The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  • • NINE • •

  That was the first summer we spent in the new camp. It was a delight, for people and for cats. The south shore of the lake was more wild than the old shore where the camps were close together. We built on a rock ledge and had a cement deck overlooking the lake. Our road was over eight hundred feet long. It was and is a good place to live and work.

  The cat window was in the front, opening out onto the cement ledge of the waist-high fireplace on the terrace.

  Later, Roger was to discover that he could leap up under the shield and into the mouth of the flue. This was an idiot performance, and he would stay up in there, peering down, quite obviously very satisfied with himself. When it acquired a heavy coating of soot up in there he stopped. Cats do not voluntarily dirty themselves.

  The flaw in the window arrangement was that they reached it from the inside by hopping up onto the glass-topped table in the dining end of the long kitchen, next to the wall of stone which was the back side of the living-room fireplace. Our cats were quite self-effacing about this exit system. Staying close to the wall they would hop to chair, to table, and glide out. By never giving an inch we had managed to train them never to hop up onto the table where the people were eating. They did beg scraps sometimes, but in a mild and mannerly fashion. Roger was the one who came closest to taking advantage. He would sit patiently on an empty chair and then, with the stealth of an awareness of guilt, he would put one paw on the edge of the table. His name said in a tone of accusation was usually sufficient to make him flatten his ears, gulp, and pull the paw back. When this did not work, you could commit the indecency of leaning forward and blowing into his face. He has always despised and resented this. He will stalk away, pausing to stare back two or three times. He manages to express incredulity and resentment. How can you possibly be so crude? Geoffrey never took such violent exception to it.

  We did not mind the Piseco window arrangement. In fact, it was handy on those days so cold we did not want any window open. It could be readily reached to be opened for a cat and closed again.

  But visiting cats and kittens made it a little less than ideal. I remember one time when Charlie, in momentary confusion, tried to leap from the floor to the window sill. Trouble was, there was a good solid hunk of plate glass in the way. He gave himself a thump that left a little knot on his head. For days he preferred to holler at the door to get in and out. And, summer before last, a visiting kitten, enormously busy, had the habit at mealtime of jumping up into a lap at the part of the table furthest from the window, scrambling onto the table, and charging through the groceries on his single-minded way out.

  Roger has always had a precise awareness of his table rights. Circumspect about intrusion at any meal, he will nonetheless leap up onto the table without hesitation, when Dorothy is reading there or writing letters, and spread himself out amiably atop whatever she is trying to do.

  Neither cat tried to steal anything from the table. With one startling exception—the time Geoff got hooked on pills. But that comes later.

  At Piseco I took wicked advantage of my increasing knowledge of cat psychology to cure Roger of a habit that was slowly driving Dorothy out of her mind. We had one of those sling chairs, or safari chairs as they are sometimes called, canvas with slots or pockets which fit over the four extremities of a frame made of bent and welded metal rod. The canvas was black. Roger thought it the finest invention of man, a perfect hammock to take the curled shape of a somnolent cat. And he left a thick deposit of gray hair against the black each time.

  We had learned the curious uselessness of those chemical compounds designed to keep cats off things. One application was enough. They jumped up into the treated chairs, snuffed, moaned softly, jumped down, and threw up.

  There seemed no way to keep Rog out of the sling chair. Then I had an idea. With fiendish Dagwood grin, I freed the two bottom pockets and placed them back against the metal rather than hooked over it, and fastened them there with Scotch tape. By then Roger was convinced it was his chair. The next time he leaped gracefully into it to settle down, it pulled loose and dumped him on the floor. He collected himself and strolled haughtily away. The next day he tried it again, with the same result, then never went near it again. A cat cannot abide being made to look ridiculous.

  Though you could usually depend upon Roger and Geoffrey to respond in individual ways to the same stimulus, I recall one incident that first summer in the new camp when their reactions were identical. After what I shall call a jolly evening down in Utica with Eugene and Mary Hubbard, we drove back to Piseco, and I brought along Eugene’s soprano saxophone, with a little book of elementary exercises thereon.

