Cat-Fish & Fish-Cat, Page 2

the day, and when evening came she just disappeared. I couldn't find her in the barn or around the chicken coop, favorite haunts of the other cats, and she no longer begged for scraps around the back door either. But come morning, there she would be, deep in a satisfied sleep that spoke of a busy night, eager to follow Ben to the milking shed. Once she turned up all bloody, limping slightly and with a well-tattered ear.

  "Take a look at this," Ben said as he held her in his lap. "Looks like she picked a fight with a bobcat." But her injuries healed quickly and she was soon back to her new schedule. She still preferred people to cats, but she seemed to have found a niche that didn't involve either one.

  One evening, when Ben was driving Two-banger back to the shed after she was overdue again, he saw Kitty out in the field. He told us about it at the supper table.

  "Kitty was out in the alfalfa this evening. Looked to be hunting mice." Now there was a shocker. We'd never seen her with a mouse before.

  "How the heck has she kept from getting 'et by a fox?" Dad wanted to know.

  "I reckon she's pretty fast," Ben said.

  Indeed. I said we probably had hundreds of cats over the years, but seldom more than eight or ten at a time. They were picked off with gruesome regularity, some by foxes, maybe a bobcat or two, and many by great horned owls. Cats are great fighters, but once a horned owl has its talons in something, it's usually done for. Kitty must have been very fast, and very careful as well.

  After supper, when the tail lights of fireflies began to charm the dusk settling over the fields, and a whippoorwill started its ceaseless song, Ben and I stole down the path that led to the stock tank. Sure enough, Kitty was sitting in the field, ears cocked, tail twitching, intent on the hunt. Of course she saw us standing and watching by the fence, but other than a few quick glances in our direction, she went on about her business. Ben and I were the first to see her catch a field mouse, and we were the ones toward whom she trotted proudly, her head held high, the mouse held daintily in her jaws.

  But she carried it as though on a mission, straight past us, 'eowing' to me as she went. It seems that even cats need to close their lips together to make the 'm' part of a meow.

  And Ben and I were the ones who first witnessed what had become a strange, and most improbable, relationship.

  We followed Kitty that evening as she made her way toward the tank, and we watched as she hopped down to the end of the dock and took up a position, right on the edge of the boards, with the mouse dangling above the water. Ben's mouth hung wide open as he walked quietly toward her, and I shall never forget what happened next. A catfish broke the surface below her and Kitty knelt down on her belly. She placed her paws just over the edge as she looked into the water, and bobbed her head up and down.

  "You think she's fishing?" I asked.

  "Impossible," Ben said. "Some of those catfish could eat her."

  Since catfish are not exactly great leapers, it seemed unlikely they would be able to jump high enough to grab Kitty's mouse. But there was at least one of their numbers that had made a considerable leap, of imagination, or intelligence, or something. As we watched, it rose as far as possible out of the water, and Kitty dropped the mouse, passing it across an enormous chasm from one set of jaws to another. When the fish fell back into the murky water with its prize, we clearly saw a flash of red yarn on its back. Without as much as another meow, Kitty walked past us back up the dock and headed toward the field with a renewed sense of purpose.

  This was news worth waiting for the full audience of our entire family. We ran home, and when everyone had settled themselves in the parlor for our usual quiet evening together, and Dad had finished reading us several new words from the family dictionary, I could no longer contain the story we had witnessed, and sprang it on them. "You know what we saw Kitty do?" Blank faces stared back at us. "She fed a mouse to the catfish!"

  Dad was amused, for I had begun writing a bit by then, and he usually found innocent humor in my stories. “Abbie”, he said, with just the corner of his mouth turned up, “you writing up a new story?”

  "It's true, Dad," Ben said. "We were right down on the dock, and we both saw it happen. Fed it to Old Catfish, too."

  Kissy thought it a fairy tale and wished to act it out the next day. Mother just rolled her eyes and said, "I can't help but wonder where such imagination comes from and I'm afraid to think where it might lead." But Ben, lost in contemplation and undeterred, looked at me intently.

