Queenie, on the other hand, had a wilder streak, and was not necessarily a couch potato. She expected to get her way, and by and large she did, all the more so since she was the only cat in the house, and remained so for a long time. The occasional sight of another cat out the window did not make it seem as if she would welcome a companion. She hissed, spat, snarled, and pressed her nose up against the windowpane, as if sending the message that she was ready and waiting to defend her turf.
Outdoor cats, hardened to rejection, were not much impressed by this. From the very beginning, one of the first things that struck us, in fact, about our house in the country was that it seemed like a magnet for cats—equally astonishing was the sheer number of cats out there in the landscape, a never-ending supply of pitiful, or defiant, or hardy, survivors. Some of them became familiar, some of them simply seemed to be passing through on their way to somewhere else. Needless to say, Margaret put out food for them, which only increased the number of mostly nocturnal feline visitors, not to speak of attracting possums, raccoons, and skunks.
The amazing thing was not just that there were so many cats out there, but that so many of them appeared to survive somehow, despite the harsh winters—yet they were clearly domestic cats, not wild ones, that had once lounged on somebody’s sofa, or dozed in front of the fire. At some point, it was clear, somebody had lost patience with them, or perhaps they had failed to get along with a new baby or boyfriend, and out they went, probably carried off by car in a cardboard box far enough from home so they wouldn’t come back, then dumped unceremoniously by the side of the road or in the woods, good-bye and good riddance.
Or, who knows, people moved from a house to a small apartment in which pets weren’t allowed, or moved in with somebody who was allergic to cats, or just decided that having a cat wasn’t what they had really wanted in the first place…. For somebody like Margaret, much of whose life was devoted to the safety and the well-being of her animals, it was hard to understand how people could simply get rid of an animal that had once sat on their lap, or snoozed at the foot of the bed, that had, as it were, paid its dues. But from farm to single-width trailer on cinder blocks, all over our neck of the woods there were people who didn’t suffer from the same compunction, and as word went out among local felines that there was always a bowl of food on the porch of the old Hubner house, the number of eyes gleaming in the woods as night fell and the porch lights went on seemed to multiply week by week.
Sometimes we would see these stray cats by day too, though less often. Some of them were not exactly “stray” either, in the full meaning of the word. For better or worse, they had made our farm their territory and their hunting range. They seldom approached the house by day—no doubt they had learned you were only too likely to get an angry shout warning you off, at best, or a kick or a well-directed small stone at worst, if you got too close to a strange house—but since we rode every day, exploring our land (and our neighbors’) on horseback, we got used to seeing the same cats out in the fields several times a week. Most of the them would run off when they saw the horses approaching, some of them would simply sit and stare back at us indignantly, as if we were trespassers, and one or two hid, peeping out from the leaves and the high grass with a mute look of appeal.
One of the shyest was a thin, frightened cat, gender unknown, orange with white markings, no longer young, certainly not a kitten, and with the unhappy look of a cat who had never expected to have to forage for food in the great outdoors.
Chutney, Margaret called him, after his color, and was determined to bring him into the house.
4. Chutney
Over the years,” remembers Margaret, “they have arrived at different porch doors, the laundry room door, in the barn, emerging out of culverts, hiding under jumps, in the weeds, up from ditches. Some visit from time to time, never to stay, others settle in quickly. Some have been alone, others in pairs, or with families, fat, starving, sick and well, old, young, friendly, feral, shy, skittish, all of them abused or abandoned. Some have had to be put to sleep. Few make a total recovery—anything abandoned rarely does. Old fears die hard. It may take years. It may take forever. Most stay. A handful find wonderful homes—we would never let them go otherwise.
“Taking on the care of any animal is a large responsibility, and it’s one thing to go and choose a cat, quite another when he, she, or they choose you. Oh, you can turn away from them, ignore them, or just hope they will move on. I have never been able to do that, much to Michael’s chagrin. At this time we have eight cats, all strays, six indoors.
“Chutney started appearing around the paddocks and barn, then on the dining-room porch. He was orange and white, with a stocky, round face. He ate everything I gave him and became a regular, sometimes sleeping on the porch, in a cardboard box lined with an old saddle pad and covered with one of Michael’s old goose-down Eddie Bauer jackets. ‘It’ll have to be thrown out now,’ Michael said. ‘He’s probably full of fleas, you don’t know anything about him, he looks filthy, and he’s not fixed. He could even have mange.’
“We were away for three weeks soon after, and although I left his care in the hands of Dot Burnett, who was our housekeeper then, she did not see him. Two days after getting home, he showed up again, looking even more thin and dirty. ‘He’s back,’ I said to Michael, ‘and for good, this time.’
“I set up an overnight for him in one of the guest bathrooms, carried him up there, and closed the door. He was not happy and cried all night. ‘You see,’ Michael said, ‘he hates it, he doesn’t want to be here, and God knows what he has brought into the house.’
