“Oh, he’s getting away!” the woman said.
“My something-or-others!” Bebe said - I don’t remember what she called them. My little kitty heart was beating so hard my sensitive ears were practically deaf to anything else.
“Go, Sami, go!” shouted Aunty Jane, who had re-appeared ahead of me and was swinging her arms, guiding me forward. I went where she pointed, and in seconds was back where the bird had been tossed on top of me, yellow feathers still strewn about and some even still floating.
If you’ve ever seen a cat in a moment of crisis, you’ll know we can accomplish great feats of leaping and making ourselves scarce. In normal circumstances, I might have hesitated to rush up that leafy-viney wall, and to leap into the great unknown beyond. But I was still being chased, and was… I would not say scared.
Concerned? Yeah, concerned.
Concerned, mostly for the poor humans making the terrible mistake of blaming little Sami for some dumb bird’s dumb predicament. When they found out how wrong they’d been about me, how would they feel?
I ran, and ran, jumping from fence to tree to a barely beaten path. There was a house just outside the fence - one of the nearby places on the outskirts of Bebe’s land. I ran past it into deeper forest, and then crossed over and back, skirting the sides of Bebe’s great big yard. I could hear the footsteps moving up and down, tromping and stomping, coming near, but still on the other side of the fence. Bebe was saying something about losing her cat, and the bad woman was saying something about lawsuits and expensive birds and sanctuary and…
“Fred’s animal control. He just has to sign a report condemning your evil cat! That’ll fix this.”
“Wait a minute,” Mele, always the level headed, worthwhile human, said. “Just hold on. How do you even know it was Sami?”
“Well, ma’am,” the Fred said, sounding calm - too calm, like he was trying to talk to an excited animal. “I saw the cat myself.”
“How do you know it was….?”
“We all know that cat! Goes wherever he wants, thinks he owns the whole town. And the bird was here! Here, in his greedy mouth!”
I wanted to leap back over the fence to give this character assassin a scratch, but thought better of it. I was fuming, so mad I could sleep! But this wasn’t the time for that. Let none say that cats are lazy. We just know the right time for action, and the right time for sleeping, and this was not a problem that napping would solve.
You have to understand that I watch humans all the time. You get the feeling that some of them get mad and blow off steam and then get back to their benign noisiness and two-legged clumsiness. Bebe was like this. Yelling at Sami right now, petting him in a couple of hours when whatever fever captured her brain had calmed down. She was easy to forgive.
But this other woman, the screechy bird-keeper, was not like that. The tone of her voice, that she would even bother to leave her territory to make these accusations in my own place, meant she wanted action. She kept going on and on about it.
“Five times in the last two weeks, some of the rarest, most beautiful, most precious birds have been disappearing from my sanctuary, and just this morning Fred saw it - your cat - walking out with my parakeet!”
“Wait, if he was hunting the parakeet, why would he bring it all the way home rather than just eat it there?” sensible Mele asked.
“I don’t know how his evil mind works! I just know the parakeet is here, your cat was covered in feathers, and I’m swearing out a complaint!”
That threat gave me shudders. Maybe I ought to take a small detour in this conversation and explain a few things so that you’ll understand.
Something similar happened once before. A small dead rabbit was found on the doorstep. I was accused. Irrationally. Captain Stone—Bebe’s latest male friend, was involved. He advised they take the bull by the horns and deal with the problem proactively. At the very least, he said they should put a bell around my neck. But he had a better plan. It seems he has a cousin with a farm out in Mojave. He suggested they send me there.
Mojave! Can’t you just picture that? Me in the middle of the desert, surrounded by cows or sheep or whatever nasty grazing animals they have on those farms? No thanks. Arrivederci Mojave Land. I wasn’t buying that one.
Besides, they have coyotes and foxes and bobcats. It’s a death zone out there. I’ll take a nice beach city, thank you just the same. Do we have a few of those deadly animals around here? Sure. But here they exist mostly in the shadows. In the desert, they rule.
