The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  John asked me if they could enlist the assistance of Geoffrey in ridding the small barn of mice which were eating the grain. I said certainly, and a day or so later he asked if I could bring Geoff over to be introduced to his duties. I did so and found that Professor Mattingly had cut a small and perfect Gothic arch in the sliding door of the barn, about a foot above the bottom sill. He felt we should acquaint the cat with this mode of access. As Geoff was accustomed to the window system, I was certain it would take but one trip in and out through the arch to give him all he needed to know. John went into the barn and closed the door. I passed Geoffrey through. John picked him up and sent him back out through the arch. At John’s insistence, we repeated this at least a dozen times. Geoff endured it with his usual obliging stoicism, but I can imagine he must have thought we had both gone mad. After the final passage into the bam, John picked Geoff up and dropped him into a grain bin. There was a scuffle of about two seconds duration, and Geoff arched out of the bin with a mouthful of mouse, leaped handily through his arch, and trotted on home. John was delighted. Thereafter Geoff apparently made it a standard part of his rounds because the mouse trouble diminished slowly to zero.

  I shall skip cats for a moment to pay tribute to the Mattinglys. They were childless at that time, and both scholars. He taught Latin and Greek. Her specialty was Sanskrit. It was their habit in good weather, when schedule permitted, to go out onto the hillside behind their property and read to each other. It seemed a charming habit. One day our Johnny was missing so long that we began to worry about him. He came home and when asked where he had been, he said he had been out on the hillside reading to the Mattinglys. He said he had read them a whole book, and showed it to us. It was one of those one-dollar, inch-thick collections of Dagwood and Blondie comic strips. He said they both liked it a lot. It still touches us that those gentle and gracious people should have so politely endured one small boy’s intrusion upon their private pleasure.

  That summer we were able to take our two-week turn at Wanahoo, Dorothy’s family’s camp at Piseco Lake, fifty miles northeast of Utica on Route 8. So many branches of the family were sharing the camp, scheduling was tight. Piseco Lake is a part of Dorothy’s life and now a part of mine too. The family camp was built in 1878. Dorothy’s grandmother used to go there when it was a two-day trip by carriage from Poland, stopping overnight at the inn at Hoffmeister. Dorothy was taken there for the first time when she was three weeks old.

  When she was a child her father had tried to buy land on the other side of the lake. There were no camps over there. It was owned by the International Paper Company. While I was in India during the war she wrote me that the paper company had decided to sell that land in two-hundred-foot lake-front pieces, some eight hundred feet deep, extending back to the dirt road called the WPA road. I had just had a very fortunate session at the poker table with some people heavy with flight pay, and I was able to send her a little sheaf of hundred-dollar money orders. She got the other few hundred needed from her brother and bought the land. She and Johnny and the surveyor went back and forth through the woods during the black-fly season, trying to set the lines so they would include the point of land on the lake shore she wanted. Gas rationing kept people from getting up there and buying the land. Our piece was the first sold, and they used our lines as the basing point for all subsequent two-hundred-foot sites east and west of us. By the following morning, after surveying the site, Johnny was an awe-inspiring object. His black-fly bites had puffed him up so that he had no neck at all, a bulging and distended face with a nubbin of a nose and slits for eyes. He looked like a small, expressionless Siberian assassin. He insisted he felt well enough to go to school, so Dorothy walked him to the school nearby so that she could explain to his teacher what had happened and tell her she would come and get him if he felt badly. As she approached the school, holding him by the hand, the other kids out in front stared at him in awe and fell back in silence. They did not even know who he was, or, probably, what he was.

  So part of our Piseco time that first summer we took the cats up was to start planning the camp we hoped to put on our land some day. We had learned during the few necessary local trips how loudly and bitterly both cats objected to riding in a car. This was the longest one yet. Twelve miles to Utica, and then (past Toppy’s tree) fifty miles to the lake. They made the trip hideous. They complained with every breath. By the time we got there Geoff was down to a breathy baritone rasp.

