The trap from the rear (illustration credit 11.1)
The following materials are necessary for building the trap: one twelve-inch board fourteen feet long, one one-and-a-half-inch strip seven feet long, one three-quarter-inch strip two feet long, twenty inches of No. 3 gage wire, two small screw-eyes, one piece of wire netting six inches square, and a little piece of fresh fish.
Cut the twelve-inch board to make the following pieces: one bottom board thirty inches long, one top board twenty-eight and a half inches long, two side boards twenty-nine and a quarter inches long, one treadle board twenty-seven inches long, one drop board thirteen and a half inches long, one end board ten and a half inches long. Now put the little piece of fresh fish away in the icebox, sweep up the sawdust, and look what you’ve done to the floor already.
Cut the one-and-one-half-inch strip to make the following pieces: two drop-door guides twenty-four inches long, two drop-door guides eleven and one-fourth inches long, one fulcrum piece for treadle ten and one-half inches long.
Cut or plane a quarter of an inch from the edge of the treadle board so that it will move freely inside the trap without binding. Cut a V-shaped groove about a quarter of an inch deep across the treadle at right angles and thirteen and one-half inches from the front end to fit over the top of the fulcrum. If you are unable, or unwilling, to cut a V-shaped groove, cut an S-shaped, or even an R-shaped groove. It will be all one to the people who live in the same building.
Looking directly at the trap (illustration credit 11.3)
Except for the fulcrum, which is impossible to construct, nothing is so difficult to construct in the cat trap as the door guides. They are very hard. Cut or plane the fulcrum piece to a ridge one inch high, to fit into the groove in the treadle. Cut or plane the edges of the drop door so that it will slide freely in the guides after the cat is in. (Incidentally, you ought to begin looking around for a cat—the disappointment of building a cat trap and having no use for it is real.) Now then, cut an opening four by five inches in the centre of the rear-end board and tack a piece of wire netting over it to provide ventilation. A stuffy cat trap is worse than no cat trap! Nail the bottom, sides, top, and end in position to form the box. Screw one screw-eye into the top of the treadle half an inch from the right side and seventeen and one-half inches from the front end. Screw the second screw-eye into the piano for all I care. The trap should be given two coats of paint inside and out, and the apartment should be completely done over, walls, floors, and ceilings. While the paint is drying, a good way to utilize your time is to cook the little piece of fish and eat it.
Cross section of the completed trap
The simplest and most humane way of disposing of the trapped cat is to gas it. Insert into the trap a tablespoonful of calcium cyanide or a wad of cotton saturated with one ounce of carbon disulphide or chloroform. A heavy blanket thrown over the trap will assist in keeping the gas confined and will ruin the blanket. Caution: Carbon disulphide is highly explosive and inflammable and calcium cyanide and its fumes are extremely toxic; but if you’re going to trap cats you’ve got to expect a few hard knocks.
Some people prefer to shoot a cat rather than trap it. To such people I have nothing to say, but I have usually found that they didn’t know how to use tools.
| 1930 |
(illustration credit 11.5)
THE CAT-SAVERS
* * *
WALLACE WHITE
A fat white cat leaped from behind a vertically propped bedspring, flew to a dusty table, and headed for a grille-covered window. “Get him! Have you got him? Emily, quick!” a slim girl with long tawny hair shouted. The cat soared from the table to the windowsill and then out through the window and its grille, and, with great agility, dashed past the outstretched hands of two people standing on the sidewalk and vanished down the street.
“He just left town,” said an attractive woman with dark-blond hair who was standing outside the building. “Did you see anybody else?”
“I saw a tabby upstairs, Judy—I’m sure I did,” the slim girl replied, stepping through a pile of debris that sent up a puff of dust around her ankles, which were encased in plaid trousers. “Is there any more food out there?”
It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were standing with three other people inside a deserted building—one of several tenements in the West Nineties that were about to be razed. The people around us—the two outside as well as the three inside—were members of the Save A Cat League, an organization whose main function is the rescuing of homeless cats, many of which, like the ones that were being sought in this neighborhood, are left behind when their owners move. After a stray cat has been rescued, the League takes it to a veterinarian for a checkup, and then places it in a temporary home while putting it up for adoption. “You do it because it’s got to be done and nobody else is doing it,” we had been told earlier by the attractive dark-blond woman, who was Mrs. Judith Scofield, the League’s founder and president. “You can’t live with yourself if you don’t.”