  We were greeted warmly by the cats. I sat down and put my fingers on what I hoped were the right keys and tried a simple scale. There are few sounds less pleasing than those made by the novice saxophonist, and a soprano saxophone is the worst of all. After a few seconds of frozen horror, both cats began to howl like dogs, giving almost exactly those same ululations as when sad hounds bay at the moon. When I stopped, they stopped. When I began again, they paced about in distress, howling, and then went out through their window into the night. I put the infernal machine away. I tried the next day and the next with the same result, and then I took it back to Eugene. I couldn’t take that much criticism.

  There was more wild life on the new side of the lake. There was a rock shelf eighty feet from shore not quite covered when the lake is at its highest and of considerable area when the lake is low. Ducks roost there. When we arrive there is always at least one merganser family, the ten or twelve ducklings riding on mother’s back. We check on them throughout the summer, watching the dreadful attrition, seeing her at last with two or three who live to reach her size. Large migratory seagulls always rest there in the fall, loners who sit scruffily on the rocks, looking as if they were pondering whether such long trips are worth the effort. Wild Canada geese lay over in the shallow bay to the east of us, arriving and leaving with that incredible communal chortling which sounds like a D.A.R. convention after some scoundrel has spiked the punch.

  The fine people who own the land to the east of us, the Leightons and the Zimmermans, have their place beyond the shallow bay and own the major share of the lake front between our camps. I own the rest. We are leaving it as is, and now it is the last place at our end of the lake where the wild things feel safe in coming down to the water.

  Deer water there. We have not bothered them. If we happen to come too close, they trot a minimum distance and continue browsing on witch hopple. One year there was a doe with twin fawns, and their hoofmarks in the firm damp sand at the water’s edge were dime-size, beautifully crisp, and perfect. There are red squirrels and chipmunks and white-foot mice, scarce one season, abundant the next. Some summers the bird book is used constantly; other years we have a few marsh sparrows, nothing more.

  Porcupines have come onto the back porch at night to gnaw the salty handles of the tools. There are fishers in the area, dark, long, heavy-bodied, catlike animals built close to the ground, and of such incredible speed and agility they can spot a red squirrel halfway up a tall tree and grab him before he can reach the branches too slender to bear their weight. Brown rabbits graze in the small open area behind the house.

  I remember the day a few years ago when we got up at dawn to watch the television broadcast of the first time we put a fellow into the lower limits of space, in a sort of lob shot. We looked out the big window in the living room and saw a pair of otters down our shore line, playing some intricate game of amphibious tag. The one swam out to the rocks, dived, and caught a large chub, perhaps a pound and a half. He killed it and washed it and carried it ashore to the other one, and they shared it.

  The next time I saw Sam Prentiss, I said, “There are some funny semantic values involved here, but somehow those otters seemed to me more important than heaving somebody in a piece of hardware a thousand miles across the ocean. In some nutty way having the otters show up seemed t
o make that space shot sort of sad and comical and artificial. And maybe pretentious.”

  Sam, with wry glance, said, “It’s taking time, but you are learning.”

  We hear the shrill yap of the red fox. One of the standard amusements is to drive to the town dump at night, leave the headlights on, and watch the bears. They are the native black bear, up to six hundred pounds in weight. They have one magic I shall never understand. If you placed Roger cat on a loose 45-degree slope composed of cans, bottles, miscellaneous trash, he would make a rumpus akin to dropping bed-springs into greenhouses. But those big bears can drift across such a slope like a bulge of dark smoke, making not the slightest clink or rattle.

  Homer Preston, the game protector for the area, is continuously apprehensive about tourists who go to see the bears, who get out of their cars and, conditioned by the myths of Disney and the bears’ mild acceptance of being watched, might one day try to pet one. Homer knows that if this ever happens, the bear is going to pat right back with an energy, speed, and force which could separate the tourists into two or three unattractive pieces.

