The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Of the elk, all that remained were the legs, the head, and the stiff, coarse hide, which are usually abandoned by the tiger. There was no meat left on the twisted carcass. The eyes were frozen to blue ice, too hard even for ravens. Nearby, along the dragging track, were the tigress’s redoubtable defecations, and Miquelle, delighted by what he called the clearest and most classic kill among a hundred-odd that he had seen, pointed out that she had hardly left her lair except to go relieve herself, which was why no detail of this ambush, kill, or feeding was obscured. “Can you imagine,” he exclaimed, “what this place would look like if a human hunter had lived here for four days, coming and going!” Having seen this clear place in the winter forest, I understood much better how the Russian researchers, before the advent of radio telemetry here in Primorski Krai, had learned so much about P. t. altaica by reading the signs of life and death in the winter taiga.

  At the end of January, in Vladivostok, we dined at the apartment of a project consultant, Dr. Dimitri Pikunov, who told us that on January 22nd—the same bitter-cold day we heard the tale of Sergei Denisov at Melnichnoye—a tiger had attacked and mauled a woman who was following her husband through the forest toward a rural train station outside the town of Partizansk, northeast of Vladivostok, then had turned and killed the courageous man when he ran up and struck it with a flashlight, yelling at his wife to make a run for it. Several hours later, after it had fed on the man’s entrails and rib cage, the tiger—a male—was tracked and killed by hunters and militia.

  “Do you have this in a cat?” (illustration credit 13.6)

  A month later, returning home to the United States, I found a letter from Dale Miquelle, who said that after my departure there had been reports of two other human deaths caused by tigers. Unlike the attacks near Melnichnoye and Partizansk, which were apparently unprovoked, “all evidence indicated that hunters had stalked and fired at these tigers, which then turned and killed them.” In one case, the tiger did not even bite the poacher but simply swatted him to the ground and ran away; apparently the man died of shock and cold. Four human fatalities in just over a year was unusually high in this sparsely populated region. Though one might argue that the poaching of hoofed animals, which the tiger requires for survival, was a critical factor in these cases, the shooting of game was unlikely to stop in this era of hard times in the new Russia. Human needs come first, and I feared that the human mortalities would inevitably lead to widespread condemnation of the tiger.

  In February, Pikunov and Miquelle had organized the most comprehensive tiger census ever made, involving some six hundred trackers. After months of analysis of the data, the results were announced: the tiger population was estimated at three hundred and fifty adults—give or take twenty or thirty—accompanied by a hundred and one sub-adults. This was at the high end of projections, and Howard Quigley, who conveyed the results to me, was elated. “The tigers took an awful hammering in the early nineties,” he said, “but, given a little breathing room, tigers know how to survive.”

  In arguing for protective measures on behalf of the tiger, one could cite the critical importance of biodiversity and the interdependence of all life. Quigley points out, for example, how many attributes of the tiger’s prey species—the astonishing alertness, keen senses, speed, and strength of the deer and the wild boar—might never have evolved without the tensions imposed on their ecology by this great predator. But, in the end, these abstractions seem less vital than our humane instinct that the spiritual and mythic resonance of a creature as splendid as any on our earth can only be removed from man’s environment at a terrible cost.

  One cannot speak for those who live in tiger country, but, for my part, the spirit and the mystery of Hu Lin the King—merely knowing that His Lordship is there twitching his white brows in the snowing taiga—bring me deep happiness. That winter afternoon in the Kunalaika, the low sunlight in the south glancing off black silhouetted ridges and shattered into frozen blades by the black trees, the ringing clarity of the cat tracks on the ice, the blood trace and stark signs of the elk’s passage—that was pure joy. As Howard Quigley once observed, “Life would be less without the tiger.”

  | 1997 |

  “You know, I’ve never seen you without your whiskers before.” (illustration credit 13.7)

  (illustration credit 13.8)

  WHERE I LIVE

  * * *

  AMY OZOLS

  Welcome to my apartment. Can I take your coat? Please make yourself at home.

  This is my cat.

