It is, of course, totally pointless to call a cat when it is intent on the chase. They are deaf to the interruptive nonsense of humans. They are on cat business, totally serious and involved.
Dorothy called Roger.
He lifted his head, stared toward us, and came bounding out of the field and across the lawn right to us. Did someone want the cat? Did someone call me? He came when called only when it pleased him to come, and so it could not have been more obvious. That big bird was making him terribly nervous. He had not known how to break off the relationship, how to extricate himself from impasse. He had leaped at this chance of retreat with honor. (Damn it, if they hadn’t called me just then, I would have caught that thing, whatever it was.)
One day when there were several adults and a batch of kids out in the driveway, Geoff came walking out of the tall grass in our back lot making a very curious sound. He had a grass snake in his mouth, an extremely active little snake about eighteen inches long and as big around as a lead pencil. He was holding it by the middle, with both ends writhing about Obviously the taste and texture displeased him, as he had his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fixed sneer of distaste, accounting for the strangeness of the sound he was making.
When he reached the group he put it down immediately and backed away, making little tasting motions, lapping his jaws. Roger was there and witnessed how Geoffrey was commended for skill and valor as the snake fled rapidly off into the grass.
Not five minutes later Roger came out of the grass with a snake of his own. Not the same one. This one was smaller. He came bounding out of the grass, dropped his snake, batted at it a couple of times, and watched it flee. I realize all the dangers of imputing more awareness to these animals than they had. But when Roger sat and began sedately to wash, it was as though he was saying, “See? I’m pretty good at that sort of thing too.”
Geoff soon became a very proficient mouser at College Hill. And generally he preferred to eat them. He hardly ever made them the objects of that game humans think so cruel and horrid, of grasp and toss and bat about, almost but never quite permitting escape. He would bring his field mice back to the yard or into the house, and if they tried to leave while he was getting ready to eat, he would make a lightning movement of one paw and hold them down. When he was ready, his precision was surgical — the nip of the spine which killed instantly, the long abdominal slit to permit removal of the tiny gall bladder, and then swift, efficient ingestion.
Once in a while he would let Roger have one of his mice. He would sit then and watch Roger play the horrible game. Roger was not interested in eating them. But there seemed to be two inevitable results. Either he became too rough and inadvertently killed them or in trying to work the narrow escape bit let the mouse genuinely escape. In either event, Geoff would get up and trudge away, as though anxious to disassociate himself from the whole clumsy mess.
This mousing reputation of the younger cat came to the attention of our neighbors on the other side, Professor and Mrs. John Mattingly. There was a small barn behind their house. That year John had constructed a corral and purchased a middle-aged, five-gaited show horse named Blue Genius. We had a small terrace on that side of the house which overlooked the corral. Blue Genius was an incurable ham. When he was aware that he had an audience, he would go around and around the perimeter of his corral, neck arched, springing nicely, exhibiting his gaits. Then he would come to the nearest portion of the railing, stick his head over, blow, and wait for the applause. If the quantity pleased him, he would repeat the whole business.
John asked me if they could enlist the assistance of Geoffrey in ridding the small barn of mice which were eating the grain. I said certainly, and a day or so later he asked if I could bring Geoff over to be introduced to his duties. I did so and found that Professor Mattingly had cut a small and perfect Gothic arch in the sliding door of the barn, about a foot above the bottom sill. He felt we should acquaint the cat with this mode of access. As Geoff was accustomed to the window system, I was certain it would take but one trip in and out through the arch to give him all he needed to know. John went into the barn and closed the door. I passed Geoffrey through. John picked him up and sent him back out through the arch. At John’s insistence, we repeated this at least a dozen times. Geoff endured it with his usual obliging stoicism, but I can imagine he must have thought we had both gone mad. After the final passage into the barn, John picked Geoff up and dropped him into a grain bin. There was a scuffle of about two seconds duration, and Geoff arched out of the bin with a mouthful of mouse, leaped handily through his arch, and trotted on home. John was delighted. Thereafter Geoff apparently made it a standard part of his rounds because the mouse trouble diminished slowly to zero.
I shall skip cats for a moment to pay tribute to the Mattinglys. They were childless at that time, and both scholars. He taught Latin and Greek. Her specialty was Sanskrit. It was their habit in good weather, when schedule permitted, to go out onto the hillside behind their property and read to each other. It seemed a charming habit. One day our Johnny was missing so long that we began to worry about him. He came home and when asked where he had been, he said he had been out on the hillside reading to the Mattinglys. He said he had read them a whole book, and showed it to us. It was one of those one-dollar, inch-thick collections of Dagwood and Blondie comic strips. He said they both liked it a lot. It still touches us that those gentle and gracious people should have so politely endured one small boy’s intrusion upon their private pleasure.
That summer we were able to take our two-week turn at Wanahoo, Dorothy’s family’s camp at Piseco Lake, fifty miles northeast of Utica on Route 8. So many branches of the family were sharing the camp, scheduling was tight. Piseco Lake is a part of Dorothy’s life and now a part of mine too. The family camp was built in 1878. Dorothy’s grandmother used to go there when it was a two-day trip by carriage from Poland, stopping overnight at the inn at Hoffmeister. Dorothy was taken there for the first time when she was three weeks old.
When she was a child her father had tried to buy land on the other side of the lake. There were no camps over there. It was owned by the International Paper Company. While I was in India during the war she wrote me that the paper company had decided to sell that land in two-hundred-foot lake-front pieces, some eight hundred feet deep, extending back to the dirt road called the WPA road. I had just had a very fortunate session at the poker table with some people heavy with flight pay, and I was able to send her a little sheaf of hundred-dollar money orders. She got the other few hundred needed from her brother and bought the land. She and Johnny and the surveyor went back and forth through the woods during the black-fly season, trying to set the lines so they would include the point of land on the lake shore she wanted. Gas rationing kept people from getting up there and buying the land. Our piece was the first sold, and they used our lines as the basing point for all subsequent two-hundred-foot sites east and west of us. By the following morning, after surveying the site, Johnny was an awe-inspiring object. His black-fly bites had puffed him up so that he had no neck at all, a bulging and distended face with a nubbin of a nose and slits for eyes. He looked like a small, expressionless Siberian assassin. He insisted he felt well enough to go to school, so Dorothy walked him to the school nearby so that she could explain to his teacher what had happened and tell her she would come and get him if he felt badly. As she approached the school, holding him by the hand, the other kids out in front stared at him in awe and fell back in silence. They did not even know who he was, or, probably, what he was.