The Second Cat Megapack: Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New

by Pamela Sargent

  “Ah,” said the Woman, listening, “this is a very clever Cat, but he is not so clever as my Man.”

  The Cat counted the five things (and they looked very knobby) and he said, “I will catch mice when I am in the Cave for always and always and always; but still I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”

  “Not when I am near,” said the Man. “If you had not said that last I would have put all these things away for always and always and always; but I am now going to throw my two boots and my little stone axe (that makes three) at you whenever I meet you. And so shall all proper Men do after me!”

  Then the Dog said, “Wait a minute. He has not made a bargain with me or with all proper Dogs after me.” And he showed his teeth and said, “If you are not kind to the Baby while I am in the Cave for always and always and always, I will hunt you till I catch you, and when I catch you I will bite you. And so shall all proper Dogs do after me.”

  “Ah,” said the Woman, listening, “this is a very clever Cat, but he is not so clever as the Dog.”

  Cat counted the Dog’s teeth (and they looked very pointed) and he said, “I will be kind to the Baby while I am in the Cave, as long as he does not pull my tail too hard, for always and always and always. But still I am the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”

  “Not when I am near,” said the Dog. “If you had not said that last I would have shut my mouth for always and always and always; but now I am going to hunt you up a tree whenever I meet you. And so shall all proper Dogs do after me.”

  Then the Man threw his two boots and his little stone axe (that makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the Cave and the Dog chased him up a tree; and from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree. But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

  Pussy can sit by the fire and sing,

  Pussy can climb a tree,

  Or play with a silly old cork and string

  To’muse herself, not me.

  But I like Binkie my dog, because

  He knows how to behave;

  So, Binkie’s the same as the First Friend was,

  And I am the Man in the Cave.

  Pussy will play man-Friday till

  It’s time to wet her paw

  And make her walk on the window-sill

  (For the footprint Crusoe saw);

  Then she fluffles her tail and mews,

  And scratches and won’t attend.

  But Binkie will play whatever I choose,

  And he is my true First Friend.

  Pussy will rub my knees with her head

  Pretending she loves me hard;

  But the very minute I go to my bed

  Pussy runs out in the yard,

  And there she stays till the morning-light;

  So I know it is only pretend;

  But Binkie, he snores at my feet all night,

  And he is my Firstest Friend!

  THE WOMAN WHO HATED CATS, by Margaret St. John Bathe

  She hated their expressive faces and their eyes that changed shape and color. She hated their mysterious appearances and their inexplicable disappearances. As a child she screamed herself into convulsions if one so much as blinked at her. When she grew up, of course, she learned not to scream; yet she could never learn to control the prickling sensation that attacked her spine whenever a cat stopped in its tracks and stared at her.

  For that is exactly what all cats did—they stared at her.

  It was strange that she who hated cats should so attract their interest. It was no ordinary interest such as a cat displays when it desires a saucer of milk; they were not hungry, stray cats that regarded her so intently; they were plump, well-fed feline citizens of a highly respectable neighborhood. They had no need to ‘meow’ at strange women for sustenance.

  She shooed them away but they were not frightened. Rather they took the sound to be indicative of a desire to be friendly and they would bound skittishly in front of her, twining their soft, almost boneless bodies, about her legs. Then it was difficult not to scream. Even though she was middle-aged and her childhood was now an almost forgotten interlude.

  She hated them more as she grew older; yet the more she hated them, the more they loved her. She was pursued by cats; gray cats, ginger cats, black cats and tabbies—the legend of the Pied Piper lived again in the respectable neighborhood. The people who put their cats out at night knew where they would go and the people who called their cats in knew where they had been.

  She would wake in the morning and find cats on the window-sill staring in at her, ‘meowing’ softly. When she opened the door to bring in the milk there would be cats on the doorstep. Before she could prevent them they would dart into the house and hide in dark corners until she had stopped searching for them. Later, as she busied herself with domestic tasks, they would jump out at her, landing on her shoulders, rubbing their sleek faces against her neck.

  In despair she wrote to a psychologist.

  “Please,” she begged, “Will you tell me how I can overcome my horror of cats?”

  The psychologist replied tersely— “Adopt a kitten.”

  She decided to ignore this advice on the principle that kittens grow into cats.

  Shortly after this correspondence she noticed her followers began to diminish in number. They no longer swirled about her feet or seized the opportunity to hide themselves in the house; she could open her eyes now in the mornings without the fear of being watched and waited for by those smooth-coated fiends.

  Only one cat remained persistent—a handsome tabby with whiskers that must have been at least four inches long, and a heavy, lustrous tail that curved the air in a gesture that was almost a bow.