  Cats will travel well if you start them early enough and take them often enough. On our way to Texas we had stopped in Virginia to see my sister, Doris, and her husband, Bill Robinson. Bill was getting an engineering degree at V. P. I. They had a black female cat named Buckethead. When they started the gypsy existence of a civil engineer, Buckethead traveled well. They had a sandbox on the back seat for her to use in transit. It made such an unsteady platform that, after using it, Buckethead would lie on her side for the essential cat habit of scratching at the sand to cover it up.

  This is, I have heard, an ancient feline instinct based on making it more difficult for other predators to get on the track of the cat, rather than out of some sense of fastidiousness. Yet this does not explain in any satisfactory way a habit which Geoffrey began in his early maturity and continued all his life.

  Dorothy always placed their dishes on waxed paper or aluminum foil. Geoff was forever the glutton, falling upon the food in his own dish and then shouldering Roger away from his dish. Roger always accepted this. Possibly it was a carryover from his maternal interlude. When elbowed aside, he would back off and sit and wait until the other cat was finished. As Geoff had a tendency to eat until everything was gone, Dorothy had to save out Roger’s food. Roger never ate much at one time. He liked to leave food and return to it off and on for snacks. Roger has always had a standard routine for showing his distaste for food which does not please him. He stares into the dish, then up at the donor, then into the dish, then up at the donor. He seems to express a bewildered disbelief. Do you actually expect me to eat that? Why are you doing this to me?

  But Geoff’s critique was brutally direct. He would plod to his dish. He would lean and snuff and perhaps try one bite. Then, if we were out of the room, we would hear the sounds of his nails against the paper or foil. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Working his way around the dish he would perform a symbolic ritual of covering it up, then plod frowningly away. I can think of no more vivid way he could have expressed his opinion of what had been served him. What particularly infuriated Dorothy was that it might be something he had been eating with gusto for weeks. Cooked hamburger perhaps. Suddenly he would decide there had been quite enough of that. The healthy, well-fed cat will demand changes of diet at almost predictable intervals. It may have something to do with the digestive process. When the demanded change is not forthcoming, he will simply stop eating, despite all appearances of ravenous hunger. The better boarding kennels recognize this cat trait and cater to it when the boarding period is long, even though they continue to give their dogs standardized fare.

  We hauled them squalling to Piseco and released them into an out-of-doors unlike anything they had seen. Here were steep slopes, the black silences of thick woods of pine, hemlock, birch, maple, a thousand hiding places, the strange scents of indigenous animals much larger than mice and moles, curious noises in the night, a lake shore, boats, live fish. They explored with great, quivering caution. We did worry about them up there, then, and in all the years to follow. House cats disappear in Adirondack country, taken by fishers, foxes, wildcats, coydogs and perhaps, sometimes, raccoons, weasels, and those bored, bourboned sportsmen with their mail-order artillery who come racketing in upon us each autumn in search of a dubious manhood.

  Once adjusted, the cats relished every minute of it. They would come exhausted back to camp for a quick meal and a short nap, and head on out again. This was a real jungle, man. This was what the cat business was really about. Red squirrels and gray squirrels cursed them. Geoff caught ch
ipmunks, and all but one or two managed their escape. Roger bore proudly back to the porch a shrew the size of an infant’s thumb. It had bitten him severely about the chin.

  A word here about a strange talent chipmunks have. Johnny discovered it years later when he and his wife were living on a farm in Michigan. Their cats, Jaymie and Grey, caught many chipmunks. They would apparently maim them cruelly, inflicting some sort of injury to the spine. The chipmunks would writhe about, rolling and thrashing once the cat put them down, rolling right toward the cat, a reaction the cats found objectionable. Johnny shot four of the pathetic things to put them out of their misery, and, one day, when he was about to shoot the fifth, it suddenly seemed remarkable that all five could have been injured in exactly the same way, and reacted in the same way.

