Stray

by A. N. Wilson

  Hunger satisfied, I set off around the edge of the field, which was heavy with golden rye. The sun was just up; the air was pure, and the field and hedgerow were alive with tempting morsels. It was during that walk that I really developed my taste for field mice. And the hunting was so plentiful, and my new-found liberty so invigorating, that I decided to stay in those regions until something happened which would make me move along. I was a couple of weeks there, I think, before men came in machines and mowed down all the corn. They were days of unalloyed happiness. And with each day that passed, I felt myself growing stronger in limb and clearer in my mind. I knew now that I was on the road, and I intended to remain as a free wanderer for the rest of my days.

  It was the harvest which made me move on. I realized that nothing lasts for ever. But I was too happy to give myself up to contemplating exactly how human beings would choose to spoil that particular little paradise. I merely enjoyed it all while I could: my shelter in the old tree, and the cornfield so thick with life and food, and the long warm quiet hours, when there was no noise louder than the song of the birds and the whirring of crickets. And then, one morning, quite suddenly, it was all the roar of machinery and the shout of men. The roaring began on the other side of the field, and I saw a huge red engine, as large as a house, moving slowly up and down in rows, cutting down all the waving golden rye. I had just eaten my second field mouse of the day when the noise began, and I did not stay until the men with their machines reached my side of the field. It is astonishing to think how much food, in terms of mice, plovers, voles, rats, larks and stoats, gets wasted every year by this human habit of cutting down corn. But that is another story.

  I was on my way and set off on the opposite side of the hedge at a brisk trot. A couple of fields beyond, there was a path between two hedges, at the end of which one could make out all the signs of human habitation: lamp posts, a pavement, a tarmac road with engines of murder driving up and down it; neatly trimmed grass, and brick houses which at first put me much in mind of Jim and June. Indeed, for one nasty moment, I thought it really was Jim and June’s house. But it wasn’t. I had stumbled upon a much more varied neighbourhood than Jim and June’s estate. There were new houses like theirs, it is true; but also a lot of reassuringly messy old ones, plenty of filthy out-houses alive with rats, and garden sheds with mice and voles in them. This was no bad place to settle. Not for ever of course. I would never settle for ever. But for the time being.

  chapter seventeen

  One autumn evening, long before the hour when human beings go to sleep, and leave the world to us and our great Mother-of-Night, I happened to be inspecting some dustbins and making some highly satisfactory discoveries. The dustbins were in a dark shady spot at the bottom of a garden and I could work undisturbed. The lid was one of those light plastic ones which you can lift off with a flick of the paw; and lying on top of the bin was a half-eaten duck! This really was a find: particularly since I had not, for some reason, eaten much that day. I decided to take the bird between my jaws, and to enjoy it in one of my accustomed hiding-places, on top of a nearby shed built against a wall. Not only could I sit on top of this roof and remain unmolested by people, foxes and other nuisances, but also I could be hidden even from cats, for it was a roof much overgrown with creeper. Eating my dinner in that spot was as good as being in some curtained chamber. On that misty night it was out of the cold and damp. I was just beginning to enjoy the duck when, two or three gardens away, I heard the yapping of a small dog. Normally, such a noise would have made less impression on me than the soughing of the wind in the trees. But for some reason – or perhaps for no particular reason – that evening I stopped, and listened. As well as yapping, there was a miaowing. One of our own kind – a female by the sound of it – was having trouble with the dog, and was calling for help.

  Let her fight her own battles, I said to myself, as I savoured a particularly toothsome, fatty duck’s wing. My days of being chivalrous are over. My days of wishing to impress females are over – females are to be had so easily any week of the year, without my trying to impress them. My days of taking risks are over. I wish to live only for myself and...

  ‘Yap, yap, yap!’

  ‘Help!’ called the female voice. ‘Oh dog – do go away! Someone! Help!’

  It was a confoundedly beautiful, attractive voice. But even then, as I tried to ignore it and to concentrate on my duck supper, I knew that there was something more to it, than to all the other female voices who had, at various stages of my history, sung alluring songs to me in the darkness. Nor was I deceiving myself when I said that the conquest of such sirens was easy. I had had many a mate, pursued her for a few hours or a few days and then forgotten about her.

  And if I chased away the dog I would be able to enjoy this little beauty too... No! Why not simply enjoy my duck and avoid getting involved?

  ‘Help! Oh, someone! Please help!’

  I could not know what lay in store. Could I? And yet it was almost as if, in the very first few seconds of hearing her voice, I had an inkling of everything that was about to happen. As she called out ‘Someone! Please help!’ I had the completely irrational response – What? Someone? Coming to her rescue? I couldn’t tolerate it if just anyone presumed to lay a paw on her. She is my responsibility.

