On Cats

  Or black cat at the dirt box. She has been out in the garden; has just emptied herself. But a kitten is due a lesson. Black cat gets on to the dirt box in the appropriate position. She calls to the kittens: look at me. She sits on, while the kittens stroll around, watching or not watching. When she knows one has understood, she gets off the box and sits by it, encouraging the kitten with purrs and calls to do as it has been shown. Minute black kitten copies mamma. Success! Kitten looks surprised. Mamma licks kitten.

  Black cat’s kittens never go through a period of messing. Indeed, like obsessively trained children, they are overanxious about the whole business. Caught playing some way from the dirt box, a kitten will send out a wild mew; will go through the motions of getting into the right position–but again a desperate mew; it is not in the right place. Black cat comes running to the rescue; black cat urges kitten into the room where the dirt box is. Kitten runs to it, leaking a little perhaps, mewing. On the dirt box, what relief, while mother sits by, approving. Oh what a good clean kitten I am, says kitten’s pose and face. Kitten gets off the box, and is licked in approval, the random careless confident lick that is like a kiss.

  This kitten is all right; but what about the others? Off goes black cat, busy, busy, to check on faces, tails, fur. And–where are they? At the age just before they leave, they are all over the house. Black cat, frantic, rushes about, up and down stairs and in and out of rooms; where are you, where are you? The kittens curl themselves up in bunches, behind boxes, in cupboards. They don’t come out when she calls to them. So she flops down near them, and lies on guard, eyes half-closed for possible enemies or intruders.

  She wears herself out. The kittens leave, one after another. She does not seem to notice until there are two left. She watches over them, anxious. Then there is one kitten. Black cat devotes all that ferocious maternity to one kitten. The last one goes. And black cat rushes all over the house, looking for it, miaowing. Then, a switch is turned somewhere–black cat has forgotten what is upsetting her. She climbs up the stairs and goes to sleep on the sofa, her place. She might never have had kittens.

  Until the next lot. Kittens, kittens, showers of kittens, visitations of kittens. So many, you see them as Kitten, like leaves growing on a bare branch, staying heavy and green, then falling, exactly the same every year. People coming to visit say: What happened to that lovely kitten? What lovely kitten? They are all lovely kittens.

  Kitten. A tiny lively creature in its transparent membrane, surrounded by the muck of its birth. Ten minutes later, damp but clean, already at the nipple. Ten days later, a minute scrap with soft hazy eyes, its mouth opening in a hiss of brave defiance at the enormous menace sensed bending over it. At this point; in the wild, it would confirm wildness, become wild cat. But no, a human hand touches it, the human smell envelops it, a human voice reassures it. Soon it gets out of its nest, confident that the gigantic creatures all around will do it no harm. It totters, then strolls, then runs all over the house. It squats in its earth box, licks itself, sips milk, then tackles a rabbit bone, defends it against the rest of the litter. Enchanting kitten, pretty kitten, beautiful furry babyish delicious little beast–then off it goes. And its personality will be formed by the new household, the new owner, for while it is with its mother, it is just kitten though, since it is the child of black cat, a very well-brought-up kitten indeed.

  Perhaps, like grey cat, the poor old spinster cat, black cat when we eventually have her ‘doctored’ will look at kittens as if she does not know what they are. Perhaps her memory won’t give up the knowledge of kittens, though while she has them her days, her nights, her every instinct is for them, and she would die any death for them, if it were necessary.

