Doris Lessing - On Cats

chapter ten

Spring. The doors open. The earth smells new. Grey cat and black cat chase and scamper all over the garden, and up on to the walls. They loll in weak sunlight–but well away from each other. They get up from rolling, and meet, cautiously, in a sniff nose to nose, this side, then that. Black cat goes indoors to the duties of maternity; grey cat is off, hunting.

Grey cat has brought back new habits from Devon. Her hunting is swifter, deadlier, more sensitive. She will lie flat along a wall, watching the tree for hours, not moving at all. Then, when the bird flies down, she pounces. Or, surprisingly, she doesn’t pounce. There is the flat roof of the theatre which overlooks the neighbour’s patch of garden, where birds like to come. Grey cat lies on the roof, not crouched, but stretched out, chin on her paw, her tail still. And she is not asleep. Her eyes are intent on the starlings, the thrushes, the sparrows. She watches. Then she gets up; her back arches, slowly; she stretches her back legs, her front legs. The birds freeze, seeing her there. But she yawns, then ignores them, and delicately picks her way along the wall and into the house. Or she sits on the bottom of my bed and watches them through the window. Perhaps her tail twitches slightly–but that is all. She can be there half an hour, an indifferent observer: or so it seems. Then, in a moment, something will spring the hunter’s instinct. She sniffs, her whiskers move: then she’s off the bed, and down the stairs and into the garden. There she creeps, deadly beast, under the wall. She quietly leaps up the wall–but not on it, no: grey cat, like a cat in a cartoon, hooks her front paws on to the wall, puts her chin on the wall, supports her weight on her back legs, surveys the state of affairs in the next garden. She is very funny. You have to laugh. But why? For once grey cat is not posing, is unconscious of herself, is not arranging herself for admiration and comment. Perhaps it is the contrast between her absolute intensity, her concentration, and the uselessness of what she is going to do: kill a small creature which she doesn’t even want to eat.

While you are still laughing, she’s up and over the wall, has caught a bird, and is back on the wall with it. She is running back into the house with the bird–but no, inexplicable human beings have rushed downstairs to shut the back door. So she plays with the bird in the garden until she tires of the game.

Once a bird swooped down past a roof, saw the jut of a wall too late, crashed into it, and lay stunned, or dead, on the earth. I was in the garden with grey cat. We went together to the bird. Grey cat was not very interested–a dead bird, she seemed to think. I remember how black cat revived with hands’ warmth, and held the bird enclosed in my hand. I sat on the edge of a flowerbed; grey cat sat near, watching. I held the bird between us. It stirred, trembled; its head lifted, its eyes unfilmed. I was watching cat. She did not respond. The bird put its cold claws down against my palm, and pushed, like a baby trying out its strength with its feet. I let the bird sit on one palm, covered with the other. It seemed full of life. All this time grey cat merely watched. Then I lifted the bird on my palm, where it sat for a moment. Still cat did not respond. Then the bird lifted its wings and sped off into the air. At that last moment cat’s hunting instincts were touched, her muscles obeyed, she gathered herself for a spring. But by then the bird was off and gone, so she relaxed and licked herself. Her movements during this incident had the same quality as those made before she had her first litter–when she was prompted briefly and inconclusively to make a lair for the kittens. Certain actions were made; part of her was involved; but she did not really know about it; she was not set in action as a whole creature.

Perhaps it is some definite movement a bird makes, a particular signal, that attracts the hunter in a cat, and until that movement occurs, a cat is not involved with the bird, has no relation to it. Or perhaps it is a sound. I am sure the frenzied chittering of a caught bird, the squeaking of a mouse, arouses a cat’s desire to torture and torment. After all, even in a human, the frightened sound arouses strong emotions: panic, anger, disapproval–the springs of morality are touched. You want to rescue the creature, beat the cat, or shut the whole beastly business out where you can’t see or hear it, don’t have to know about it. A tiny turn of the screw, and you’d be sinking your jaws in, ripping claws through soft flesh.

But what screw? That’s the point.

Perhaps for a cat it isn’t sound, but something else.

That great South African naturalist, Eugene Marais, describes in his remarkable and beautiful book, The Soul of the White Ant , how he tried to find out how a certain kind of beetle communicates. It was a toktokkie beetle. It is not equipped with auditory organs; yet everyone brought up on the veld knows its system of small knocking sounds. He describes how he spent weeks with the beetle, watching it, thinking about it, making experiments. And then, suddenly, that marvellous moment of insight when he came to the until then not obvious conclusion that it was not sound, but a vibration which the beetle was using: a vibration so subtle it is out of our range completely. And the symphony of clickings, squeakings, chirpings, buzzings, which is how we experience the insect world–on a hot night, for instance–is for them signals of a different kind, which we are too crude to catch. Well yes, of course: obvious. As soon as you see it, that is.

Under our noses, all these complicated languages which we don’t know how to interpret.

You can watch a thing a dozen times, thinking, How charming, or how strange, until, and always unexpectedly, sense is suddenly made.

For instance: when black cat’s kittens are at the walking stage, grey cat will always, at a certain point, but never when black cat is watching, creep up to a kitten–and this is what is so odd–as if kittens are a new phenomenon, as if she has never had kittens herself. She creeps behind , or sideways , to the kitten. She will sniff at it, or put a paw to it, tentative, experimental: she might even give it a hasty lick or two. But not from the front. Not once have I seen her approaching from the front. If the kitten turns and faces her, perhaps even in friendly curiosity, not hostile at all, grey cat spits, backs, her fur goes up–she is warned off by some mechanism.

I thought this was just grey cat, whose sexual and maternal instincts have been taken from her, and who is such a coward. But a fortnight ago, a five-week-old kitten was taking its first walk in the garden: sniffing, looking, adventuring. Its father, the whitish cat, came up; and in exactly the same way as grey cat, in a creeping cautious way. It sniffed at the kitten from behind. The kitten turned around and faced this new creature, and at once the big male cat backed away, hissing and frightened, threatened by this minute thing which it could have killed with one snap of its jaws.

Nature protecting a tiny creature from an adult of its own species during the period it can’t fight for itself through strength?

The cats are now four years old, two years old.

Grey cat is less than halfway through her life–if she has luck.

Not long ago, she wasn’t in when we went to bed. She didn’t come in that night at all. Next day, no grey cat. That night, since grey cat was not in the prestige position, black cat took it.

The day after that I switched on all the defence mechanisms: well, it’s only a cat, etc. And did the routine things: Has anyone seen a Siamese-shaped grey cat with a cream underside and black markings? No one had.