  Not long ago the New York State Conservation Department, in co-operation with Cornell University, conducted a three-year study of the large community of bears in the central Adirondack region. After sides of bacon and culvert traps had been used to catch them, they would then be knocked out by means of a hypo gun and, while unconscious, would be weighed, measured, tagged, and get one ear notched. In the case of the male bears, one testicle was removed and shipped in dry ice to the lab at Cornell. One can imagine that the male bears awoke in a state of some confusion. I believe about six hundred were trapped over the period of the study, and they discovered that the male bears are potent only in alternate years, one half their number being potent in any given year. During the off year their reproductive equipment is non-functional. Though the layman is not likely to get much conversational mileage from this discovery, I assume it must have stimulated the professionals vastly.

  One summer not long ago, when the cats could not be with us, for reasons I must explain later, we fed a family of raccoons on the front terrace. For some time Dorothy had been feeding some unidentified creature, leaving a paper plate of scraps out behind the pump house at night. We had to go to New York City for a week, and when we returned the raccoons had become so anxious about the sudden cessation of the handouts, they came around to the front of the camp, a huge female who looked practically round, and her half-grown child. We would leave the outside floods on after they became bolder. We fed them puppy biscuits by hand, but this was hard on the nerves. Those front teeth are like chisels. They move very slowly toward the biscuit and then suddenly take it with an awesome snap.

  (We had to stop feeding the red squirrels by hand when, one day, Dorothy walked out without peanuts and the irritable squirrel jumped from the cement deck up to her hand and sliced the pad of a finger open as if a razor had been used.)

  One night when we were watching the two raccoons through the window, a huge male raccoon came lumbering slowly up the three concrete steps at the end of the deck, and the female went waddling to meet him. We were certain we were going to see a vicious battle. Among most animals the females will drive the males away from their half-grown young. She reached him just as he got to the top step, and they put on the most incredible greeting we have ever seen. They smooched shamelessly, nuzzling into each other’s throats, rubbing heads, for at least a full thirty seconds, and then together came trundling to the food she had left. I have never seen this kind of display of affection between the male and female of any wild species. It was definitely not the practical business of checking each other’s coat for scents, nor was it a shared washing or scratching, nor even a mating prelude. It was simply a very warm and happy hello.

  (Sarasota County has been diligently eradicating the raccoons from the keys and the mainland for several years, on the basis of someone somewhere being bitten by a rabid one. Competent naturalists were quick to inform the county commission that rabies is endemic, relatively dormant, and in non-violent form in every sizable raccoon community in the world. They rarely infect other species, and it is one of the rarest of instances to have one of them go berserk. But minor agitation by the ignorant, the uninformed, the timorous, the nature haters who will not feel safe until the entire earth has been covered with asphalt, this minority gave the commissioners an excuse to set up a permanent patronage post of raccoon-killer, with an assistant to do the scut work, thus devising in perpetuity a nifty little way of rewarding the party hack who might foul up if given a more demanding position. Today a raccoon is a rare sight in the county, and the things the raccoons used to keep under control are beginning to create other problems, much to the bewilderment of everyone. I treasure the memory of the comment of one county commissioner who defended the eradication program by saying, “They are a very dirty animal.”)

  I tell of the wild life at Piseco to show what sort of natural community the cats had to adjust to in order to survive. There was violence out there in the woods. One night we heard some of it when we were awakened by loud sounds of vicious, snarling combat directly behind the camp, a prolonged thrashing, thumping, scrabbling, and then a sound of something going away through the woods swiftly, making heart-breaking cries of pain as it fled. When we investigated in the morning we found great wads of turf ripped up, small trees broken, but no print clear enough to tell us what it had been. Last summer, on the lake shore a few hundred feet from the terrace, we found a cat track which we photographed with a ruler beside it. It was an inch and a half wide and two inches long.

