In the morning Pard was walking up and down the hall all bright and innocent and wondering why I was in that bedroom.
No sign of mouse.
Last time there never was any sign of what became of mouse. I assumed it escaped, that time and this time.
But Friday night Pard woke me about 3 a.m. by rummaging persistently at the base of the standing lamp in my bedroom, making annoying noises, and worrying me that he’d knock the lamp over, even though the base is a big, heavy brass disk. No way to go back to sleep with that going on. I picked him up and shut him out of the room.
There’s no use trying to shut out both Pard and a mouse, because the door is so high off the floor that the mouse can run back in, leaving Pard out, and then Pard will rattle the door and cry.
But this time when I shut him out, Pard just went down the hall to sleep in the other bedroom. This told me, indirectly, something about the mouse.
Pard is an excellent hunter, but as I said in an earlier blog, he doesn’t know that he should kill the prey, nor, evidently, does he know how to. His instincts and skills are impeccably feline, but his education was incomplete.
Saturday morning, once I was up, dressed, and more or less competent, I lifted the heavy lamp base and looked under it. Sure enough, the poor little dead mouse was there. In its last refuge. Injury, terror, exhaustion. All can be mortal.
I wrote a poem for the mouse. I am not sure it’s finished yet, I keep moving lines and changing bits of it, but here it is in its current form.
An Unfinished Education, Continued
January 2016
WE WERE READING Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring aloud before dinner last night when Pard came trotting through the living room in an uncharacteristically feral way: body low to the ground, tail down, head poised, eyes all black pupil. And sure enough, a small mouse in his mouth. He put it down, let it go, recaught it, and trotted on back to the kitchen, the tiny black tail hanging out of his mouth. We went on grimly with Penelope. After a while Pard came back, mouseless, and looking clueless. He wandered off, and we decided, or hoped, he’d lost the mouse.
Just as we were about to do the dishes he reappeared with it. It was now distinctly less active, but still alive. Pard was confused, troubled, and purposeless, as he always is when he has caught a mouse: totally possessed by the instinctive command to hunt, to catch, to bring the catch to the family as trophy or toy or food, but lacking any instinct or instruction as to how to follow through to the kill.
A cat with a mouse—the cliché example of cruelty. I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another’s pain and the intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals. We don’t want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt.
It’s possible that I could have caught the mouse and taken it outside to spare it some suffering. (Charles couldn’t, because after an operation a little while ago he’s forbidden to stoop down.) I didn’t even try. To do it, I’d have to be highly motivated, and I’m not. I feel neither guilty nor ashamed of that, only unhappy about the whole situation.
I’ve never been able to come between a cat and its prey. When I was twelve or so our tomcat caught a sparrow on the lawn. Two of my brothers and my father were there. All three shouted at the cat, tried to get the bird away from it, and succeeded, in a cloud of feathers and confusion. I recall clearly, because I was clearly aware of my own feelings at the time, my refusal to join the shouting and scolding and scrambling. I disapproved. I thought the matter was between the bird and the cat and we had no business interfering with it. This may appear very cold-blooded, and perhaps it is. There are certain other matters of life and death toward which I have a similarly instant, absolute, imperative response—it is right to do this, or it is wrong to do this—which is not affected by personal preference or tenderness, has nothing to do with the reasonings of conscience, and cannot be justified by the arguments of ordinary morality. But neither can it be shaken by them.
Our feeble solution to Pard and the mouse’s problem was to shut them into the kitchen, leaving them to work it out in their own way. (And the dishes to be done in the morning.) What the mouse needed was to find the hole he’d come in by. Pard’s box is in the kitchen porch and his water bowl on the kitchen floor, so Pard had all he needed. Plus his problem.
And minus us. He is a very human-dependent cat. He’s almost always unobtrusively nearby. Fits of flying about at eye level, wreaking sudden havoc on bedspreads, galloping madly up flights of stairs, and bouncing backward stiff-legged and humpbacked with enormous tail and glaring eyes down the hall ahead of you for no reason occur now and then, but mostly he’s just quietly somewhere near one or the other of us. Keeping an eye on us, or sleeping. (Right now he’s conked out on his beloved Moebius scarf right next to the Time Machine, about eighteen inches from my right elbow.) Nights he almost always spends on my bed around the vicinity of my knees.
So I knew I’d miss him last night and he’d miss me. And we did. I got up to pee at around 2 a.m. and could just hear him weeping softly down in the kitchen. All the way home from the Humane Society in the carrier, he meowed and yowled lustily, but since then he’s never raised his voice. Even when shut by mistake in the basement, he just stands at the door and cries, softly, Meew? till somebody happens to hear him.
I steeled my heart, went back to bed, and felt bad till 3:30.
In the morning getting dressed I heard Meew? again, so I dressed fast, hurried down, and opened the kitchen door. There was Pard, still puzzled, still anxious, but tail in the air to greet me and breakfast.
There was no mouse.
These chapters of the saga almost always end now in mystery. An unhappy mystery.
A result, maybe, of the only partly worked-out relationship between two immensely different ways of being, the human and the feline. Wild cat and wild mouse have a clear, highly developed, well-understood connection—predator and prey. But Pard’s and his ancestors’ relationship with human beings has interfered with his instincts, confusing that fierce clarity, half taming it, leaving him and his prey in an unsatisfactory, unhappy place.
People and dogs have been shaping each other’s character and behavior for thirty thousand years. People and cats have been working at transforming each other for only a tenth that long. We’re still in the early stages. Maybe that’s why it’s so interesting.