Now, inside the building, an auburn-haired woman said as she stepped over a fallen chair, “I’m going back upstairs. That tabby can’t have got away.” She was Emily Cobb, an actress and a member of the League’s Canine Auxiliary, which does roughly the same thing for dogs that the parent organization does for cats.
“The tabby might have run off over the roofs,” said a strongly built man in a green parka, who had been introduced to us as Gil McKean, an advertising copywriter.
“There’s all kinds of furniture in here!” the slim girl, whose name was Susan Neher, called to those outside. “Anybody want a cane chair? A bathtub?”
As the two young women and Mr. McKean plodded around broken furniture and unidentifiable artifacts on their way to the building’s staircase, we made our way out to the sidewalk. It was about two o’clock, and a drizzling rain had begun to fall. Mrs. Scofield turned to her companion, a man named Mack Shopnick, and said, “We’ll try that building across the street, and then go see the little girl who wrote to us.” On the sidewalk were five or six cat-carriers—large, perforated cases with suitcase handles—and a cardboard carton containing perhaps a dozen cans of cat food.
After about five minutes, the three searchers emerged from the building empty-handed. Mr. McKean was panting, and Miss Cobb looked a bit dishevelled.
Miss Neher, who we had learned was a secretary for The Players, picked up one of the cat-carriers and started across the street. Other League members picked up carriers and followed her toward a bleak-looking tenement whose windows had been boarded up. Mr. McKean managed to open a basement door, and a party of four (Mrs. Scofield and Miss Neher stayed behind), armed with flashlights, advanced into the gloomy interior. They returned several minutes later and reported that they had found nothing but a dead kitten. Miss Neher looked stricken, but Mrs. Scofield bore the news stoically and suggested that the group move on.
With Mrs. Scofield and Mr. Shopnick, who is an arranger and conductor of music for radio and television commercials, we got into a gray sedan and began driving west. The others followed in Miss Cobb’s car. “No, turn there, Mack,” Mrs. Scofield said. “No. No, left!” She glanced at us and said, “The rain’s going to make it difficult. The cats aren’t out. They’re all hiding inside somewhere. Quite a few people write us or call us when they learn of cats that have been abandoned. You’d be surprised how many people move out and leave their pets to fend for themselves. I just wish the owners would call us, instead of deserting the animals. People can be so intolerably cruel. We got a call a while ago to come down to West Twenty-second Street. A bunch of boys were taking stray cats up onto the roof of a building and throwing them off.” Mrs. Scofield said this with an equanimity that, we guessed, stemmed from years of dealing with such grisly matters. She began rescuing homeless cats, as a personal venture, in 1942, and she founded the League in 1956. She has continued to run the organization while working as an insurance broker. The League, which now has about two hundred and fi
fty members, devotes much of its energy to placing rescued animals with adoptive families. It also helps arrange cat-boarding and sitting services, and distributes free cat food to people known as “feeders,” who attempt to care for the strays in their neighborhoods.
Mr. Shopnick pulled up before a nondescript gray stone building, and we accompanied Mrs. Scofield to its door. In a minute or so, she and we were standing inside the apartment of the building superintendent, whose daughter, a pretty girl of about ten, had written to Mrs. Scofield about a demolition area where ownerless cats were reported to be roaming.
“Now, where did you see them?” asked Mrs. Scofield.
“Well, I know the lady who can take you to them,” the little girl replied. She gave Mrs. Scofield a name and address, and Mrs. Scofield returned to the car and directed Mr. Shopnick to drive on for several blocks. The building they were seeking turned out to be the most dilapidated of the day. A dingy tenement, it stood alone on a corner, with rubble-covered lots stretching away from it in two directions. We went inside with Mrs. Scofield, and followed her down a hallway whose faint lights illuminated crayon-scrawled walls and up two creaking flights of stairs. Mrs. Scofield pushed a button outside a third-floor apartment several times, and at last the door opened, revealing a very small, very old woman with a black kerchief on her head.
Mrs. Scofield said, “Does Mrs. Hernandez live here?”
“I’m Mrs. Hernandez,” the woman said in a tiny, childlike voice.