  It’s a studio apartment, so there’s not much to see, but let me give you a quick tour anyway. Here’s the kitchen. It’s not very big, but there’s a ton of cabinet space, which is nice. Here’s my desk, where I do most of my writing, and that’s the bathroom over there.

  Here is another cat.

  This is a picture of my family from last Thanksgiving. Here’s my mom—she’s a real pistol. I think that’s where I get my sense of humor. These are my sisters. My dad’s the tall guy in the back. And that’s my grandmother, with a cat on her lap. And that animal crouched menacingly on top of the picture frame—that’s an actual cat, far more knowledgeable and terrifying than the cat in the picture.

  This is my couch, where we can sit and watch a movie later, and then maybe make out awkwardly while three to six cats stare at us.

  This cat over here—the one burrowing into your overcoat—belongs to my neighbor. But he comes over a lot, so I feed him and buy him toys and take him to the vet and stuff like that. He’s a pretty great cat, so I sort of just let him live here and systematically destroy my clothing and furniture.

  This is an antique gramophone I inherited from my grandmother. It’s worth a lot of money, but I’m never going to sell it, on account of how much it means to my family.

  I’m kidding, of course. It’s not really an antique. Or a gramophone. It’s a cat.

  Do you want a drink? I think I have some beer, or there’s a pitcher of water in the fridge. It’s tap water, but it’s filtered through one of those Brita things, so it tastes pretty good. I also have some bottled water, which I save for the cats, but you’re totally welcome to one of the bottled waters, if you want to be a dick about it.

  You can probably tell that I’m more of a cat person than a dog person. I’m more of an “all animals” person, actually. I like animals way better than people, because they’re friendly and they don’t eat very much, and they don’t tend to fuck twenty-six-year-old flight attendants under adulterous circumstances, the way humans do.

  Are you allergic? There’s some stuff coming out of your nose. Don’t be embarrassed; it happens to me all the time. In fact, if I’m being totally honest here—and, let’s face it, I’m being totally honest here, perhaps unsettlingly so—I haven’t breathed freely since the Clinton Administration. But it’s a small price to pay, considering how much joy these cats bring into my life. These watchful, almost eerily numerous cats.

  I’m sorry about the smell—that’s sort of a litter-box issue. It’s tough to have eight cats in a studio apartment, but I think while you’re spending the night here—the first of many, many passion-filled nights you’ll undoubtedly wish to spend here—you’ll find that it’s well worth the smell to have the selfless companionship of these seventeen reeking, dander-encrusted animals. I said “eight” before when I meant to say “seventeen.” That’s the number of cats that I have.

  I understand that you need to step out for some Claritin, but I’m really looking forward to your coming back. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun, you and I, watching movies and eating popcorn and having workmanlike intercourse on the fold-out sofa—all under the penetrating gaze of the vile feline minions with which I have inexplicably chosen to share my home.

  I am begging you: please do not tell them I said that. Should they deem it distasteful, we would have zero chance of survival.

  Anyway, I’ll see you soon. And thanks again for coming over. It’s always such a treat to have guest
s.

  | 2011 |

  INTERCAT

  * * *

  HENDRIK HERTZBERG

  We’re happy to report that the First International Cat Film Festival, which we attended the other afternoon, was one heck of a nice film festival. Intercat ’69, as the festival was also called (inevitably), took place at the Elgin Theatre, on Eighth Avenue at Nineteenth Street, and it consisted of four solid hours of cat movies—professional and amateur, underground and overground, happy and sad, ranging in length from ninety seconds to twenty-eight minutes and in style from traditionally cute animation to paw-held auteur cinema.

  One doesn’t just walk into an event of this kind without some background information, and before the show we had a word with its organizer, Pola Chapelle. Miss Chapelle, a pretty brunette who used to be a night-club singer, told us she had put the festival together because she loves cats and because she herself had made a cat movie and wanted to show it before an audience capable of appreciating it. “My original idea was that this would separate the real cat lovers from the fair-weather friends,” she said. “After four hours, I figured, there wouldn’t be anybody left but the hard core. But the other day a friend of mine called and said, ‘Pola, how can you do this? You know I can’t leave my cats alone for four hours.’ So now I’m not sure.”