  There was a she-cat, all those years ago. I don’t remember why it went wild. Some awful battle must have been fought, beneath the attention of the humans. Perhaps some snub was administered, too much for cat pride to bear. This old cat went away from the house for months. She was not a pretty beast, an old ragbag patched and streaked in black and white and grey and fox-colour. One day she came back and sat at the edge of the clearing where the house was, looking at the house, the people, the door, the other cats, the chickens–the family scene from which she was excluded. Then she crept back into the bush. Next evening, a silent golden evening, there was the old cat. The chickens were being shooed into the runs for the night. We said, perhaps she is after the chickens, and shouted at her. She flattened herself into the grass and disappeared. Next evening, there she was again. My mother went down to the edge of the bush and called to her. But she was wary, would not come close. She was very pregnant: a large gaunt beast, skin over prominent bones, dragging the heavy lump of her belly. She was hungry. It was a dry year. The long dry season had flattened and thinned the grass, cauterized bushes: everything in sight was skeleton, dry sticks of grass; and the tiny leaves fluttering on them, merely shadows. The bushes were twig; trees, their load of leaf thinned and dry, showed the plan of their trunk and branches. The veld was all bones. And the hill our house was on, in the wet season so tall and lush and soft and thick, was stark. Its shape, a low swelling to a high ridge, then an abrupt fall into a valley, showed beneath a stiff fringe of stick and branch. The birds, the rodents, had perhaps moved away to lusher spots. And the cat was not wild enough to move after them, away from the place she still thought of as home. Perhaps she was too worn by hunger and her load of kittens to travel.

  We took down milk, and she drank it, but carefully, her muscles tensed all the time for flight. Other cats from the house came down to stare at the outlaw. When she had drunk the milk, she ran away back to the place she was using to hide in. Every evening she came to the homestead to be fed. One of us kept the other resentful cats away; another brought milk and food. We kept guard till she had eaten. But she was nervous: she snatched every mouthful as if she were stealing it; she kept leaving the plate, the saucer, then coming back. She ran off before the food was finished; and she would not let herself be stroked, would not come close.

  One evening we followed her, at a distance. She disappeared halfway down the hill. It was land that had at some point been trenched and mined for gold by a prospector. Some of the trenches had fallen in–heavy rains had washed in soil. The shafts were deserted, perhaps had a couple of feet of rain water in them. Old branches had been dragged across to stop cattle falling in. In one of these holes, the old cat must be hiding. We called her, but she did not come, so we left her.

  The rainy season broke in a great dramatic storm, all winds and lightning and thunder and pouring rain. Sometimes the first storm can be all there is for days, even weeks. But that year we had a couple of weeks of continuous storms. The new grass sprang up. The bushes, trees, put on green flesh. Everything was hot and wet and teeming. The old cat came up to the house once or twice; then did not come. We said she was catching mice again. Then, one night of heavy storm, the dogs were barking, and we heard a cat crying just outside the house. We went out, holding up storm lanterns into a scene of whipping boughs, furiously shaking grass, rain driving past in grey curtains. Under the verandah were the dogs, and they were barking at the old cat, who crouched out in the rain, her eyes green in the lantern-light. She had had her kittens. She was just an old skeleton of a cat. We brought out milk for her, and chased away the dogs, but that was not what she wanted. She sat with the rain whipping over her, crying. She wanted help. We put raincoats on over our night-clothes and sloshed after her through a black storm, with the thunder rolling overhead, lightning illuminating sheets of rain. At the edge of the bush we stopped and peered in–in front of us was the area where the old trenches were, the old shafts. It was dangerous to go plunging about in the undergrowth. But the cat was in front of us, crying, commanding. We went carefully with storm lanterns, through waist high grass and bushes, in the thick pelt of rain. Then the cat was not to be seen, she was crying from somewhere beneath our feet. Just in front of us was a pile of old branches. That meant we were on the edge of a
shaft. Cat was somewhere down it. Well, we were not going to pull a small mountain of slippery dead branches off a crumbling shaft in the middle of the night. We flashed the light through interstices of the branches, and we thought we saw the cat moving, but were not sure. So we went back to the house, leaving the poor beasts, and drank cocoa in a warm lamplit room, and shivered ourselves dry and warm.

  But we slept badly, thinking of the poor cat, and got up at five with the first light. The storm had gone over, but everything was dripping. We went out into a cool dawnlight, and red streaks showed in the east where the sun would come up. Down we went into the soaked bush, to the pile of old branches. Not a sign of the cat.