Mrs. Scofield explained her mission, and Mrs. Hernandez disappeared into the apartment. In a few moments, she reappeared and, moving slowly, escorted Mrs. Scofield down the stairs and out of the building. We followed as the entire group advanced across some rugged, obstacle-strewn terrain. It was still drizzling, and the earth was beginning to turn to mud. At a point where the vacant lots ended and the back yards of two buildings that faced on parallel streets began, Mrs. Hernandez pointed vaguely toward the buildings and said, “There. They live in there.”
With cat-carriers in each hand, Miss Cobb, Miss Neher, and Mr. McKean began picking their way across broken bricks and nail-studded timbers toward the back yards. High in a neighboring building, a window flew open and a man stuck out his head and yelled, “You looking for the cats?”
“Don’t talk to him!” Mrs. Hernandez piped in her small voice. “He hates cats!”
The cat-savers ignored the cat-hater and pressed on with their search.
“Where’s the food?” Miss Cobb called. “Have you got the Friskies?”
(illustration credit col13.2)
(illustration credit col13.3)
“I’m coming with them!” Mr. McKean called back.
Below a pile of wreckage, Miss Cobb made a gingerly descent into one of the back yards. She emptied a can of cat food onto a paper plate, crushed the empty can with one foot, and drew back. In a few minutes, a tiger-striped gray cat emerged from the shadow of a fence and crept cautiously toward the food. “Oh, he’s a saint!” Miss Cobb whispered.
Mrs. Hernandez cried, “Oh, no! That’s one of Mrs. Miller’s cats!”
The League members looked disappointed.
At intervals of several minutes, a calico cat, an all-gray cat, and a black-and-white cat emerged from the shadows and crept toward the food. As each cat appeared, Mrs. Hernandez cried, “No! No! That’s one of Mrs. Miller’s cats!”
The group looked very discouraged.
Rain was coming down hard now, and Mrs. Scofield decided to terminate the search. “If it weren’t for the rain, we’d have had them,” she said as we accompanied her back toward the cars. “The last time we went out on one of these hunts, we got thirty cats, just like that! Why, some of them practically walked right up and said, ‘Take me.’ ”
Having arranged, this time, to ride in Miss Cobb’s car, we got into its front seat—Miss Neher was in the back—and Miss Cobb drove along an eastbound street. When we reached Central Park West, she came to a sudden halt. “That dog!” she exclaimed. “Quick! Somebody get him! He’s a stray! Quick! Oh!” She sprang from the car, which was in the middle of the intersection, and ran toward the Park. The dog, a young brown mongrel that looked to be part German shepherd, fled through the rain along the edge of the Park. We watched the flight and pursuit in numbed fascination.
Three minutes later, the wet dog climbed docilely into the back seat, shook itself, and began to munch on a dried dog-burger. “He’s a stray. See? No license,” Miss Cobb said as she slid behind the wheel. “Oh, what a prize, what a beauty! I can hardly wait to get him to a vet. I just can’t wait. Anybody would be a fool not to take him. Just look at him! A saint!”
“Emily’s heart really belongs to dogs. There’s no getting around it,” Miss Neher said. “We’ll get our cats the next time.” She reached down and patted the dog on the head, and it looked about as pleased as a dog can look.
| 1967 |
A DULL, ORDINARY, NORMAL LIFE IN MANHATTAN
Fiction
* * *
BERNARD TAPER
An incident that occurred the other day has started me thinking once more about moving out to the suburbs, or the exurbs, or, if possible, even farther away than that from this crazy city. One of my children once observed, when my wife and I were having an inconclusive discussion about the ideal place to live, “Well, there are more advantages to living in the city, but there are fewer disadvantages to living in the suburbs”—a remark that struck me as prattle at the time but that I now think sums up the matter compendiously.
My wife sees only the advantages in city living. Manhattan is still an adventure to her. She goes out to take the wash to the laundry or buy a loaf of bread, and she comes back to the apartment all aglow, looking like someone who has just made an exhilarating ski run. With me, the disadvantages loom larger, and there are times when the complications attendant on trying to live just a dull, ordinary, normal life here are more than I can contemplate.