“‘I’ll take him to the vet in the morning,’ I said. ‘The first appointment I can get.’
“It’s an old scenario by now. I may house them in different locations for a while, but they mostly end up staying with us, although a few we have given away to friends. Chutney was a loving, quiet cat, and I wonder often how he ever survived for as long as he did in the wild. He had the odd habit of often peeing in the kitchen sink. Michael never knew for a long time, and when he did find out was, as I expected, pissed off. I thought it quite smart and very easy to clean. Chutney did not make friends easily with other cats, but for years he slept against my legs.”
Actually, it was more than that. Queenie, with her independence and bossy ways, had never quite replaced Irving in Margaret’s mind, fond as she was of her, but Chutney was in many ways like a reincarnation of Irving. With his long whiskers and his vivid coloring and his big, round head, he was an impressive cat, but a real gentleman, well-mannered, quiet, and utterly devoted to Margaret. He was more adventurous than poor Irving, and quite enjoyed a leisurely stroll in the great outdoors, what elderly German and Austrian gentlemen call a Spaziergang, whether by day or in the evening. Snow and rain or heat and humidity did not discourage him from his daily walk—after all, having lived as a stray for so long, the outdoors did not frighten him, though he preferred to stay within sight of the house, so he could cut a hasty retreat if necessary to the porch.
To say that Chutney was not aggressive is putting it mildly—he did not attack other cats, he did not bite or scratch people, he didn’t even sharpen his claws on the furniture as a way of starting his day. He avoided fights, and therefore never came home with the kind of wounds that mean making an emergency call to the vet.
That does not mean his life was stress-free, of course. No sooner had he been released from the upstairs bathroom while he recovered from being neutered and allowed to wander all over the house than Queenie, who was at first anything but pleased at the arrival of a stranger, bit Chutney so badly that his leg abscessed and he almost died. He did have to be carted off to the vet again, and on his return hid for weeks behind the furniture, out of Queenie’s way, making a slow recovery. It’s amazing how cats survive at all, given the effect that one cat bite can have (after all, they are meat eaters who don’t brush their teeth), in terms of damage and infection. Poor Chutney looked like a goner for some time,
but eventually massive doses of antibiotics and his native good health (or good luck) brought him round, though for a long time he sensibly kept his distance from Queenie.
Then, as is so often the case, they settled down and became friends, the pecking order having been established. Chutney, to give him his due, didn’t seem to care who was “top cat,” and was happy to leave all that to Queenie. He himself had no ambition except to sleep as close as he could possibly get to Margaret at night, and, if possible, to share a late afternoon nap with her. He had, quite possibly, the kindest face it is possible to imagine a cat having, broad, good-natured, trusting, and even while making his rounds of the farm he showed no inclination to attack small birds or baby rabbits or moles, or any of the creatures that cats usually try to torment, then kill if they cross their path—if there is such a thing as a pacifist cat, it was Chutney.
He was also, of course, the first stray cat we adopted, after some difficulty, for with strays that is usually the case. Short of running around with a net, or more practically speaking, a Havahart trap, it’s hard to pick up stray cats if they don’t want to be picked up, and very often they don’t. Even when they do want to be picked up, they do not necessarily make it easy. Chutney had apparently seen enough of us—of Margaret, at any rate—to conclude that we were likely to be friendly, had taken his time, months of it, to case the house, and had clearly had enough of living in the great outdoors on his own. It’s scary out there for a little cat, with temperatures that go down to ten or twenty below zero at night in the winter, and coyotes that hunt in packs, or in the heat of the summer, bitten by fleas and ticks. Cats are sly creatures, adept at cutting a low profile, and at hiding in places that don’t seem big enough for them to get into in the first place, but your average house cat, while it has built-in survival skills, isn’t really cut out for life in the wild, and doesn’t necessarily enjoy it. Most of them have simply been thrown out to fend for themselves, and along the way have developed—with good reason—a deep, abiding distrust of human beings that is hard for even the most determined cat lover to overcome. Having been thrown out of its home, the cat’s attitude in most cases is, not expectedly, “Once bitten, twice shy.”
Margaret pursued “Chutney” (who was not yet named, of course), with strategically placed cans of food, drawing him nearer and nearer to the house, and finally onto the porch itself, but however hungry a cat may be, this doesn’t always work, nor does it always lead to the critical moment of reaching out to touch the cat. A lot of cats will leap away at that, and may not come back for a long time, if ever. They are only too likely to equate an outstretched hand with being hit, and react accordingly. What is required, basically, is a huge amount of patience—the patience to try the same thing over and over again, night after night, until the cat begins to build up a slight willingness to take a risk, enough confidence to come close and let itself be touched, at which point, with even more patience, it might just let itself be drawn inside for a moment or two, just to scent out if there are unseen dangers in the house, or perhaps to get a taste of what it’s like to have its feet on warm carpet again, instead of cold snow.