  Disturbing though his persistence undoubtedly was, life was infinitely more tolerable with one cat than with a score. Beyond fixing her with his bright, yellow eyes every time she went in and out of the house, he did nothing to ingratiate himself.

  The woman who hated cats saw nothing ominous in his patient squatting—she had no premonition of disaster.

  Then one day while polishing a bedroom mirror she received a shock.

  Of late she had been troubled by a twitching on each side of her mouth; had taken it as an incipient heat-spot and applied calamine lotion. Today, however, the mirror reflected two small mounds of flesh perforated like a pepper pot and with long strong whiskers sprouting from the holes.

  The poor women went very pale and troubled.

  Feverishly she searched a drawer for a small pair of tweezers and holding the skin now with one hand she caught one large fine whisker and jerked.…

  It was a painful operation and, as the whisker left the follicle under the skin, the woman cried aloud—

  “Ow!”

  She listened as the cry echoed through the room. A horrid suspicion darkened her mind. She tried the sound again experimentally then she sank into a chair, completely robbed of her strength.

  She had not said “Ow”—she had said “Meow.”

  The days that followed were nightmarish; yet, by degrees, she became accustomed to the meowing and the whiskers; when she went out to shop she wore a veil and delivered notes over the counter so that she would not have to use her voice. She studied her reflection anxiously every day but there were no further signs of metamorphosis; apart from a growing urge to drink more milk, she remained normal.

  She still—thank goodness!—had one big toe and four graduated ones on each foot; her hands were not yet paws, and she had n
ot started to grow a tail. It seemed not unlikely that, in time, she would lose the cat-cry and the unsightly whiskers.

  Alas, for her optimism. One day, as she was crossing the hall, a mouse darted in front of her. The woman’s eyes brightened, she held herself tense, then—she pounced.

  She was too intent on her prey to notice that she now had paws and claws. It was lovely to feel the soft trembling body of the mouse between her pads. Allowing it to run a little way along the polished floor she sprang after it and tapped it gently on the head. This was fun. Why had she never played this game before? Again she released it, but this time it darted under the clothes cupboard.

  In a flash the woman followed but the cupboard balked her. She still possessed a human body and could not squeeze herself into the small aperture between the floor and the piece of furniture. Up and down she ran in a frenzy, peering first one side and then the other. The mouse had escaped, however.

  The woman ‘meowed’ heartbrokenly and then, in the manner of all cats, sat down and began to wash behind her ears.

  It was late that night when the transition became complete. There was a full moon and the air reverberated with strange sounds. The woman who hated cats drank the last of a bottle of milk, sprang through an open window, and stalked down the garden path.

  The handsome tabby was waiting by the gate. He gave a deep-throated purr as she approached and together they disappeared into the shadows.

  GIPSY, by Booth Tarkington

  On a fair Saturday afternoon in November Penrod’s little old dog Duke returned to the ways of his youth and had trouble with a strange cat on the back porch. This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke’s experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort. He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something which he was pretty sure would not happen. Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of wistfulness.

  Thus, being asleep in a nook behind the metal refuse-can, when the strange cat ventured to ascend the steps of the porch, his appearance was so unwarlike that the cat felt encouraged to extend its field of reconnaissance—for the cook had been careless, and the backbone of a three-pound whitefish lay at the foot of the refuse-can.

  This cat was, for a cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent, and masculine. Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, “Gipsy,” which he abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing when he declared that the young cat was half broncho and half Malay pirate—though, in the light of Gipsy’s later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates.

  No; Gipsy was not the pet for a little girl. The rosy hearthstone and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him. Surrounded by the comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation. He wanted free air and he wanted free life; he wanted the lights, the lights, and the music. He abandoned the bourgeoisie irrevocably. He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, and joined the underworld.

  His extraordinary size, his daring, and his utter lack of sympathy soon made him the leader—and, at the same time, the terror—of all the loose-lived cats in a wide neighborhood. He contracted no friendships and had no confidants. He seldom slept in the same place twice in succession, and though he was wanted by the police, he was not found. In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister. This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice-cold, so fire-hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duellist. His soul was in that walk and in that eye; it could be read—the soul of a bravo of fortune, living on his wits and his valor, asking no favors and granting no quarter. Intolerant, proud, sullen, yet watchful and constantly planning—purely a militarist, believing in slaughter as in a religion, and confident that art, science, poetry, and the good of the world were happily advanced thereby—Gipsy had become, though technically not a wildcat, undoubtedly the most untamed cat at large in the civilized world. Such, in brief, was the terrifying creature which now elongated its neck, and, over the top step of the porch, bent a calculating scrutiny upon the wistful and slumberous Duke.

