"Well, how good of you to tell me," Murphy spat. "I don't see you doing anything to keep the barn free of vermin. In fact, Poptart, I don't see you doing much of anything except feeding your face."
Placidly rising above the abuse, the huge creature stretched her neck down until she touched Murphy's nose. "Hey, shortchange, you're trapped in my stall, so you'd better watch your tongue."
"Oh, yeah."
With that the cat leapt onto the horse's broad gray back. Poptart, startled, swung her body alongside the stall bars. With one fluid motion Mrs. Murphy launched herself through the stall bars, landing on the tack trunk outside.
Poptart blinked through the stall bars as Mrs. Murphy crowed, "You might be bigger but I'm smarter!"
Having a good sense of humor, the horse chuckled, then returned to her orchard grass/alfalfa mix, which tasted delicious.
The cat trotted into the feed room. Sure enough, she could hear the mouse behind the feed bin. Harry lined her feed bins with tin because mice could eat their way through just about anything. However, grains spilled over and the mice had eaten a tiny hole in the wall. They'd grab some grains, then run into the hole to enjoy their booty.
Mrs. Murphy sat by the hole.
A tiny nose peeped out, the black whiskers barely visible. "I know you're there and I'm not coming out. Go home and eat tuna."
Murphy batted at the hole and the little nose withdrew. "I'm a cat. I kill mice. That's my job."
"Kill moles. They're more dangerous, you know. If one of these horses steps into a mole hole? Crack."
"Clever, aren't you?"
"No, just practical," came the squeak.
"We're all part of the food chain."
"Bunk." To prove the point the mouse threw out a piece of crimped oat.
"I will get you in good time," Mrs. Murphy warned. "You fellows can eat a quart of grain a week. That costs my mother money, and she's pretty bad off."
"No, she's not. She has you and she has that silly dog."
"Don't try to flatter me. I am your enemy and you know it."
"Enemies are relative."
Mrs. Murphy pondered this. "You're a philosophical little fellow, aren't you?"
"I don't believe in enemies. I believe there are situations when we compete over resources. If there aren't enough to go around, we fight. If there are, fine. Right now there're enough to go around, and I don't eat that much and neither does my family. So don't eat me ... or mine."
The tiger licked the side of her paw and rubbed it over her ears. "I'll think about what you said, but my job is to keep this barn and this house clean."
"You already cleaned out the glove compartment of the truck. You've done your job." The mouse referred to Murphy's ferocious destruction of a field mouse family who took up residence in the glove compartment. They chewed through the wires leading into the fuse box, rendering the truck deader than a doornail. Once Murphy dispatched the invaders, Harry got her truck repaired, though it cost her $137.82.
"Like I said, I'll think about it."
"Murphy," Harry called. "Let's go, pussycat."
Murphy padded out of the feed room. Tucker, sleepy-eyed, waddled behind Harry. Fit as she was, Tucker still waddled, or at least that's how she appeared to Mrs. Murphy.
"Whatcha been doing?"
"Trying to catch mice. You should have heard the sneak holed up there in the feed room where I finally trapped him with my blinding speed."
"What did he say?"
"One argument after another about how I should leave him and his family alone. He said enemies were relative. Now that's a good one."
As Harry rolled open the barn door, a blast of frigid air caused the animals to fluff out their fur. Tucker, wide-awake now, dashed to the house through the screen door entrance and into the kitchen through the animal door. Mrs. Murphy jogged alongside Harry, who was sliding toward the back porch.
"I can handle snow but I hate this ice!" Harry cursed as her feet splayed in different directions. She hit the hard ice.
"Come on, Mom." Mrs. Murphy brushed alongside her.
Tucker, feeling guilty, emerged from the house. Her claws, not as sharp as Murphy's, offered no purchase on the ice so she stayed put unless called.
"Crawl on your hands and knees," Tucker advised.
Harry scrambled up only to go down again. She did crawl on her hands and knees to the back door. "How did I get to the barn in the first place?"
"You moved a lot slower, and the sun is making the ice slicker, I think," Mrs. Murphy said.
Finally Harry, with Mrs. Murphy's encouragement, struggled onto the screened-in back porch. She removed her duck boots and opened the door to the kitchen, happy to feel the warmth. Mrs. Murphy kept thinking about the mouse saying enemies were relative. Then another thought struck her. She stopped eating and called down to Tucker, "Ever notice how much bigger we are than mice, moles, and birds? Our game?"
"No, I never thought about it. Why?"
"We are. Occasionally I'll bring down a rabbit, but my game is smaller than I am."
"And faster."
"Oh, no, they're not!" Mrs. Murphy yelled back at Tucker. "No one is faster than I am. They have a head start on me, and half the time I still bring them down. Anyway, they have eyes on the sides of their heads. They can see us coming, Tucker."
"Yeah, yeah." Tucker, pleased that she had twitted feline vanity, rested her head on her paws, her liquid brown eyes staring up at angry green ones.
"I'm not going to continue this discussion. I'll keep my revelation to myself." Haughtily she turned her back on the dog and walked the length of the kitchen counter. She stopped before the painted ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a laughing pig.
"Don't be so touchy." Tucker followed along on the floor.
"I don't see why I should continue a discussion with an animal who has no respect for my skills." She was feeling a little testy since she couldn't nail the barn mouse.
"I'm sorry. You are amazingly fast. I'm out of sorts because of the ice."
Eagerly the cat shared her thoughts, "Well, what I've been thinking is how small jockeys are. Like prey."
Tricky November. The mercury climbed to 55°F. The ice melted. The earth, soggy from the rain, slowly began to absorb the water. One confused milk butterfly was sighted flying around Miranda's back door.
Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber sorted through the usual Monday morning eruption of mail. Pewter visited but grew weary of Mrs. Murphy and Tucker describing their dramas on the ice. She fell asleep on the ledge dividing the upper from the lower post boxes. Lying on her side, some of her flabby gray belly hung over.
"Now you are coming, aren't you?" Mrs. Hogendobber asked about her church's songfest. "It's November nineteenth. You write down the date."
"I will."
Mrs. Murphy stuck her nose in Mrs. H.'s mailbag. "Mrs. Murphy, get out of there."
"Don't be an old poop face."
Mrs. Hogendobber reached down into the bag, her bangle bracelets jangling, and grabbed a striped kitty tail.
"Hey, I don't grab your tail!" The cat whirled around.
"Now I told you to get out. I don't even like cats, Murphy. For you I make an exception." Mrs. Hogendobber told half the truth. When Harry took over her husband's job, bringing her animals to work, Mrs. Hogendobber had been censorious. During her period of mourning she would find herself at the post office, not sure how she'd arrived at that destination. She'd helped George for the nearly four decades that he was postmaster. An unpaid assistant, for the Crozet post office, small and out of the way, did not merit more workers. Of course, the volume of mail had increased dramatically over the years. When Harry took over as postmistress, as they preferred to call the position, her youth allowed her to work a bit harder than George could at the end of his career, but even she couldn't keep up with the workload. Entreaties for an assistant fell on deaf federal ears. No surprise there. Out of the 459,025 postal employees, less than 10 percent worked in rural areas. They tended to be ignored, a situation that also had its good side, for rural workers enjoyed much more freedom than urban postal employees, trapped in a standard forty-hour week with some power-hungry supervisor nagging them.