We live on the eighth floor of a fifteen-story apartment house—my wife, myself, our two sons, and a cat, of whom the children are inordinately fond. The incident I mention involved the cat—or, I should say, it involved us all, but it started with the cat. As I was about to leave for work one morning, my older son, Philip, who is eleven, came up to me with a worried look, saying that he could hear the cat crying but couldn’t find her anywhere in the apartment and was afraid she had got out and was stuck somewhere.
“Oh, damn!” I said. “Who left the window open?”
You have to concern yourself with trifling problems if you live in Manhattan, such as how to get an adequate supply of soot-laden air into your apartment without providing an aperture large enough to tempt a cat.
“Mother thinks you did,” Philip replied.
“Well, never mind,” I said briskly. “We’ll find her.”
I went out, searched the back stairs up to the top floor, looked behind the chimneys on the roof, and then went down to the courtyard, where I found my wife, our six-year-old son, Mark, a couple of women I didn’t recognize but supposed were fellow-tenants, and the building’s handyman. One of the women had her hands cupped behind her ears and was rotating slowly on her axis, as if she were a radar station. “The cat may be in the basement,” she said thoughtfully.
“I already looked there,” the handyman said.
“To me, it comes from up high,” said the other woman, in a Middle European accent, and, tilting her head back and stretching her neck, she called sternly, “Kidt, kidt, vere are you?”
I have long suspected that cats are natural ventriloquists. As far as I could tell, the sound of our cat’s crying, which had now become very loud and piteous, might have been coming from any direction. My child, baffled, continued to look high and low, and to rush about helplessly whenever the cat wailed. My wife asked me, “Why don’t you go up to the roof again and see if you can spot it by looking over the edge?”
I said I would. On the way up I stopped off at our apartment to phone my office an
d leave word that I would be late for an appointment. “Just say I’ve been detained,” I told the receptionist.
When I emerged on the roof a few minutes later, I saw our mailman. He was strolling along by the edge of the roof, smoking a pipe, his mail sack over his shoulder. Surprised, I asked him what he was doing.
“Looking for a cat,” he answered.
“Our cat,” I said.
“Oh, it’s yours, is it? I wondered,” he said.
We deployed, the mailman on one wing of the building and I on the other, walking along the rim of the roof and peering down. The courtyard group, I could see, had been augmented, and there were also a couple of heads protruding from apartment windows. The search for our cat was becoming a public spectacle. After a while, the mailman called out triumphantly “There it is!” and, going over to him and sighting along his pipe, with which he was pointing, I saw the cat crouched shivering on a window sill two stories below. “It’s at 13-E,” the mailman said. Then he added, “They’re away on vacation, 13-E.”
Someone in the courtyard must also have spied the cat about then, for there was a sudden hubbub and arm-waving down there, and I heard somebody call, “Go down the fire escape!” Well, that was obviously the thing to do, all right—the fire escape went within a foot or two of the cat’s perch—and I was obviously the one expected to do it, so I stepped awkwardly over the edge of the roof and started down, clutching the railings of the fire escape fiercely.
“Yeah, I was into the pet thing for a while, but that scene wasn’t for me.” (illustration credit 12.2)
I happen to be somewhat vertiginous—not to a medically significant degree, but enough to make high places seem pretty unpleasant to me. For one thing, they inflame my imagination. The moment I stepped off the roof, lurid pictures flashed into my mind. First, I had a vision of the fire escape collapsing into the courtyard in an avalanche of ironwork, bringing destruction to all. I had read newspaper accounts of just such catastrophes, usually with some building inspector being quoted as saying, “We inspected that escape only a week ago. The bolts must have been rusted clear through.” Then, as the fire escape held firm under my full weight, that vision was supplanted by a more poignant one. I saw myself losing my hold on the railings (because of the buffeting of the wind, perhaps, or a missed step, or a momentary dizziness; all three possibilities presented themselves) and plummeting down through space, paying, like Icarus, the penalty for having presumed to venture too high. Then, wistfully, as from a great spiritual distance, I contemplated the ensuing tableau: my crumpled body in the courtyard, the horrified crowd of onlookers, my children standing pale and silent, unable to comprehend what had happened, my wife weeping heartrendingly, and all the time—a gruesome but effective touch—the cat, trivial cause of the tragedy, keening away on its ledge, still preoccupied only with its own precious plight.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 21
