We arrived home on Wednesday this week to find that Fizz has completed her first successful hunt. There were feathers everywhere and we began the fun game of 'hunt the corpse'. The boys joined in with gusto and it wasn't long before Sebi discovered a furry ball under the largest and heaviest bit of furniture that we own. My feminist tendencies left the building and I dispatched Stu to lie on his stomach with a torch, a long stick and a carrier bag whilst I pretended to stack the dishwasher. Stu's masculine tendencies left him when he poked the 'corpse' with a stick and it moved.
"It's a rat", declared my husband, as he showed more agility than he has done in a while, as he rapidly did the worm backwards across the kitchen. Although I was aware that he was the one (a) with the torch and (b) that was nearest, I did dispute the rat call because of the aforementioned enormous amount of feathers. It would have been one hell of a coincidence if the cats had killed a bird in the house on the same day a rat has just decided to take up residence underneath our sideboard.
With a second look Stu decided that the rat had a beak after all which made our lives slightly less complicated. Then followed a rather painful twenty minutes of Stu poking a terrified bird out into the open and me flapping at it with a towel until it eventually went out of the window, probably straight back into the jaws of an eagerly waiting Fizz.
It got me thinking back to when my last cat Toby was in his heyday. I have never, ever, known such a determined hunter as he was; he would tackle anything, no matter what size it was. He managed to drag in pigeons through the cat flap which made the most almighty mess. When I turned my nose up at a common old garden pigeon, he outdid himself by bringing in a very expensive racing pigeon instead. (That was an awkward phone call.) Toby half killed a squirrel and then grew bored and left it suffering. I couldn't cope with watching it slowly die, or with doing anything with it myself, so I called my poor father who had to travel half an hour to my place to bludgeon to death an equally poor squirrel with his garden spade. Toby decided to bring in an enormous rat, alive, that my partner at the time managed to shoot in the lounge with his air rifle. What on earth the neighbours thought was going on, I don't know.
Toby's finest hour however came after his death. Shelley had moved into the flat with me by this stage and we were staggering back from the pub next door one night, as normal, when we bumped into one of our neighbours on the path. She told me that a ginger cat had been run over on the hill and she thought it was mine. Shelley and I were distraught. We went up to the flat for another drink whilst the neighbour valiantly offered to scoop up the cat remains and bring them to us. She delicately presented me with a dead ginger cat in a cardboard box and we all sobbed and drank a little more. The neighbour, (by then our new best friend, can't remember her name now though), decided it was time to leave and as we were elongating our effusive farewells at the top of the stairs, the cat flap opened and Toby came in. Silence. Shelley turned to me and said, "you can see that cat can't you?" I think she thought the ghost of Toby had come to see us instead! Toby thought we were insane as we all landed on him kissing him and crying, he turned around and went straight back out again. We were, of course, then left with the problem of having a dead ginger cat in our flat in a cardboard box. Technically, I think the neighbour should have taken it with her - she had brought it in in the first place after all, and, it was now nothing to do with us. Of course, she didn't, she scarpered and we all went to bed, exhausted. I wonder what Toby's reaction was when he found it on his return... Must have been rather disconcerting. I took the corpse to the vet the next day and let it become their problem instead.
So, here we go again. Another fourteen or so years of active contributions to the housekeeping by our feline friends. Once Bubbles dares to stick her nose out of the cat flap it will be double trouble too. Most days the boys are home at least an hour and a half before I am though so surely the responsibility must lie with them? I am sure however that I will walk through the door and still find them in ignorant bliss sucked into their X box, even if they are surrounded by half of Hertfordshire's rodent population... I'll keep you posted...
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