  We asked Miss Chapelle what she planned to do with the box-office receipts.

  “Intercat ’69 is a benefit for needy cats,” she said. “We’re going to give the money to free-lancers, though—not to organizations. For instance, there’s a man who lives across from me who must spend ten dollars a week on cat food. He’s an unsentimental-seeming fellow—rather gruff, actually—but he feeds all the stray cats in the neighborhood. And there’s a lady on a Hundred and Third Street who has something like two dozen formerly homeless cats living in her apartment. If you hear of anybody like that, by the way, let me know.”

  We said we would, and headed for the balcony, where we sat for the next four hours. (We’re hard-core, and our cat doesn’t mind being left alone for a while.) The theatre was nearly full, and the audience included plenty of old folks and families with small children, in addition to the young and unattached who generally frequent film festivals. A lady on our right, in a spirit of self-reliance that was almost feline, had brought along a thermos of coffee, and two girls on our left seemed continually amazed at how closely this or that cat on the screen resembled their own. We had been foolish enough to imagine that the cat movie, as a genre, would prove to be rather limited. We were soon relieved of this notion. The influence of the great directors was emphatically there. James Langlois’s Fore-Footage, for example, depicted a Vermont-bred cat giving himself a bath with unrelenting, Rossellini-like realism. The birth scene in Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s The Private Life of a Cat recalled Ingmar Bergman’s little-known but excellent Brink of Life, and Peter Knuppel’s Oma, in which an old woman plays with her kitten in a cemetery, muttering to herself in German the while, brought to mind the Swedish master’s darker visions. Joyce Wieland’s Catfood, in which a tabby cat eats five large fish in succession, was as uncompromisingly didactic as anything by Godard. Sausalito Cat, by Viva, represented the Warhol school; it consisted of painfully out-of-focus shots of the Sausalito waterfront interspersed with footage of a black cat standing in a doorway. Miss Chapelle’s film, dramatically titled Fishes in Screaming Water, showed a marmalade-colored cat working to get some rosebuds out of its water dish with all the oblivious determination of Chaplin’s little tramp. The film’s star, an animal named Mamacat, wrote the music herself by walking around on a piano, and we remembered with approval that Chaplin, too, had scored his own movies. Elsie Esposito’s Tony featured a series of kittens in thirties-style getups performing in Busby Berkeley fashion, and Walter Gutman’s Orpheus and Vikanna, in which a cat is petted by a scantily clad exotic dancer, owed much to the sensitivity of Russ Meyer. Carroll Ballard’s The Perils of Priscilla, a thriller about a Siamese left home alone, makes ample use of the low camera angles pioneered by Welles. The documentary short Hickory Hill, in which George Plimpton leads the viewer on a tour of a pet show on the grounds of Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy’s home, had the grainy authenticity of a Leacock Pennebaker film. In fact, as we discovered when the credits were shown, it was a Leacock Pennebaker film.

  Our favorite, though, was a classic (1941) “instructional film for the primary grades” called Fluffy the Kitten, which had been lent by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. In it a very small kitten goes through its daily routine of fun and mischief. Title cards saying things like “I am looking for a little mouse” and “Yum, yum!” more than made up for the lack of a sound track. When the final title (“Now I will look pretty to say goodbye. I hope you liked me”) flashed on the screen, the audience cheered. Even the Supreme Soviet has never applauded more stormily.

  | 1970 |

  (illustration credit col15.2)

  THE LAST MEOW

  * * *

  BURKHARD BILGER

  She arrived in Manhattan looking ravaged and ravishing, like a queen of silent film with one last swoon left in her. Her sleek ermine coat was matted and worn, her long neck so weak that it drooped to her chest. For months she had managed to hide her condition, eating full meals yet still losing weight. Now she was days away from dying, but her pale-green eyes didn’t show it.

