No. Years of being our nearest neighbour and therefore rarely missing a thing we do has done nothing to alter Father Adams’s conviction that what we need is a keeper. If I couldn’t cope with a donkey hauling logs, I could see him thinking, what chance would I have against a grizzly?
We couldn’t even win with Siamese cats. We had two.
Seeley, a four-year-old Seal Point and Shebalu, a two-year-old Blue Point. And if evidence was needed of our ineptitude in that direction there was, to take the latest example, the affair of Seeley and the dog-food.
This had come about as the result of the husband of Shebalu’s breeder calling to see us one day when he was on business in our neighbourhood. ‘Good Lord, hasn’t she grown!’ he said, hardly able to believe that the tall, beautiful, serenely elegant Blue Point who swayed top-model fashion across the room to greet him was the same matchstick-tailed little scrap who used to race up and down his curtains. ‘She’s twice the size of her mother.’
‘It’s the country air,’ I told him. ‘And tearing about the hillside. And of course she eats like a horse.’ At which we got to talking about feeding – pigs’ hearts and lean mince they liked, I said, and didn’t it cost a bomb... tinned food was good and cheaper, but we couldn’t get them to eat much of it... and he said Shebalu’s mother didn’t like tinned cat-food either, but now they fed her on Chum. She and their dog side by side, from twin bowls, and she ate it as though it were caviare.
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Aha! I thought. The next time I went to the village shop I too brought home some Chum. Shebalu was the real stumbling block when it came to the tinned cat-food business. Seeley, our amiable gannet, would eat it if he had to. It was just that it didn’t seem fair to feed him on tinned stuff while Shebalu held out for fresh meat. If her mother liked dog-food, however, perhaps she would, too, and that would solve the problem. Not only as regards cost. Our Vet had told us years before that cats should eat a fair proportion of tinned pet food. It was scientifically balanced, he said
– particularly the kind that contained cereal – and cats were much less likely to get kidney trouble in later life if their diet wasn’t exclusively meat and fish.
So I got the Chum. Shebalu refused to look at it, saying she didn’t care what her mother said. What jurisdiction did She have, anyway, letting her Daughter leave home at Eight Weeks Old, bawled Abandoned Annie indignantly at the very thought of it. Seeley tunnelled into it saying it was super... better than rabbit, he assured us between noisily appreciative slurps. How were we to know that, having eaten his and Shebalu’s platefuls and presumably seen the picture on the tin, his Siamese mind would translate that into meaning that he was now a dog, so from now on he was going to behave like one?
He started that very afternoon. When I opened the back door to take them out for their four o’clock run, there, on the other side of it, was one of our neighbours about to put the church news-sheet through our letterbox. Behind her was her dog, a huge black muscle-rippling Labrador at the sight of whom Seeley would normally have fled indoors and hidden under the table.
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The Coming of Saska What, fortified by Chum, did he do on this occasion? Stick his neck out, growl like a guard dog, and charge. ‘Seeley!’ I screeched, diving after him. ‘Bramble!’ yelled the woman, making a futile grab at her dog. Round the corner of the cottage we tore, expecting to find Seeley demolished on the lawn – and what incredible scene met our eyes?
Bramble sitting down hard on the front path, presumably to stop himself from running away, shivering like a jelly with his ears flat in surrender... and, stalking intimidatingly towards him like Gary Cooper in High Noon, our normally timid little Seeley.
I grabbed him, wondering what he might do to me in that mood, but he knew even then that I was his friend. He let me carry him away, his coat bushed out like a porcupine, contenting himself with shouting threats over my shoulder as he went. Show his nose in our Valley again and he’d have his Ears off, he bawled at the terrified Bramble. Set foot on our Path and he’d Eat Him. Wet Just Once More on our gatepost and he’d... what dreadful Siamese retribution that would incur we didn’t hear. By that time I’d dumped him in the conservatory and locked the door.
I apologised to our neighbour saying it must have been the dog-food and she said she reckoned the Rector should pay her danger money... both of us laughing, seeing that nobody had been hurt, and neither of us serious in what we said...
and a week later Seeley did it again.
This time he’d been up on the hillside in the Forestry Commission estate with me and Shebalu. Basking in the late afternoon sunshine, hunting in the bracken for mice, the pair of them chasing each other up the fir trees... Shebalu shinning effortlessly up like a stevedore mounting the Eiffel Tower; Seeley, like Solomon before him, achieving 10
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four feet up with an excited yell to Look At Him and then falling off with a plop. They’d had their fun and were back sitting on the rug with me when a man leading a horse and accompanied by a boy and an Alsatian dog appeared in the lane below us.
Normally – this, for safety’s sake, was something I’d taught them long ago – when we saw a dog the three of us vanished silently into the undergrowth. A right nit I felt too, at times, crouched in a clump of bracken peering out with a couple of cats, but I thought it was good to set an example.
This time, however, before I could make a move, Seeley was up and streaking downhill to the attack. True when he reached the bottom and the Alsatian barked at him he lost his nerve and dodged into an old stone ruin; just over the Forestry fence, it had always been a refuge for our cats.
But no sooner did the bitch turn away, called off by the man who said she wouldn’t harm him, she was young and only playing, than Seeley shot out again like a cannon ball, thinking her retreat meant that she was afraid of him.
By this time, actually, she was. Back to her owner she fled, with Seeley like an avenging fury at her heels. Up in the air went the horse – thank goodness the man wasn’t riding him. How I managed to field Seeley as he passed me I will never know. Only that somehow, as in a dream, I did
– reflex action is second nature to the owners of Siamese cats – and that I was dimly aware in the background of the man hanging on to the rearing horse, the boy getting up on the bank for safety, Charles running like mad down from the orchard – and, watching from the lower lane, registered even in my extremis by the downturned brim of his trilby, the silent. Job-like figure of Father Adams.
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The Coming of Saska Sometimes I wonder how he does it. Fell a tree up in the top hedge of our wood and round the corner as it falls will come Father Adams. Not deliberately, because he’s heard the sawing and wants to know who it is, but because he’s happened to come that way home from the pub. Get out quietly repairing one of our garden walls – they are dry-stone walls and always tumbling down – and, just as one puts on a wrongly-balanced stone and the whole lot falls down again, there on the other side of it will be Father Adams.
It was a foregone conclusion, therefore, that he’d be in at the end of the dog-food experiment. It was a few days later and we’d stopped giving Seeley Chum. Another Siamese owner had told us that her Vet said one shouldn’t feed cats on dog-food. Different types of animals have different metabolisms, she said, and the foods are geared specially to their needs.