That Chutney wanted to come in out of the cold is certain—you only had to look at him to see that—but it took a good deal of effort for Margaret to gain his trust and confidence to some degree, and a good deal more to get him upstairs and locked into a guest bathroom where he must surely have felt like a prisoner before he finally settled down for a nap on the bath mat, and resumed life as a pet, as if it had never been interrupted.
These are the victories that matter—and are never forgotten—in bringing stray cats indoors. Once Chutney came, survived a trip to the vet, then Queenie’s attack, and as a result of it, another trip to the vet, and finally settled in, he never showed any desire to stray farther than the flower garden outside the front door, within easy reach (and view) of the house, and he quickly became such a fixture of our lives that it was hard to remember that we had once merely caught glimpses of him from a distance while we were out riding.
Not every cat, as we were soon to discover, makes the return trip to domesticity as easily and successfully as Chutney did, or with such good long-term results. Nor, of course, once you start rescuing strays, can you keep all of them, unless you want to end up as one of those crazy cat people who are occasionally found by the police or the ASPCA living in a tiny house with forty or fifty cats.
There’s some point at which having a lot of cats crosses the line from normal behavior to insane, but it’s hard to fix a firm number. Neighbors of ours, whom you will meet, have anywhere between a dozen and twenty, depending on the circumstances, and while that doesn’t necessarily make dinner at their house a treat—you are likely to have not just a cat on your lap, but cats walking across the dinner table, drinking out of your water glass, and snatching food off your plate or fork—they have the situation under some kind of control, and the cats are lavishly looked after, well fed, and obviously loved as individuals. However, forty to fifty cats in a small house, particularly, which is often the case, owned by an old person who can no longer look after them properly, is of course a whole different story.
From the very beginning, we have tried to keep some kind of distinction (though not very successfully) between those parts of our house that are zoned for cats, and those parts that aren’t, unlike certain of our neighbors who simply threw in the towel and abandoned their house to their cats altogether. This has meant, among other compromises, giving up one bathroom and the downstairs laundry room to the cats, establishing the formal living room, which admittedly we seldom use, as a cat-free zone (there’s a glassed-in door that allows them to peer in, but not to enter), and keeping the cats out of the guest rooms as much as possible, though it’s up to guests, who are few and far between, as to whether they want to close their door at night or not. If they do not, they are likely to find a cat on their bed, or sometimes on their pillow, when they wake up, which is likely to be early, since our cats are used to having their breakfast between six-thirty and seven, and mildly impatient when any human being stays in bed later than that.
Still, at least we warn guests, and leave it up to them whether to close their door or not. In the days when one remembers having been a guest oneself in country houses, one was often woken in the middle of the night with a start when a previously unseen cat launched itself onto the bed in a single bound, landing with the impact of a Scud missile, claws extended. Etiquette seems to demand that guests be fully aware of the cats, and allowed to make up their own mind as to whether they want to share the bed with them. Guests bringing dogs are, naturally, asked to keep their door closed, in order to avoid a protracted cat-and-dog fight in the middle of the night, ending either with a visit to the twenty-four-hour-a-day emergency animal hospital off Route 55, or the total destruction of what little remains of our carpets and upholstery.
Actually, the cats seem to accept the presence of dogs with better manners than they would a visiting cat. They seem to be able to figure out that the dogs are under strict control, and forced to remain on their best behavior. Their presence in the house doesn’t exactly thrill the cats, but since they’re of a different species, it also doesn’t threaten to upset the pecking order, either, as another cat’s presence, even behind a closed door, most certainly would. The knowledge that there are dogs in the house brings the cats together, in fact, in a close, huddled bunch, like seamen preparing to repel boarders, their fur raised and puffed out until they look twice their normal size.
Of course none of this was a problem when we had only two cats and many guests. Now, twenty years later, we have lots of cats and hardly any guests at all, so it’s only natural that the cats have taken over a good deal more of the house than used to be the case, or that they feel that the house basically belongs to them. Back then, when it was just Queenie and Chutney, guests either made a fuss of them, or didn’t, and the two cats mostly stayed out of the way, or settled in a comfortable position on a chair or
sofa to watch the proceedings from a distance. Of the two, Queenie was by far the more outgoing and, when in the mood, “pushy,” whereas Chutney preferred to keep to the lowest of low profiles, in extreme cases hiding underneath a bed until Monday morning, when the guests had all gone back to the city and he felt it was safe to come out again.
We had one perennial guest, Mayo, a friend whose noisy ways, which included dropping glasses, doing her yoga so violently that she cracked the ceiling of the room below hers, and a tendency, after a few drinks, to knock things over by accident and argue at the top of her voice about politics, used to send Chutney in search of a place to hide in peace and quiet at the first sight of her in the driveway—all the sadder, since it was among Mayo’s many illusions that she had a natural rapport with animals of all kinds, and that they loved being in her company. Chutney, who disliked smoking, loud noises, arguments, raised voices, or any other disturbance, needless to say did not share this particular illusion.
Cat People Page 5