I was pretty upset. I could tell that Bebe was considering Captain Stone’s idea. The whole thing blew over when Mele got wind of it and got very quiet and teary-eyed and Bebe promised she wouldn’t send me away after all. But a second supposed offense might change her mind. That was why I had to think fast.
As you can see, I’ve faced the possibility of unjust punishment before, which is what makes me so skittish now. I need my position in the matter to be understood by all.
I am a busy beast. I like a good hunt now and then (more for the catching than the eating - the two-leggers own very efficient can openers for a reason) and if I were going to be sneaking birds from some sanctuary, they would stay sneaked. Sami would be a black ghost in the shadows, here and gone without a hint.
I am not a sloppy cat. I will not be accused of being a sloppy cat.
There was just one thing for it. While the humans were busy shouting at each other and making all kinds of loudness, I sneaked into the bed of the woman’s truck out in front.
There wasn’t even a trick to it - I just passed underneath a hedge, clearly visible to anyone with eyes to see for a good dozen yards, and jumped into the open back. There were two vehicles out front, besides Mele’s - the woman’s truck, and the big van with blacked out windows, and a very large picture of a possum on the side. Using my powers of deduction, I determined that was Fred’s, and I wanted to have nothing to do with it.
I hunkered down between a heavy box I assumed was full of human stuff and some blankets that were scruffy and dark and hid me pretty well. The plan was to go to this woman’s place (expertly memorizing the road on the way so I could get back home without a hitch) and doing some feline examinations of my own. This nose I have can smell a thousand different smells. These paws, they’re sensitive and intelligent little agents of investigation, step lightly and silently wherever I need to go. Even my whiskers can tell a million things that the human senses cannot see.
If there is one thing that I, as a cat, should remain humble about (and it’s a question whether I should or not) it is that I have to fight my instincts. A cat is made for a life of regular excitement, punctuated by long bouts of dozing. Wake up, catch food, chase off evil-doers, patrol the territory, sleep at regular intervals. You humans do all kinds of things to mess up these perfectly fine instincts.
So there I was, ready to brave the trip to the woman’s bird place, in order to solve this mystery and clear my name. It shouldn’t take long. I was alert and sharp as a tack. Ready for battle or fine deducing. Either way.
But—well, someone put the softest blankets in the bed of that truck. Because despite my heroism, after the truck got going the regular motion became… hypnotic. And so… it may be I slept on the way to the lady’s place instead of paying attention to where we were going and knowing how far I was from home.
I’m not saying it’s what happened. Just that I got in, the truck started, and before I knew what was happening we were there.
I still have the nose, though, and I’ve been all over this town. It would be no trouble to find some familiar smell, and follow it to a familiar place. I think.
Either way, I was here now, and was about to leap right out of the truck as it stopped when I saw the other vehicle barreling down toward it - the van, with the man Fred barely visible in the front seat behind his heavily tinted windows. He was wearing dark glasses, too, and I wondered how in the world he saw anything behind all that darkness. Of course, the worst darkness
was in the man’s soul. I could tell.
His big angry sounding engine went gunga-gunga-gunga, then stopped.
“Fred, you didn’t have to follow,” the woman said, getting out of her own truck. She walked around the edge… and leaned over the side of the truck bed, grabbing at the toolbox.
“Never mind, Molly. I’m just sorry that it all went sideways like that. How do you think the parakeet is going to do?”
“Ugh, no thanks to those cat owners, he might live. If it were up to me, Fred, they’d let you round up every cat in Destiny Bay, North, South and otherwise. Bird murderers, each and every one of them.”
She was gesticulating now, talking with her arms in a particularly human way that had no patch at all on the subtle movements of communicative kitties. It did take her hands and eyes away from the inside of the truck, so I could try to move (ever-subtly) into a place where, even if she picked up the toolbox, she wouldn’t see me.