  This was a shaft about eighty feet deep, and it had been cross-cut twice, at about ten feet, and then again much deeper. We decided the cat must have put her kittens into the first cut, which ran for about twenty feet, downwards at a slant. It was hard to lift off those heavy wet branches: it took a long time. When the mouth of the shaft was exposed, it was not the clean square shape it had been. The earth had crumbled in, and some light branches and twigs from the covering heap had sunk, making a rough platform about fifteen feet down. On to this had been washed and blown earth and small stones. So it was like a thin floor–but very thin: through it we could see the gleam of rain water from the bottom of the shaft. A short way down, not very far now that the mouth of the shaft had sunk, at about six feet, we could see the opening of the cross-cut, a hole about four feet square, now that it, too, had crumbled. Lying face down on the slippery red mud, holding on to bushes for safety, you could see a good way into the cut–a couple of yards. And there was the cat’s head, just visible. It was quite still, sticking out of the red earth. We thought the cut had fallen in with all that rain, and she was half buried, and probably dead. We called her: there was a faint rough sound, then another. So she wasn’t dead. Our problem then was, how to get to her. Useless to fix a windlass on to that soaked earth which might landslide in at any moment. And no human could put weight on to that precarious platform of twigs and earth: hard to believe it had been able to take the weight of the cat, who must have been jumping down to it several times a day.

  We tied a thick rope to a tree, with big knots in it at three-foot intervals, and let it down over the edge, trying not to get it muddied and slippery. Then one of us went down on the rope with a basket, until it was possible to reach into the cut. There was the cat, crouched against the soaked red soil–she was stiff with cold and wet. And beside her were half a dozen kittens, about a week old and still blind. Her trouble was that the storms of that fortnight had blown so much rain into the cut that the sides and roof had partly fallen in; and the lair she had found, which had seemed so safe and dry, had become a wet crumbling death trap. She had come up to the house so that we could rescue the kittens. She had been frightened to come near the house because of the hostility of the other cats and the dogs, perhaps because she now feared us, but she had overcome her fear to get help for the kittens. But she had not been given help. She must have lost all hope that night, as the rain lashed down, as earth slid in all around her, as the water crept up behind her in the dark collapsing tunnel. But she had fed the kittens, and they were alive. They hissed and spat as they were lifted into the basket. The cat was too stiff and cold to get out by herself. First the angry kittens were taken up, while she crouched in the wet earth waiting. The basket descended again, and she was lifted into it. The family were taken up to the house, where she was given a corner, food, protection. The kittens grew up and found homes; and she stayed a house cat–and presumably went on having kittens.

  chapter ten

  Spring. The doors open. The earth smells new. Grey cat and black cat chase and scamper all over the garden, and up on to the walls. They loll in weak sunlight–but well away from each other. They get up from rolling, and meet, cautiously, in a sniff nose to nose, this side, then that. Black cat goes indoors to the duties of maternity; grey cat is off, hunting.

  Grey cat has brought back new habits from Devon. Her hunting is swifter, deadlier, more sensitive. She will lie flat along a wall, watching the tree for hours, not moving at all. Then, when the bird flies down, she pounces. Or, surprisingly, she doesn’t pounce. There is the flat roof of the theatre which overlooks the neighbour’s patch of garden, where birds like to come. Grey cat lies on the roof, not crouched, but stretched out, chin on her paw, her tail still. And she is not asleep. Her eyes are intent on the starlings, the thrushes, the sparrows. She watches. Then she gets up; her back arches, slowly; she stretches her back legs, her front legs. The birds freeze, seeing her there. But she yawns, then ignores them, and delicately picks her way along the wall and into the house. Or she sits on the bottom of my bed and watches them through the window. Perhaps her tail twitches slightly–but that is all. She can be there half an hour, an indifferent observer: or so it seems. Then, in a moment, something will spring the hunter’s instinct. She sniffs, her whiskers move: then she’s off the bed, and down the stairs and into the garden. There she creeps, deadly beast, under the wall. She quietly leaps up the wall–but not on it, no: grey cat, like a cat in a cartoon, hooks her front paws on to the wall, puts her chin on the wall, supports her weight on her back legs, surveys the state of affairs in the next garden. She is very funny. You have to laugh. But why? For once grey cat is not posing, is unconscious of herself, is not arranging herself for admiration and comment. Perhaps it is the contrast between her absolute intensity, her concentration, and the uselessness of what she is going to do: kill a small creature which she doesn’t even want to eat.

