I tell of the wild life at Piseco to show what sort of natural community the cats had to adjust to in order to survive. There was violence out there in the woods. One night we heard some of it when we were awakened by loud sounds of vicious, snarling combat directly behind the camp, a prolonged thrashing, thumping, scrabbling, and then a sound of something going away through the woods swiftly, making heart-breaking cries of pain as it fled. When we investigated in the morning we found great wads of turf ripped up, small trees broken, but no print clear enough to tell us what it had been. Last summer, on the lake shore a few hundred feet from the terrace, we found a cat track which we photographed with a ruler beside it. It was an inch and a half wide and two inches long.
Had Roger maintained his dashing attitude, his willingness to stalk anything, this bravado combined with his general incompetence afield might have been a fatal combination. But somehow he acquired discretion in time. The cats became considerably less nocturnal on the wilder side of the lake. They would range further during the day, and stay much closer to the camp at nightfall. Roger violated this concept twice that first summer. Both times we had driven out after dark and came back home about midnight. It was the only time either of them showed any tendency to follow when we went out in the car. Both times we came back, and, way up at the head of the road, our lights picked up the gleam of Roger’s eyes and he would come out of the brush. He hated riding in any car. But on both those occasions when we opened the car door, he came piling in, delighted to get out of the fearsome night and ride back down with us to the lights and safety of the camp.
Both of them acquired the same habit that first summer. It took us some time to check out what they were doing. If either cat, through carelessness, found himself an ominous distance from the camp when darkness fell, he would hole up rather than risk the trip home. They selected places in deep thickets of brush or down among the exposed root structure at the base of a tree. It happened less often to Geoff than to Roger. Apparently this sort of night would have such corrosive effect on feline morale, broad daylight would not give them sufficient heart to start back. By mid-morning we would be tramping through the woods, calling the missing cat, each secretly convinced that this time something had eaten him. The cat would come out of hiding, moving very cautiously, and then suddenly recover from the megrims and prance, dance, and game his way home to the greedy meal before the exhausted sleep. The other cat would always snuff at him carefully from head to tail, reading the clues of adventure.
While Sam and Evelyn, with kids and cats, were staying with us that summer, Geoff killed the weasel. It was mature, sizable, and had a very nasty expression. It was on the terrace, dead, when we got up. There was no mistaking who had killed it. Aside from the exploratory sniff, Geoff would permit no other cat liberties. And he seemed to realize that it is a rare and exceptional feat for a house cat to kill a weasel. They have a deadly swiftness. Whereas he would appear bored and indifferent about other species he lugged home, he was visibly impressed with this one. We gathered around to admire it and tell him what a beautiful cat he was. He kept bumping into our legs, purring, and going back time and again to the weasel to give it that little pat cats use to make the game wiggle one more time.
Later that day Sam skinned it, scraped the insides of the hide, rubbed salt into it and tacked it to a board to dry. In Clearwater we had become friendly with Alec Rackowe, the writer, and his wife, Gracie. Gracie’s birthday was in the summer. Dorothy showed me a card she had bought for Gracie, one of those studio cards with a tag line that said, “What do you think? Mink?”
So we packaged the card with the weasel hide and mailed it to Gracie, reminding her that weasels in winter are known as ermine. It amused them. They had it on a hall table. The curing job which seemed adequate at Piseco was not up to the intense heat and humidity of Clearwater in midsummer. The first Alec knew of the problem was when a whole pack of dogs came to the front door and stood whining and grinning in at him through the screen, tails wagging. It was then he discovered he had a ripe weasel.
During the cool evenings that summer, the cats learned the special pleasure of a fireplace. At first the look of the flames fascinated them. Then they habitually cozied up to it. Geoff could endure more heat for a longer time than could Rog. When Geoff was finally forced to move back, his fur would feel almost too hot to touch.
When we began to pack to head south, we realized that the cats were becoming ever more aware of the significance of open suitcases and cardboard cartons. Though Geoff enjoyed settling down in any open container, both of them quite obviously related this particular activity to some pending unpleasantness. They would both become querulous, restless, irritable, spitting at each other, whining at the people. Geoff, usually so charmed to be toted about, would begin a mild, stubborn struggling when picked up, as though he detected a real possibility this might be the moment when he would be dumped into that damned shipping crate. And it became impractical to even try to pick Roger up. They were both fourteen-pound cats, and Roger could react like fourteen pounds of whirling fishhooks. They went back and forth through their window endlessly.
They expected the worst, and it happened, and we dropped them off at Dr. Sellman’s with ear-weary relief.
Ten
The last day of travel south was through torrential rains which were the aftermath of a hurricane, rains which for the first time soaked through the tarp laced over our cargo trailer, and through the suitcases, washing the unnecessarily vivid colors out of the suitcase linings and onto the clothing therein.
We had written Randy when we would arrive, and it was raining hard that late afternoon when we got there, hardly in any mood to cope with the thousand irritating little problems involved in moving into a rented cottage. But Randy, bless him, had put a crew to work at the house. All the utilities were hooked up. The yard and house were spotless. Beds were made and turned down, opened packs of cigarettes on the end tables, Coke and beer in the refrigerator. Never have we been welcomed so imaginatively. A few days later when he came out to see how we were getting along, he brought a throw net, cast it over a fat mullet, split and cleaned the mullet on the dock, and showed Dorothy a fine method of broiling it.
The cats approved the setup at once. They liked the bay side. They would go over onto the beach when we did, but they did not care for it. The glare seemed to bother them. In all that open space they had no chance of catching a sandpiper, a sanderling, or a tern. They seemed to regard the surf as ominous indeed and would become agitated when we went out into it. They would pace back and forth and we could see their mouths make hollering motions.
We had seen a cat who had made an interesting adjustment to beach life. When we lived on Acacia Street, my sister and her husband had vacationed down at Madeira Beach. When we went down to see them there, Dorrie pointed out a cat at work. She had been watching him for days. A battered old timber groin extended out into the water. That cat would lie on the beach against the groin, in the actual wash of the surf. He looked like some wretched bit of flotsam, all soaked and caked, the waves washing over him. When finally some unwary water bird came near enough that sodden cat would spring and bring it down, kill it immediately, and carry it off the beach up into the sea oats to eat it. I have never heard of another cat who used this hunting scheme so contrary to cat habit and instinct.