“Well, let me take a look around. I want to poke about the bird cage, maybe take some pictures. Figure out how to keep the cats away.”
“Maybe I’ll just put out some poison kibble,” Molly said, sounding deeply villainous. I was shocked. Even I didn’t think the woman would go that far. But to even mention it---I would keep that in mind in case any cats go missing in the town…
Besides me, I meant. Gulp.
“Anyway, I want to see the new rescues you got in,” Fred said.
Molly sighed, and stepped away from the truck, finally. “I’m almost afraid to take them out of the house into the sanctuary. These are some real specimens. If a cat gets them…”
And they trailed off behind closed doors as I, ruffled but not doing too poorly, finally got out of the truck and got my bearings.
It was a strange piece of land. There were trees around - we were further inland than my territory, so the smell of sea-salt was not in the air, and the trees looked positively forest-like, and natural to the area. Bebe’s whole backyard was cultivated, full of stuff that didn’t really belong there, but that sort of thing made the humans happy anyway.
Above my head, was a net. In fact, the whole place seemed canopied with this sort of see-through, meshy material. I guess it was to make it so birds couldn’t fly away. Seemed to me the perfect sort of thing to prevent them from escaping cats, but I doubt Miss Molly Sanctuary would see it that way.
The ground was nice and soft underfoot, with the pavement running out right before the driveway, turning into soft dirt. I padded away from the front of the house to scout out the entire area. I was not certain that whatever was taking birds was, indeed, a cat. But if it was, a cat path would be obvious and let me into the sanctuary, no humans required.
I walked around the edges, feeling very wild, sniffing around to get the nose-news of the land. Some dogs had been by within the last week, befouling everything with their own doggy-nonsense, so there was less nasal information than I had at first hoped. You know how you humans complain about wet dog smell? Trust me, that smell is there all the time - it’s only amplified by dampness enough for nose-blind humans to finally get treated to it.
There was a lot of it around. Woof.
It wasn’t until I reached the further end of the entire fenced-in area, which went well behind the building and was far from the road and fairly deep into the forest, before the dogginess was beaten out by the more natural smells. Then I was surrounded by bird scents. The normal dirty bird smell of the local fauna (not dirty in a bad way, just smelling like dirt, earth, the stuff underfoot) was there, but there were other, much different feather-stinks. It all reminded me of that nasty loudmouth in the shed, just biding his time to ruin a cat’s day.
These were tropical bird smells, and stronger than they should have been, in an enclosed area. Not completely enclosed. Right near the corner of the building, where the wood fence was far too tall to jump, and the lower area was reinforced with a chain-link fence that wrapped around the wood, and the netting enclosure so high it made even a heights-savvy beast like me dizzy. But, between all of these lines of defense against animals going in or coming out, there was a gap.
It was not obvious. Piles of wood cut for a fireplace were stacked near there, and the gap was in a place that looked completely blocked, at first glance. If my sniffer hadn’t told me someone had been through there, and recently, I might have missed it. Yes, me.
But I did not. I climbed over the wood, and stared down into a little hole, where some fencing that surrounded the area had been peeled back, and the wooden fence dug under. Ducking down and making myself as flat and small as was possible for a beast of my enviable size, I crawled down, almost snagging some gorgeous fur on a sticky bit of chain-link fencing.
I came out behind a large shelf, into an area that was suddenly warm and muggy, despite being essentially a fenced-in open area. An enormous oak was in the center of this section of yard, reaching up almost as high as the poles that held up the netting. There were several other trees growing in the enclosure, of various types with branches criss-crossing. Besides these trees were man-made structures, tall and skinny with poles sticking out at angles.
Up in every single branch, and on every weird structure, every single place you looked, there were birds. Birds, birds, little birds, even littler birds, tall and angry-looking birds. Birds so many colors it was like Bebe’s flowers. I didn’t know the names of any of these kinds of birds, but they made me, a confirmed can-fed-kitty, salivate, just a little.