  "Tomorrow," he said, stabbing a fork at me. "We're going down there again tomorrow and have another look. I'll bet you anything Kitty was feeding Catfish in the tub all along. Explains everything." Then he grinned at me. "Holy cow, Ab, this could be big! You know how many people would like to see a fish-cat feeding a catfish?"

  And was he ever right. After we discovered what Kitty's hours were, we started inviting people to see for themselves. The skeptics became believers. Price Walker called it "the darndest thing I've ever seen", and he even went to the considerable trouble of getting his wife, Pleasure, down to the pond to enjoy the sight. Dr. Hobsome and his whole family came out from Navasota and they watched Kitty at work so long Mother had to reheat the dinner she'd cooked for them.

  And what really amazed me was that Ben became an absolute celebrity with the high school girls, though I don't think he ever realized he was playing second fiddle to a cat. On one evening he had four young ladies out on the dock, sitting in chairs, sipping lemonade, and cooing over Kitty's antics. I'm sure he enjoyed the attention and would even interrupt Kitty's hunts to hold the cat for the girls to pet and fuss over. Perhaps all the adoration went to Ben's head.

  There were times when Kitty wouldn't cooperate, or the mice were elusive, and Ben's audience got bored from waiting and left. He finally got the idea of trapping mice for her, and then allowing her to feed them to the fish, which kept Kitty on the dock...where his admirers were. And Kitty didn't seem to mind leaving out that rather messy initial step. She would gladly sit on the dock while Ben produced a mouse squashed from the bail of a trap, then pick up the offering and go through her usual routine. Only now there were too many mice for just Old Catfish, and the other fish got in on the act. And that spelled trouble.

  Even when there was no audience for Ben to entertain, he wanted to keep Kitty's skills well honed so as not to disappoint when the time came to show her off. He tried to leave a fresh supply of mice on the dock every evening, and most mornings would find them missing, presumably offered by Kitty to the fish.

  If there were more than two or three mice, a feeding frenzy ensued, with the fish roiling around beneath Kitty, each trying to push itself far enough out of the water to be the lucky one. And on one occasion, when Ben was alone with her, Kitty delivered them so fast that she became careless, or the catfish may have made a genuine leap or something, because Kitty was suddenly treading water among her comrades in the tank. And apparently she made a hard job of it.

  "All those fish started mouthing on her, grabbing onto her paws and tail, and just hauling her under," he told us that evening. "I thought she was a goner. Tried to grab her, but she kept popping up here and there, then disappearing just before I could get a hold. She was getting pretty tired, so I took off my shoes and started to jump in. Then there was this big flurry and the water foamed, and here came that cat, heading for the dock. And she was riding a lot higher than any half-drowned cat had a right to, I'll tell ya.

  "She dug her claws dug into the dock, and I grabbed her up by the scruff of the neck and hauled her out. That's when I saw that red yarn I'd sewn into that catfish's fin. I thought, holy cow, but then it was gone."

  There was one, among many catfish, who now became Cat-Fish.

  For nearly a week Kitty would have nothing to do with the fish. For a few days Ben carried her with him to the pond, and then, slowly, she began following him again and watching from a respectful distance while he fed them. But Ben missed her ant
ics and the limelight he'd come to enjoy, and he kept encouraging Kitty to resume her duties, feeding the mice to the fish himself while Kitty watched and meowed. I could see a softening of his features while he held her for long periods, stoking and reassuring her, and he even managed to convince Mother it was okay to allow her into the house. "She'll come around," he'd say, while dragging a string over the floor for her to chase. "Just needs a little time. Won't ya, little Kitty?" He pressed his face into the cat's fur, something I'd never seen him do with any of our pets, not even with Hounder. Ben, trapper, hunter and stockman, was smitten.

  Kitty responded slowly, seemingly determined to follow her own timetable, but it was plain Ben was making progress. She ventured closer and closer to the edge of the dock, watching as Ben dropped mice to the waiting fish. "See," he'd say to her, "It's easy. Just pick up a mouse, and plop. Bombs away." Kitty meowed and crept closer.

  "She's almost ready," Ben said to us one evening. "You can tell she really wants it. I reckon in a day or two she'll be her old self again."

  A few days later she went out the back door and headed straight for the field with the stock tank. We both had chores to do until after dark that day, so we were unable to see if she had