More Cats In The Belfry

  It was mating time everywhere just then. A Siamese-breeding friend I hadn't heard from for ages rang to tell me of the trouble she was having with her Golden Burmese male. She'd gone to buy a queen the previous year, she said, but while the breeder was actually making out the pedigree this absolutely gorgeous kitten walked up and looked at her, and she fell for him and bought him instead. She'd heard that the Burmese-Siamese cross was wonderful, and had the idea of using him as a stud with her Siamese queens. The trouble was, he was now a year old and he still didn't know what was expected of him. At first he used to hide when the queens started calling, so she took him to her vet to have him checked. The vet had up­-ended him, pronounced that he had the biggest balls he'd ever seen on a cat, and said there was nothing wrong with him. Give him time and he'd work it out, he said.

  She was on hand when daylight did start to dawn. One of the queens was calling, rolling on the floor yelling, waving her paws, Claude looking on in mystification – when suddenly the penny dropped. His face cleared. He knew what was wanted. He got down, threw himself on his back, and rolled as well. Waving his paws in the air, bawling and looking backwards over his head at the queen. He did it now whenever the girls came on heat – and that was all he did. He had such a limp paw, too, and she was wondering... Was it because she'd called him Claude?

  I was in the middle of laughing when a thought suddenly struck me. Some while before, Pat had told me that Luki had a habit of rolling on his back, waving his paws and peering backwards at her chocolate-point girl, Sahra. Pat described it as Luki trying to look alluring. Sahra, she said, always looked more horrified than allured. I'd told her that Saphra often did the same thing with Tani, and Tani usually slapped him on the nose. Why should our respective boys try to look alluring? I wondered now. Could they possibly be odd like Claude?

  I needn't have worried. A few days later we had an incident that proved who was the man about the cottage. It was a hot day, and I'd propped the cat-house window open so that Tani and Saph could sunbathe on the shelf inside. Going past on my way up to the garage I saw Tani sitting on the shelf, for all the world like a mediaeval princess at a tourney, gazing at the knight wearing her favour in the jousting ring below; and down in the jousting ring – the paved run of the cat-house – crouched Saphra, one paw upraised at something hidden behind a clump of grass. I was in there in an instant, grabbing him. Behind the grass, head up and hissing, was an angry adder.

  I rushed Saph down to the cottage, tossed him in, shut the door and ran back armed with a spade. There was no need to rescue Tani. She was still sitting in the window, watching calmly with her paws tucked under her, knowing that at that distance she was safe. The adder was still there, head up and watching me, tongue flickering in and out. I dealt with it regretfully but firmly. Adders have now been declared a protected species but they weren't at that time – and how else can one deal with an adder in a cat-run? From its size I reckoned it was the one that escaped Jeanine McMullen and myself the previous year. Probably it had wintered under the cat-house, which is on bricks; grown bigger; had come out to bask in the sun and, in the way of snakes, would have gone on doing it, a constant and predictably fatal danger to the cats, if I hadn't happened past and been suspicious.

  It was the final lesson as far as Tani was concerned, at any rate. She is nobody's fool. The next evening I was out on the lawn with the pair of them, dragging a piece of rope around for them to chase. Saph, in his element, was jumping on it wildly, rushing away with his ears flat and coming back to jump on it again. Tani, who had possibly seen the adder come out from under the cat-house and recognised the same sinuous movement in the rope, hardly touched ground as she belted round the corner and into the cottage. It was Saphra's business to deal with snakes, she said. He was the he-cat round here.