  While you are still laughing, she’s up and over the wall, has caught a bird, and is back on the wall with it. She is running back into the house with the bird–but no, inexplicable human beings have rushed downstairs to shut the back door. So she plays with the bird in the garden until she tires of the game.

  Once a bird swooped down past a roof, saw the jut of a wall too late, crashed into it, and lay stunned, or dead, on the earth. I was in the garden with grey cat. We went together to the bird. Grey cat was not very interested–a dead bird, she seemed to think. I remember how black cat revived with hands’ warmth, and held the bird enclosed in my hand. I sat on the edge of a flowerbed; grey cat sat near, watching. I held the bird between us. It stirred, trembled; its head lifted, its eyes unfilmed. I was watching cat. She did not respond. The bird put its cold claws down against my palm, and pushed, like a baby trying out its strength with its feet. I let the bird sit on one palm, covered with the other. It seemed full of life. All this time grey cat merely watched. Then I lifted the bird on my palm, where it sat for a moment. Still cat did not respond. Then the bird lifted its wings and sped off into the air. At that last moment cat’s hunting instincts were touched, her muscles obeyed, she gathered herself for a spring. But by then the bird was off and gone, so she relaxed and licked herself. Her movements during this incident had the same quality as those made before she had her first litter–when she was prompted briefly and inconclusively to make a lair for the kittens. Certain actions were made; part of her was involved; but she did not really know about it; she was not set in action as a whole creature.

  Perhaps it is some definite movement a bird makes, a particular signal, that attracts the hunter in a cat, and until that movement occurs, a cat is not involved with the bird, has no relation to it. Or perhaps it is a sound. I am sure the frenzied chittering of a caught bird, the squeaking of a mouse, arouses a cat’s desire to torture and torment. After all, even in a human, the frightened sound arouses strong emotions: panic, anger, disapproval–the springs of morality are touched. You want to rescue the creature, beat the cat, or shut the whole beastly business out where you can’t see or hear it, don’t have to know about it. A tiny turn of the screw, and you’d be sinking your jaws in, ripping claws through soft flesh.

  But what screw? That’s the point.

  Perhaps for a cat it isn’t sound, but something else.

  That great South Afri
can naturalist, Eugene Marais, describes in his remarkable and beautiful book, The Soul of the White Ant, how he tried to find out how a certain kind of beetle communicates. It was a toktokkie beetle. It is not equipped with auditory organs; yet everyone brought up on the veld knows its system of small knocking sounds. He describes how he spent weeks with the beetle, watching it, thinking about it, making experiments. And then, suddenly, that marvellous moment of insight when he came to the until then not obvious conclusion that it was not sound, but a vibration which the beetle was using: a vibration so subtle it is out of our range completely. And the symphony of clickings, squeakings, chirpings, buzzings, which is how we experience the insect world–on a hot night, for instance–is for them signals of a different kind, which we are too crude to catch. Well yes, of course: obvious. As soon as you see it, that is.

  Under our noses, all these complicated languages which we don’t know how to interpret.

  You can watch a thing a dozen times, thinking, How charming, or how strange, until, and always unexpectedly, sense is suddenly made.

  For instance: when black cat’s kittens are at the walking stage, grey cat will always, at a certain point, but never when black cat is watching, creep up to a kitten–and this is what is so odd–as if kittens are a new phenomenon, as if she has never had kittens herself. She creeps behind, or sideways, to the kitten. She will sniff at it, or put a paw to it, tentative, experimental: she might even give it a hasty lick or two. But not from the front. Not once have I seen her approaching from the front. If the kitten turns and faces her, perhaps even in friendly curiosity, not hostile at all, grey cat spits, backs, her fur goes up–she is warned off by some mechanism.