  And I found that without thinking about it, I had dropped the duck into the hidden recesses of the foliage on the shed roof and set off over the garden fences in the direction of the yapping and the miaowing. Since my younger days, what a wary suspicious cat I had become. When my brother was still alive and we were lodgers at Granny Harris’s house, I would have bounded along in the darkness without a thought of the dangers which shadows might contain. Such bravado was a thing of the past. I ran stealthily, aware that any summons for help might be a trap, and that even a fellow cat might be some communard on the prowl. But it was not long before I came upon the pair who were making all the noise. A King Charles’s spaniel, only a shade larger than myself, had got a cat into a garden corner, and was bullying her. I could not make out her features. She was buried in shadow. I could only see the strutting overconfident figure of the spaniel, who had not even the presence of mind to bite his victim, but who was just standing there shouting and throwing his weight about. He was not a very observant dog. He did not see me looking down on the scene from the fence above his head. And when I pounced, I took him completely by surprise. I jumped on to his back, sinking my claws deep into his shoulder blades and biting the back of his neck. He yowled with pain and tried to roll over on his back. But this merely gave me the opportunity to scratch his face. He tried to bite me, but I was much too quick for him and after some notional growling, he limped off, calling no doubt for the protection of his human owners. They, probably, would soon be drooling over him and wondering who could have done such nasty scratches on their darling diddums. They would probably blame an Alsatian.

  I was not interested in the spaniel’s fate, but I was very interested indeed in whoever it was that sat hidden in the shadows.

  ‘You seem to have annoyed that spaniel rather a lot,’ I said, speaking into the darkness and still unable to see anyone.

  ‘They are easily annoyed,’ she said with a laugh. ‘There are two of them next door. It was silly of me to be scared, I know there is no harm in them really. But how thankful I am – that you came to the rescue!’ And there was great emphasis on the word you.

  She stepped out of the darkness and, on the half-lit path from the varied lights of a street lamp and uncurtained windows at the backs of houses, I saw her. She was a small grey tabby cat ribbed with delicate tiger-stripes all over her back and tail. Her chest was perfectly white, and her face was a mixture of tabby and white in all the right places. There is no point in telling you that she was the most beautiful cat in the world, for you could probably find a thousand cats whose looks by some standard or another were more perfect. But... she was the cat for me. I felt – no, I knew – as soon as I saw her that she w
as the cat I had been waiting for all my life. In fact, although I had not realized it until then, the whole of my previous life seemed as if it were nothing but a preparation for that moment.

  ‘You look hungry,’ I said, ‘shaken...’

  ‘They’ll feed me,’ she said – and there was great tenderness about the next phrase – ‘when I get in’ – because although she only said those four syllables, I heard much more. I heard, When I get in – but please, let us spend more time together before I go back indoors. Let us spend a life together...

  ‘Would a bit of duck tempt you?’ I asked.

  ‘Duck?’ she laughed.

  ‘Yes! Come on!’

  And side by side and happily we trotted back to my darkened shed-top retreat. Words cannot describe the hours which followed, the days and nights which followed. It would be foolish to try to describe them in all their innerness and secrecy. They were times which only two beings can share with one another and into which a third cannot enter. Suffice it to say that we were in love.

  She lived, my beloved tabby, in a lodging house occupied by a number of human creatures all of whom, by the low standards of that race, were pretty decent. They were what is known as ‘animal lovers’. In that household of three or four women and two men, there were, I should say, twelve cats, as well as all kinds of rats, mice, guinea-pigs, rabbits and what not. My particular beloved shared a room with a kind young woman, two other cats, and a cage of white rats. She described herself – and this caused me dreadful torments at first – as ‘very happy’ in that house.

  ‘Or at least,’ she said one evening, nestling against me, and licking my face, ‘I thought I was happy.’

  ‘I just hate to think of you in that house,’ I said, ‘being treated as a pet!’

  ‘It is better than being treated as you have been treated,’ she said. For by then, she knew the story of my life.

  ‘I know your present human minders are kind and decent,’ I said. ‘That isn’t the point. Granny Harris was benign and decent and then, look what happened to her.’

  ‘That is something which happens to all living things,’ said my beloved.

  Now, I had never heard anyone say that before, and I was so shocked that I sprang free from her and shouted, ‘No! That isn’t true! Who told you such a thing? It happened to my brother – but the Great Stillness was brought upon him by cruel men. It happened to Granny Harris, it is true. But why it happened, I shall never know.’

  ‘My poor darling,’ she laughed. ‘You seem so wise and experienced, and so full of knowledge about the world. And had it never occurred to you that the Great Stillness, as you call it, is something which befalls all creatures? One minute, a bird dances and sings on its branch. The next it swoops down to get a worm from the lawn and wham! We eat it. But if we never ate it, the bird would still die; and so will the tree; and so will the lawn. All things are moving towards death. All things, that is, beneath our great Mother-of-Night. And who knows, perhaps the Great Stillness will one day come even upon her, and the earth itself.’

  ‘This cannot be!’ I said. ‘For if it were true... why, the whole world would be nothing but a pile of rotting meat and dead bodies, and decayed flowers and dry grass, and leafless trees...’

