doing this, and would always back up in confused alarm if either of them squealed in pain or anger. But as far as Homer knew, anything that escaped his grasp could disappear into the black void of gone forever. Homer could never assume that any plaything—whether a squeaktoy or the body of another cat—would be findable again once he was no longer touching it. If I dangled a string in front of him for him to try to catch, a game that Scarlett and Vashti both loved, he could sense the string but always went for my hand instead, digging his claws into my skin to keep both string and hand from disappearing. It was this same tendency that made him grabby when it came to sharing toys with the other cats. If Scarlett and Vashti were batting around a ball of paper between them, Homer would bound over and clasp the ball of paper tightly in his claws to keep it from spinning off into infinity. This inevitably led Scarlett and Vashti to walk away—clearly, Homer was hogging all the action—while Homer was left to bounce the ball of paper around in his tight claw with a perplexed expression at finding himself so suddenly alone. Don’t you guys want to play with this anymore?
So he tended to dig his claws into things, like the other cats’ flesh, without meaning to do them any harm. I spent long hours training Homer to retract his claws when playing—mainly by encouraging him to play with me, then issuing a harsh “No!” and abruptly ending the game when his claws came out—but in the meantime, he wasn’t winning Vashti and Scarlett over.
I think what most surprised Scarlett and Vashti, who weighed eleven and nine pounds, respectively, was that Homer never got tired of stalking, or at least attempting to stalk, the two of them. Surely, had he been able to see how very much bigger they were than he was, he would never have contemplated it.
But Homer couldn’t see how much bigger they were. What’s more, it’s entirely possible that he had no understanding of the concept of relative size. He might have been a six-week-old kitten who still had a distinct waddle to his walk, but in his mind’s eye he was one of the Big Cats—a panther, maybe, or a mountain lion.
His efforts at playing the mighty hunter hardly ever produced satisfactory results. He was able to leap upon Vashti whenever he wanted, but only because Vashti—conditioned by a lifetime of bending to Scarlett’s will—adopted a philosophy of passive nonresistance. Homer would jump onto her back, a minuscule black mound on top of a much larger white one, nipping at Vashti’s neck in a vain effort to get her to fight back or do something, for crying out loud.
But Vashti would just lie there patiently while Homer thrashed around, turning resigned eyes upon me that seemed to cry, Oh, the humanity!
Scarlett, by contrast, was nobody’s patsy and always put up a fight. She was Homer’s White Whale, his mortal nemesis. The unequivocal sacking of Scarlett was the pot of gold that lay at the end of all Homer’s rainbows, and I think it was the dream of his life to finally—indisputably—best her.
The will was certainly there, but his tactics were woefully inadequate. Homer had all of a cat’s normal instincts to creep noiselessly and crouch down before springing. Unfortunately, he never understood that, since he wasn’t crouching down behind anything, he wasn’t any less conspicuous to his intended victim than he would have been if he were preceded by a marching band.
It was as good as a play, watching the drama unfold when Homer would take it into his head to attempt yet another assault on Scarlett. You could tell the exact moment when, with a tilt of his head, he caught the faint sounds of her stirring across the room. He would hunker down into his stalking posture, taking a few breathlessly slow, silent steps in her direction. Then he would stop. Still crouched low, he would run for four or five more steps. Then he would stop again. He repeated this process—slow, then fast … slow, then fast—”sneaking” up on Scarlett directly from the front.
You could almost hear Scarlett heave a sigh and see her roll her eyes heavenward. Again? The look on her face was invariably one of bemused contempt, as if she were observing some new species of idiot. She’d wait for him to get close enough to spring, wriggling his backside in joyful preparation for what would assuredly be his moment of victory, and then—with a casual disdain that verged on boredom—Scarlett would swat him a few times on the head with her front paw, making it painfully obvious that she’d known exactly where he was the whole time. Homer would sit there flummoxed (Why didn’t it work this time?), and Scarlett would turn and stride with cold dignity into the other room, swishing her tail as if to say, That’s quite enough of that.
Perhaps realizing the futility of trying to take an unsuspecting Scarlett from a sitting position, Homer would sometimes attempt to catch her in midflight. One afternoon, I saw a gray blur whiz past me at breakneck speed, followed by Homer—racing as fast as his little legs would carry him—in mad pursuit. I laughed long and loud at the visual of this half-pound kitten chasing an eleven-pound, full-grown cat. Scarlett leapt to the safety of a kitchen countertop, glaring down at Homer who was making his best, if unsuccessful, efforts to scale the side of the counter to reach her.
Homer never caught her, but he did frequently come close. I would often come upon a disgruntled Scarlett, angrily settling herself onto a sofa arm or the top of a coffee table, and a few feet away would be Homer, sitting on his haunches, a tuft of gray fur in his mouth.
“Homer, were you just chasing Scarlett?” I would ask in a severe tone.
Homer would turn toward me with an innocently blank expression, unaware that I could see the incriminating clump of gray fur still clinging to his snout. Who, Scarlett? I don’t think she’s been here recently …