  The scrutiny was searching but not prolonged. Gipsy muttered contemptuously to himself, “Oh, sheol; I’m not afraid o’ that!” And he approached the fishbone, his padded feet making no noise upon the boards. It was a desirable fishbone, large, with a considerable portion of the fish’s tail still attached to it.

  It was about a foot from Duke’s nose, and the little dog’s dreams began to be troubled by his olfactory nerve. This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signaled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid. Duke opened one drowsy eye. What that eye beheld was monstrous.

  Here was a strange experience—the horrific vision in the midst of things so accustomed. Sunshine fell sweetly upon porch and backyard; yonder was the familiar stable, and from its interior came the busy hum of a carpenter shop, established that morning by Duke’s young master, in association with Samuel Williams and Herman. Here, close by, were the quiet refuse-can and the wonted brooms and mops leaning against the latticed wall at the end of the porch, and there, by the foot of the steps, was the stone slab of the cistern, with the iron cover displaced and lying beside the round opening, where the carpenters had left it, not half an hour ago, after lowering a stick of wood into the water, “to season it.” All about Duke were these usual and reassuring environs of his daily life, and yet it was his fate to behold, right in the midst of them, and in ghastly juxtaposition to his face, a thing of nightmare and lunacy.

  Gipsy had seized the fishbone by the middle. Out from one side of his head, and mingling with his whiskers, projected the long, spiked spine of the big fish: down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish’s tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the intolerable glare of two yellow eyes. To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece—the bone seemed a living part of it. What he saw was like those interesting insect-faces which the magnifying glass reveals to great M. Fabre. It was impossible for Duke to maintain the philosophic calm of M. Fabre, however; there was no magnifying glass between him and this spined and spiky face. Indeed, Duke was not in a position to think the matter over quietly. If he had been able to do that, he would have said to himself: “We have here an animal of most peculiar and unattractive appearance, though, upon examination, it seems to be only a cat stealing a fishbone. Nevertheless, as the thief is large beyond all my recollection of cats and has an unpleasant stare, I will leave this spot at once.”

  On the contrary, Duke was so electrified by his horrid awakening that he completely lost his presence of mind. In the very instant of his first eye’s opening, the other eye and his mouth behaved similarly, the latter loosing upon the quiet air one shriek of mental agony before the little dog scrambled to his feet and gave further employment to his voice in a frenzy of profanity. At the same time the subterranean diapason of a demoniac bass viol was heard; it rose to a wail, and rose and rose again till it screamed like a small siren. It was Gipsy’s war-cry, and, at the sound of it, Duke became a frothing maniac. He made a convulsive frontal attack upon the hobgoblin—and the massacre began.

  Never releasing the fishbone for an instant, Gipsy laid ba
ck his ears in a chilling way, beginning to shrink into himself like a concertina, but rising amidships so high that he appeared to be giving an imitation of that peaceful beast, the dromedary. Such was not his purpose, however, for, having attained his greatest possible altitude, he partially sat down and elevated his right arm after the manner of a semaphore. This semaphore arm remained rigid for a second, threatening; then it vibrated with inconceivable rapidity, feinting. But it was the treacherous left that did the work. Seemingly this left gave Duke three lightning little pats upon the right ear, but the change in his voice indicated that these were no love-taps. He yelled “help!” and “bloody murder!”

  Never had such a shattering uproar, all vocal, broken out upon a peaceful afternoon. Gipsy possessed a vocabulary for cat-swearing certainly second to none out of Italy, and probably equal to the best there, while Duke remembered and uttered things he had not thought of for years.

  The hum of the carpenter shop ceased, and Sam Williams appeared in the stable doorway. He stared insanely.

  “My gorry!” he shouted. “Duke’s havin’ a fight with the biggest cat you ever saw in your life! C’mon!”

  His feet were already in motion toward the battlefield, with Penrod and Herman hurrying in his wake. Onward they sped, and Duke was encouraged by the sight and sound of these reinforcements to increase his own outrageous clamors and to press home his attack. But he was ill-advised. This time it was the right arm of the semaphore that dipped—and Duke’s honest nose was but too conscious of what happened in consequence.

  A lump of dirt struck the refuse-can with violence, and Gipsy beheld the advance of overwhelming forces. They rushed upon him from two directions, cutting off the steps of the porch. Undaunted, the formidable cat raked Duke’s nose again, somewhat more lingeringly, and prepared to depart with his fishbone. He had little fear for himself, because he was inclined to think that, unhampered, he could whip anything on earth; still, things seemed to be growing rather warm and he saw nothing to prevent his leaving.