The gap that lead out from the other side opened into a perfect bit of cover - a shelf which had pots and bags on it, and went almost the whole length of the fence. A thinking kitty could have used it to cross the whole enclosure without being seen. But with so many birds, I must admit I lost a bit of my cool. I stepped right out from behind the shelf, slinking low, looking at all these flying snacks, thinking the world would not miss just one…
“Cat!” a tiny sparrow piped through his tinier beak, “Cat cat cat cat cat!”
Just in that moment, the door opened, and I could see the first foot of the screechy Molly woman, stepping out into her place. The sparrow was still tweeting excitedly, “Cat cat cat there’s a cat don’t you see the cat!”
It was only a matter of seconds before I was found out. Before the rest of the birds saw the mighty hunter, the predator in their midst, and began their screaming fit. I turned, but saw my place behind the shelf occupied.
Two yellow eyes look out at me from behind a bag of seeds--blinked slyly, then disappeared again.
“Follow me if you want to eat,” the tiniest, most secret cat voice said, just as Molly stepped out onto the soft ground, loud in her boots.
“Let’s go cat hunting!” Molly said.
Chapter 3 - The Other Black Cat
I leapt with admirable grace into the exact space seconds ago occupied by the other cat.
“What was that?” Molly said, coming clomping toward the space I’d just left with nowhere near my speed or agility. “Fred, did you see that?”
“The cat the cat the cat!” The sparrow kept at it, though it didn’t seem like the other birds were hearing him. Maybe he was the proverbial Little Sparrow That Cried Cat, and my natural stealth had made me invisible to the other birds.
It hadn’t made me invisible to this other cat, though, who was padding right where I should have gone when I came into the enclosure. She (I could tell from a single sniff this was a lady cat, and a single glance--a rather handsome one) walked behind the shelf, moving low-legged or stretched as the contents of the shelf and stealth required. Fred stomped right past her, saying, “What? What did you see?”
“I thought it was a cat.”
“That cat couldn’t have got here unless he hitched a ride,” Fred said.
“Well, maybe it’s a different cat,” Molly said, and the humans argued in a tedious fashion I could no longer listen to. I followed the different cat, and assessed her even as we legged it along the fence and casually strolled in through an open door
, unseen.
And it struck me that, though my keen cat eyes could see 10,000 differences between this lady and myself, to a human’s dim-vision, we might have looked alike. Not that I’m as flip as she is - she stopped right in the doorway to lick her back, and I passed by her to get inside and not be seen.
It was cooler in the house than out, which I generally prefer. I like a cool house with a hot sunbeam to sleep in, and maybe a good safe place by a window to stretch out. This cluttered bird-stinking house was not made for cats at all - the windows were shuttered, and no sun got in. It was as musty as the shed.
“Pee-eww, I don’t know why I come in here,” the lady cat said, stepping daintily past me to the center of the human’s kitchen. “At least out there the bird smell gets some air.”
“Oh, so you don’t belong to the woman?” I said, playing it sly while I gathered my information.
“Belong? I don’t even know what that means. I’m a freeborn.” That’s what strays liked to call themselves. With her thickness and clean coat, I didn’t believe for an instant this cat didn’t have human caretakers.
“Oh, freeborn, are you? And how do you feed yourself? Are there wild can-trees next to opener-bushes that I do not know about?”
She sniffed. “I’m sure there are innumerable things you do not know about. And what do you think I feed on? Birds, birds, birds, all day long. I catch two in the morning, and only eat the better one. Then I sleep until I decide it’s time to really get cracking, and I grab one of the really big ones, right out of the tree.”
I had to hand it to her. Quite a storyteller, this one.
“If you did that, the birds would know it and they would be broadcasting it to the world. That sparrow couldn’t get a-one of them to be the least bit excited.”
Mele's Ghostly Halloween Caper: Plus Sami's Story by J.D. Winters and Dakota Kahn (Destiny Bay Cozies Mysteries Book 6) Page 10