  So he watched. When the chipmunk would roll toward the cat, the cat would back away with a pained expression. The cat would watch it thrash aimlessly in the grass and, confident that it was unable to flee, the cat’s attention would wander. The chipmunk writhed ever closer to a thicket and then suddenly shot off into cover, a little streak of pale brown a good safe distance ahead of the cat’s belated pounce. Johnny told me that he then realized, to his dismay, he had slain four skilled thespians right in the midst of their art.

  We found this hard to believe. When Johnny and Anne brought Grey to Piseco, they called me from the typewriter one afternoon when Grey had caught a chipmunk. The chipmunk lay rigid and unmoving in the cat’s jaws. When Grey put it down, that little animal put on the most convincing act I have ever seen. It looked like the final agony, the last wild spasms. It imitated a broken back, and rolled wildly right into the cat. The cat backed away. The chipmunk rolled in random directions, flopping about, then abruptly it sped off to safety. This is apparently a talent shared by chipmunks everywhere and one of the strangest and most specialized defensive instincts I have ever seen. Many animals and even some insects will play dead. But as far as I have been able to tell, only chipmunks play dying.

  The lake intrigued Geoffrey far more than it did Roger. The front porch of the hillside camp overlooked the boat dock and the tethered boats. One late afternoon several of us, sitting on the porch, saw Geoff jump down into a skiff. He explored it carefully, sniffing at elderly traces of fish, working his way to the stern. He got up onto the rear seat and from there onto the housing of the outboard motor. The motor was tipped up. Stepping quite daintily, he went cautiously out onto the narrower housing which encloses the drive shaft. When he took a step halfway to the propeller, his weight tilted it down abruptly, dumping him into the lake. Shocked, and doubtlessly furious, he cat-paddled to shore. A soaked cat is a sorry, spavined sight. He moved off into heavy brush, and when we saw him next he was totaly dry, fluffy, unconcerned—and probably would have told us that we were all mistaken—it had been some other cat.

  When we went out in a boat he would sit on the dock and look after us so wistfully that one day Dorothy took him into a boat and rowed him down to Big Sand. It terrified him. He wanted to jump out but could not quite bring himself to do so. Dorothy let him out at Big Sand so upset he threw up, and she rowed slowly back, with Geoff following along the rocky shore line, making pitiful noises. Perhaps he noticed on that return trip that the shore line was where you go to look for frogs. Years later he owned one.

  When our time was up and the next contingent due, we drove back to Clinton. The cats made loud objection the entire way, and I know it was only my imagination, but I seemed to detect in their mournful cries not only their objection to automobiles but also despair that they should be yanked out of paradise with so many woodsy tasks yet undone.

  It was at Wanahoo that they became sophisticated and deft about trees. As we sat on the porch we would hear thrashings in the leaves of the smaller trees on the slope of the bank, and then, at our level, a cat face would appear to stare at us. This was a look-at-me, look-at-me device, typical of all young males. Roger made up in reckless abandon what he lacked in co-ordination and judgment. Ascending he was superb, but descending was a frantic and perilous procedure, usually ending with a quick twist, a shower of shredded bark and too long a drop to the ground. Geoff descended with all the careful assurance of a middle-aged lineman. He backed down tree trunks, setting each foothold firmly, looking down over his shoulder exactly as in those pictures of koala bears Down Under. His final drop was usually of one foot or less, followed by a glance up at where he had been.

  Also it was at Piseco that they became acquainted with the half brother, Heathcliffe. Geoff and Heath soon learned to tolerate each other, though in grudging fashion. Geoff was not belligerent, at least not when he seemed to feel it a waste of time. He was ready to make those small, constructive adjustments which simplified life. But Rog and Heath reacted to each other with an undying malevolence, noisy warnings, frequent displays of claw and fang, springing back with steam-valve hissings when they met unexpectedly in doorways. It was hate at first sight, and it never lessened.

