During their Christmas holidays, Johnny and Anne drove to Florida, bringing Jaymie and Grey. Jaymie was the complete cat, and Grey was the adolescent. The size and the look of Roger alarmed them. Grey, at Roger’s delicate, inquisitive, placating approach, backed swiftly under a couch and made a noise unlike any they had yet heard him make. Except for his permanent feud with Heathcliffe, Roger has never made objection to other cats in the house. With small cats there is a reversion to that maternal urge. And he wants to play with the larger ones. While they are still uneasy about him, he will pounce elaborately upon some long-ignored catnip mouse and bat it about as they watch him, as if he were trying to demonstrate his innocent intent.
They became accustomed to him, and the three cats romped, but Roger could not keep up the pace. About five frantic minutes would do him in and he would leave the game and go get some rest. And, in action, they were a little too speedy and agile for him, so that he wound up often cuffing at the empty place where a cat had just been.
He enjoyed having them around. Johnny, Anne, and the cats lived in the guesthouse. The cat window was returned to service. In the dressing room there is a small, low chest of drawers. The top of it is eight or nine inches below the window sill, just the right height for Roger to sit on the chest with his forearms resting on the sill while he stares out at the night through the hole cut in the screen.
Night after night after the visiting cats were gone, we would wonder where Roger was and go look for him and find him sitting in the dressing room in the dark, an absurd and touching sight from behind, like a tired woman at a tenement window looking out at the street. He did not want to go out into that darkness, but he sat there waiting for those other cats and looking for them.
Here are some passages from a letter Johnny wrote us the following April (written on a Saturday after Jaymie had been gone since the previous Monday):
We have looked and called and combed the roadsides, but he blended into the grass so well we could step right over him without seeing. We have gone through many theories and only one seems to fit. Two weeks ago we heard real wildcats screaming behind the house. We think nine pound Jaymie could cope with anything that moved except a forty pound Jaymie... He died at night, not by human agency of car or gun, but in his own world; so, as our friend Tullio said, ‘He may have been beaten, but he wasn’t confused.’ ...Anne is up to her nose in degree furies. I am simply waiting for James.
Fifteen
Johnny and Anne had acquired other livestock that spring — rabbits, some ducks, a pair of goslings. The geese adopted them as parents. By the time the geese were half grown, Johnny and Anne had become so enchanted with their responsiveness, intelligence, fastidiousness, and the ducks, by comparison, seemed such mindless, offensive, noisy, sloppy gluttons, they began to dine on duck.
Geese are fantastically effective watchdogs. In the middle of one night there was a horrible racket out back. By then the wildcats had cleaned out most of the small creatures in their wood lot. That night they or it came to eat goose. They slew the gander and opened a long gash in the neck of the goose, before the kids were able to get out there and drive it away. Johnny and Anne had named the female Knees, a name which will seem apt to anyone who has stared with any objectivity at the knees of a goose. She was understandably agitated, and they brought her into the house, bandaged her neck, finally got her settled down.
When they took walks, Knees and Grey would accompany them. Geese are not constructed for walks in the woods. They cannot see where they are stepping. She would do the best she could and wait noisily to be picked up and hoisted over obstacles she couldn’t manage. There were references to Knees in every letter. We felt that a goose could be nothing other than a rather absurd-looking idiot.
They wrote us of leaving Knees alone outside one day when they went on an errand. When they came back she was gone. As they were looking for her, the phone rang. A farmer nearly a half mile down the highway had her, and they drove down to find the farmer and his wife and Knees standing on the porch. Knees acted nervous and gave them elaborate greetings.
The farmer said that he had seen this here white goose going across that back lot out there, flat out, wings spread, running like hell, apparently with something chasing it. Thinking he might scare off whatever was after it, he had given a yell, whereupon Knees had spotted him, veered, and come directly to him to stand and lean against his leg, staring out into the field and talking a blue streak. Considerably rattled, he had headed back to the house with the goose practically underfoot, talking every step of the way. There it had climbed the steps to the porch, and damn if it didn’t act as if it knew they were going to come after it.
Knees and Grey were at the camp when we got there last summer. Johnny and Anne had arrived first and opened it up.
There is room for Knees in this cat book, because this book is concerned with how living creatures display their separate personalities only when there is trust and security and, most of all, attention.
She was almost full-grown when she first saw water she could swim in. She went into it at once and headed off until she was a tiny white spot. At first she was a bad swimmer. She couldn’t stroke properly. Each thrust would swing her tail over toward the side opposite the thrust, so that instead of gliding she wobbled from side to side. When Anne went down to the dock and called her, Knees came heading back from far away, giving a resounding, triumphant QUONK every fifty feet.
That first night she spent a happy hour in front of the floodlight by the deck, snapping moths out of the air with that multi-purpose beak. The kids were planning a trip very soon and were testing a tent they had erected under the pine trees back of the camp. When they went off to bed, they called Knees, and she went waddling along with them, keeping up a continuous conversation.
In a few days they left, taking Grey, leaving Knees with us. By then Knees had given us her approval. We knew the formula for goose soup — cylindrical duck pellets which dissolve in water to make a greenish and singularly nasty-looking mess. Just as she was more responsive to Anne than to Johnny, she was more responsive to Dorothy than to me.
We were most astonished by the “vocabulary” she had. There was a greeting noise, made when you approached her. This was accompanied by a series of low bows, strangely oriental in flavor. There was the eating noise when she was presented with soup, an ecstatic and delighted little chuckling that she could continue to make even when her bill was deep in the soup. She liked the soup donor to stay close by, preferably sitting on his or her heels on the other side of the bowl. Knees would stop the chuckling and soup-sucking at regular intervals to lift her head high and stare directly and fixedly into your face. For some reason a goose, head on, staring at you, looks cross-eyed.
There was quiet conversation — when adult was inert and goose was paddling about or trudging about, a kind of peaceful little quabbling sound. There was excited conversation, such as when she was going for a walk, a swim, or a boat ride. This was a quabbling carried on at a louder and faster rate, punctuated every little while by one or two of those huge, resonant QUONK sounds. Sometimes QUANK!