  ‘Nature always renews herself,’ she said. ‘We pass through it, but we give birth to new young. The flower withers and fades, the tree loses its leaves, but in a new year, there are new leaves, new grasses, new kittens. The old passes away. You must know that.’

  ‘No! No! No!’

  I was utterly shaken that anyone could hold this point of view, and I am completely sure that it is not true. It must be some wicked human idea that my poor beloved had picked up from the household where she lived. She said that it was the shortness of our lives which lent such sweetness to being in love. But I still believe that, with caution, we can all avoid the Great Stillness.

  After she had told me her idea – that we all die – I felt overcome by a terrible fear, and by a deep sadness. It was not really bearable that the One I loved should think in this way. And yet, as I clung to her for comfort, I almost, on that dark evening, believed her. The Great Mother in the sky, instead of being a protectress and a governor of our destiny, seemed to smile upon us with indifference. And then it seemed as if we were just two beings surrounded by a great black nothingness: that the darkness of the night was the only reality; and that the only light which could ever penetrate it was not the beams of our Great Mother, but the love of our own hearts; and that the only weapon which we possessed against the Great Stillness was the knowledge that we too could renew ourselves, like the grass, and the trees and the flowers.

  chapter eighteen

  You will have heard human beings up and down this street refer to my beloved as Tammy – just as they have that ridiculous ‘Pufftail’ nonsense for me. But I hardly need stress that we did not have names for each other. We did not need names. She was (and is, and always will be) She. There can never, quite, be another She in the world. And I think I was the only He in her heart. I longed for her and me to take to the road, and to live quite independently of the idiot human race. And I think that she came to share my longing. That I really do believe. But she also wanted, in the very depth of herself, to have kittens. When I learnt that kittens were ‘on the way’, I realized that our flight would be delayed until they were born. My darling wanted them to be safely born and kindly cared for, and she trusted her present human friends to look after that for her.

  ‘Just be a little patient,’ she said. ‘When they are born and weaned, and can look after themselves – then we can go away together, and take to the road.’

  ‘And be together for ever and ever?’ I said.

  ‘And be together for ever and ever.’

  ‘And no more talk about everybody dying?’

  She kissed me and hit my nose gently with her paw. ‘Oh, you poor simpleton,’ she said.

  I think it fairly probable that I have been the father of over a hundred cats, and although I had sometimes taken pride in my offspring, when I knew they existed, they had never been of much interest to me. But I was desperately anxious that my darling should have a safe delivery. Moreover, for the first time in my life, I minded about the kittens themselves; I was aware, as I had never been before, that these beings, when they appeared, would be the products of our love. And I fell to thinking about my own mother, and those wonderful days before any human being intruded into our nursery, and it was just her, and my brothers and my sister and me, snuggling in warmth. In the bleak hostile world which mine had become, it once more seemed possible to recreate some of that warmth, some of that love.

  ‘I’m still doubtful whether you are safe in that house,’ I said to my dear one day.

  ‘Nowhere could be safer! Really, you are funny sometimes!’

  ‘It’s natural to be anxious.’

  ‘I’ve already told you – everything will be all right.’

  We were having this conversation on the same shed roof where we had had our first midnight duck-feast. Now it was a cold winter’s day and it was broad daylight.

  ‘I don’t like all the other – cats in the house,’ I blurted it out with some awkwardness.

  ‘I do believe you are jealous!’ she laughed.

  ‘Rubbish! I? Jealous? I merely think it is rather dreadful that you should have to share a house with – with that sort of riff-raff, that’s all.’

  ‘Darling!’ she laughed. ‘None of the cats can do me any harm! They are all just friends, and some of them aren’t even that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course! How can you doubt me?’

  ‘I don’t doubt you. I suppose I just don’t like you being with anyone except me.’

  ‘That’s silly.’

  ‘I know. I still can’t help it.’

  ‘Tammy! Tammy!’ At that moment, I could hear her human minder’s voice, two gardens down, calling for her.

  ‘Sounds as though it’s dinner
time,’ she said. She had a way of looking at you which was really rather mocking; and yet there was complete kindness, complete trustfulness in the smile. It seemed to combine all cleverness with all love. ‘I’ll walk halfway with you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t try and come in with me or there’ll be a fight with Bundle,’ she said. Bundle was the name given to a pretty little black and white female who lived in the basement below Tammy. ‘She always thinks you’re coming in to get her food.’

  ‘A ridiculous misapprehension. As if I would!’

  ‘As if you ever ate anything but someone else’s food!’

  ‘I, my dear? You mistake me. The idiot human beings tell their children stories of a man whom they call Robin of Greenwood. He robs the rich in order to give to the poor; and the children sing songs about him, and read books which perpetuate his name. Now I should not be surprised if in cat generations to come, they are not singing of the exploits of myself. What do I do except rob the rich – such as the poor old Major or your Bundle – in order to feed the poor. You cannot deny it.’