  The world of the cats was growing more complex, and they were learning.

  • • FIVE • •

  It is difficult to appraise the intelligence of any creature, including man. I.Q. in man, maze skills in rats, chickens who play baseball, chimps who pile the boxes to reach a banana, the quicker learning and longer retention of cattle as compared to horses, the circus dog who will walk grotesquely on his front feet—all these things are small illuminations in a great darkness. Too often we confuse some adaptive instinct with reasoning power. There is, for example, one small and enchanting crab in tropical waters which carefully plucks bits of marine weed and, with all the care of a woman doing her own hair, plants these living bits atop his shell so as to make himself less noticeable in his environment. The hermit crab, growing too large for his mobile home shell, will crawl from empty shell to empty shell, using his claws to measure the opening, as businesslike and thoughtful as any carpenter measuring for a shelf. Finding one a suitable degree larger, he will take a long and careful look around before, with frantic haste, he hoists his soft nether portions out of the old home and slips them into the new. (If watching this sort of thing entertains you, grab a hermit crab and put him in a shallow pan of sea water along with several empty shells. Then take one of those tap-icers and carefully crack the back end of the shell he lives in, carefully enough not to damage him. Put him back and watch him pick a new house.)

  Another area of confusion in measuring intelligence in animals is our tendency to give the higher marks to the animals most willing to follow orders. (The kid who strains to do well on the I.Q. test may be of lower intelligence than the boy who, lacking sufficient motivation, drifts through it thinking of more entertaining things and makes a lower score.)

  Cats are not interested in pleasing anyone by a display of obedience. They are unfailingly pragmatic, which in itself seems to denote a kind of intelligence we are not yet equipped to measure. If a cat can detect no self-advantage in what it is being told to do, it says the hell with it, and, if pressure is brought to bear, it will grow increasingly surly and irritable to the point where it is hopeless to continue. Yet, where the advantage to be gained is clearly related to the task required, the learning process is so acute as to be almost instantaneous. Once learned the feat will be repeated only when the cat is interested in the result.

  Geoff was constructed in such a curiously square fashion, we could not help but notice that he had a strange habit, when sitting, of sometimes lifting his forepaws off the floor, sitting much in the manner of a ground squirrel. Sometimes he would adopt this posture for the business of face washing. When he was interested in what people were eating, he would sit near the table, and it took just a little upward gesture of the hand with a morsel in it to bring him up into his sitting position. The implied guarantee of receiving the scrap would keep him there, like a small dog.

  Yet after the novelty of that wore off, we did not continue it. It was a question, I suppose, of appearances and of dignity. The cat who emul
ates a small, supplicant dog has somewhat the same inadvertent ludicrousness of, for example, a small and extremely fat man. The grin of conviviality is always a little abashed. In some obscure way it shamed the three of us to shame him in a way he accepted so solemnly, and without ever having to discuss it, we all gave it up.

  It was Geoffrey, when we lived on College Hill, who provided us with the most memorable example of reasoning power we can remember.

  It came about this way. We used to go quite often to the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica with my parents. Johnny was popular with the staff, and they would take him out into the kitchen. One of the other guests had brought in pheasant that fall, and it was being prepared for his table when Johnny went out there. One of the chefs gave him a handful of the big tail feathers of the cock pheasants. He brought them home, and the cats were delighted with them. They could be batted about, knocked into the air, chased, clawed, bitten. They were symbolic birds. In a week or so there were only a few not completely destroyed, and these had been denuded of feathers all except that tuft at the very end which has “eye” markings much like peacock feathers. They were twelve inches of heavy, naked quill with the end tuft.

  I should mention here that whereas Roger seemed to prefer co-operative play, either with brother cat or one of the people, Geoff often played alone for long periods, playing solemn and wide-ranging games of solitary field hockey, dribbling a half-bashed ping-pong ball from room to room.