  Had Roger maintained his dashing attitude, his willingness to stalk anything, this bravado combined with his general incompetence afield might have been a fatal combination. But somehow he acquired discretion in time. The cats became considerably less nocturnal on the wilder side of the lake. They would range further during the day, and stay much closer to the camp at nightfall. Roger violated this concept twice that first summer. Both times we had driven out after dark and came back home about midnight. It was the only time either of them showed any tendency to follow when we went out in the car. Both times we came back, and, way up at the head of the road, our lights picked up the gleam of Roger’s eyes and he would come out of the brush. He hated riding in any car. But on both those occasions when we opened the car door, he came piling in, delighted to get out of the fearsome night and ride back down with us to the lights and safety of the camp.

  Both of them acquired the same habit that first summer. It took us some time to check out what they were doing. If either cat, through carelessness, found himself an ominous distance from the camp when darkness fell, he would hole up rather than risk the trip home. They selected places in deep thickets of brush or down among the exposed root structure at the base of a tree. It happened less often to Geoff than to Roger. Apparently this sort of night would have such corrosive effect on feline morale, broad daylight would not give them sufficient heart to start back. By mid-morning we would be tramping through the woods, calling the missing cat, each secretly convinced that this time something had eaten him. The cat would come out of hiding, moving very cautiously, and then suddenly recover from the megrims and prance, dance, and game his way home to the greedy meal before the exhausted sleep. The other cat would always snuff at him carefully from head to tail, reading the clues of adventure.

  While Sam and Evelyn, with kids and cats, were staying with us that summer, Geoff killed the weasel. It was mature, sizable, and had a very nasty expression. It was on the terrace, dead, when we got up. There was no mistaking who had killed it. Aside from the exploratory sniff, Geoff would permit no other cat liberties. And he seemed to realize that it is a rare and exceptional feat for a house cat to kill a weasel. They have a deadly swiftness. Whereas he would appear bored and indifferent about other species he lugged home, he was visibly impressed with this one. We gathered around to admire it and tell him what a beautiful cat he was. He kept bumping into our l
egs, purring, and going back time and again to the weasel to give it that little pat cats use to make the game wiggle one more time.

  Later that day Sam skinned it, scraped the insides of the hide, rubbed salt into it and tacked it to a board to dry. In Clearwater we had become friendly with Alec Rackowe, the writer, and his wife, Gracie. Gracie’s birthday was in the summer. Dorothy showed me a card she had bought for Gracie, one of those studio cards with a tag line that said, “What do you think? Mink?”

  So we packaged the card with the weasel hide and mailed it to Gracie, reminding her that weasels in winter are known as ermine. It amused them. They had it on a hall table. The curing job which seemed adequate at Piseco was not up to the intense heat and humidity of Clearwater in midsummer. The first Alec knew of the problem was when a whole pack of dogs came to the front door and stood whining and grinning in at him through the screen, tails wagging. It was then he discovered he had a ripe weasel.

  During the cool evenings that summer, the cats learned the special pleasure of a fireplace. At first the look of the flames fascinated them. Then they habitually cozied up to it. Geoff could endure more heat for a longer time than could Rog. When Geoff was finally forced to move back, his fur would feel almost too hot to touch.

  When we began to pack to head south, we realized that the cats were becoming ever more aware of the significance of open suitcases and cardboard cartons. Though Geoff enjoyed settling down in any open container, both of them quite obviously related this particular activity to some pending unpleasantness. They would both become querulous, restless, irritable, spitting at each other, whining at the people. Geoff, usually so charmed to be toted about, would begin a mild, stubborn struggling when picked up, as though he detected a real possibility this might be the moment when he would be dumped into that damned shipping crate. And it became impractical to even try to pick Roger up. They were both fourteen-pound cats, and Roger could react like fourteen pounds of whirling fishhooks. They went back and forth through their window endlessly.