Cats

Yesterday afternoon the head of a hare lay on the lawn beneath the chestnut tree. Its eyes were gone and the face was mangled, so only the long ears allowed me to identify it as a hare. The cat had got it, it was the second hare it had killed in two days, with the same modus operandi, a torn-off head with eyes missing and bloodied fur left in the garden. As I write this the cat is sitting on the windowsill looking into the house and waiting for someone inside to get up, notice it and let it in. It is a Siberian forest cat with long grey-black fur and a bushy tail whom the woman we bought it from called Amaga, which is still her name. Amaga likes to sleep in enclosed spaces, the narrower the better, it seems – crates, boxes, suitcases, prams – but she will also snuggle up on windowsills, stairs, beds, sofas and chairs. More than anything, she lives like a tenant of the house, she comes and goes as she pleases, eats her own food in a special place, sleeps the days away, is out all night. Occasionally acquaintances of hers come to call, sometimes I see them sitting in the garden waiting for her to come out. In the literature the character of her breed is described as sensitive and resourceful, and while the description seems excessively anthropomorphic, it matches my impression of her fairly well. We had several cats while I was growing up and they each had distinct personalities, from the wary but mild-mannered Sofi, a grey long-haired Norwegian forest cat, to her daughter Mefisto, also long-haired, completely black and both more elegant and more devoted than her mother, to her son Lasse, who was impulsive, undisciplined and markedly more dull-witted than his progenitor. He would begin to purr if you so much as looked at him, was never properly house-trained and loved to be petted. Petting was clearly the high point of his existence, he tried to turn it into orgies of bodily contact, his nose would run, he pushed his paws in and out with their claws extended, he turned over on his back, splayed his legs, rubbed himself against everything within reach. Lasse had no dignity and no integrity, and when he tried to chase Mefisto away and take over the house, he was eventually taken to the vet, where he met his fate. Amaga is Lasse's complete opposite, she has total integrity, and if she is as wary as Sofi was, she is nowhere near as mild-mannered. There is something sharp in her character, noticeable even when she surrenders herself, for if she purrs and closes her eyes when she is petted, the watchfulness never entirely leaves her; at any moment she might twist around, jump to her feet and leap to the floor to walk off by herself. When we got a dog two years ago, the first thing she did was attack it, she scratched it near the eye so that blood ran down its snout, and from that moment the dog was terrified of her, she ruled it entirely. The baby girl we had had the year before she didn't pay any attention to at first, but when the girl began to walk and toddled after the cat, she would lower herself turtle-like towards the floor and run off, as she always does when she senses danger. ‘The tack, the tack!’ the girl would shout – that was her word for cat, which was felicitous, since tack means ‘thanks’ in Swedish, so that whenever I saw her I could point to her and say, ‘There's gratitude for you!’–and try to grab her by the tail. She rarely succeeded, since Amaga was so much faster than her and just slunk away, except when she was sleeping, and if we didn't get over there quickly enough then, Amaga would hiss at her, and if that didn't deter the little girl, she would scratch her. It happened twice, and now she has respect for the tack, no longer throws things at it, doesn't grab its tail, but likes to pet it, which the cat lets her do although I don't think she gets much enjoyment out of it, for she lies there with watchful eyes, looking somewhat tense as the small hand strokes her soft and often tangled fur. The self-control Amaga displays then is admirable, considering the torn-off heads, the gorging on blood and gouging out of eyes that her instincts can lead her to at other times. In fact, through living with cats I have come to wonder what instincts really are. I used to think they were a form of automated actions, something preprogrammed and ineluctable in animals, separate from what little they had in the way of thoughts and emotions, and that taming animals meant implanting a different system in them, just as automatic, which caused their instincts to be held back or channelled into other directions. And that the instincts of large carnivores such as lions and tigers were more powerful and might therefore more easily break down the wall that their taming had erected, so that without warning they might attack those who had tamed them, who fed and sheltered them, and tear them to pieces. We can call it instinct, we can call it nature, we can call it the animals’ essential being. But when I see a lion or a tiger in a zoo somewhere I never get the feeling that they are ruled by what we call instincts, that they are in thrall to their instincts and thus confined to a limited number of possible reactions. It is more as if they do as they please, that they never consider or judge any action, they just act. That the decisive difference between us and them isn't that we think while animals don't, but that we have morals and they don't. I am certain that Amaga has sized us up, that she knows who we are, the six members of the family that lives in her house. I am also certain that she sees us as some sort of large, stupid cats, slow and dim-witted, and if she doesn't think that she is superior to us, I am certain she feels it with her whole being. 8PCTotH9FXwsUUxRHg3Cp5kkDRQs4v+fcwY0Tph/KWn65aYfJyqU4GeQaqoGrOpV