  Shawn Levering glanced down at his cat, Lady, then cast a bewildered look around the waiting room of the Animal Medical Center, on New York’s Upper East Side. He had on scuffed bluejeans and a faded Wheels of Time T-shirt, silk-screened with a picture of a custom Cadillac. His face was freckled and ruddy, his forearms thickly cabled. Standing in the middle of the room, his feet spread wide, he had the specific gravity of a man who knows exactly where to reach for his tools. Back home, in Wilmington, Delaware, Levering liked to work on old cars, taking rusted wrecks and transforming them into street rods. But this cat and her problems, and the city to which he’d been compelled to take her, were beyond him. “This place is crazy,” he said. “The taxi-drivers are like demolition experts. I just hope we can find our way out again.”

  Beside him, the veterinarian, Cathy Langston, nodded, her eyes on Lady. The cat was in the throes of chronic renal failure, she said. Her kidneys weren’t filtering out the toxins in her blood anymore. “I think she would definitely benefit from dialysis. It won’t make her kidneys better, but it will buy her time to see if she’s a good candidate for a transplant.” There were risks: clotting, internal bleeding, dangerous drops in blood pressure. More than a quarter of Lady’s blood would be taken out of her body each time and filtered artificially. If the dialysis was done too quickly, it could cause seizures or even a coma, but the alternative was certain death. “I’ve got the whole team on standby,” Langston said. “We can whisk her back, put in a catheter, and take a biopsy today. If she passes all the tests, we could have her ready for transplant by next week.”

  Like many of the center’s eighty-five veterinarians, Langston is a specialist. “Everyone has to have a passion, and the kidneys are mine,” she says. But such passions are relatively new in her field. Little more than twenty years ago, all vets were general practitioners, and neutering and spaying were among the most elaborate procedures they performed. Now the American Veterinary Medical Association has more than seven thousand specialists in thirty-nine fields, including cardiology, radiology, ophthalmology, and oncology. As the director of the center’s quarter-million-dollar kidney unit, Langston usually has one or two patients in dialysis at any given time. Some owners have chartered planes for their animals, then stayed at nearby hotels during the treatment. But not all her clients are wealthy.

  “We’re looking at spending a thousand dollars in the next twenty-four hours and between three and four thousand in the next week,” Langston told Levering. If the dialysis was successful, Lady would have to be transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where her condition was first diagnosed. (The university’s ve
terinary hospital didn’t yet have a dialysis unit, but its vets were more experienced in performing transplants, and Lady was a high-risk patient.) The total cost would be more than fifteen thousand dollars.

  Levering sighed and shook his head. Lady was already anemic, asthmatic, and congenitally blind. She had been born on the streets of Wilmington four years earlier, and dropped at a local animal clinic at the age of six months. Soon after Levering and his wife adopted her, she became allergic to her own tooth enamel. “That was a weird thing,” Levering said. “Never heard of that before.” But he had willingly paid four hundred dollars to have all her teeth pulled. In retrospect, it seemed like a bargain.

  “I don’t know. If it was up to me, I might not go through with it,” he said. He was recovering from a bout of Lyme disease and from carpal tunnel syndrome, and he had recently had sinus surgery. His wife had been laid up for three years with back injuries, and was only now going back to work. If they were willing to go this far for a cat, it was partly out of a sense of shared misfortune. But mostly it was a matter of love. “My wife is totally wiped out about this,” he said.

  A nurse in blue scrubs came over and carefully took the cat from Levering. As she turned to go, he reached over and laid his hand on Lady’s head. Then he watched as she was borne away in the nurse’s arms, through a pair of swinging doors, and into another world.

  The Animal Medical Center and the University of Pennsylvania veterinary hospital are the Mayo Clinic and the Mass General of their field. One is perhaps the world’s largest private animal hospital; the other is the world’s largest university veterinary center. The A.M.C. occupies an eight-story concrete tower at the corner of Sixty-second Street and York Avenue, overlooking the East River, and in an average year admits sixty-five thousand patients. The center has its own oncology, dentistry, and dermatology departments, as well as the usual surgery, emergency, and recovery wards. To insure that there is a steady supply of blood flowing to surgical patients, it keeps thirteen donor greyhounds, twenty-six donor cats (some of them inherited from an elderly woman who kept seventy in her apartment), and three donor ferrets. The ferrets are called Larry, Mo, and Curly.