Catalyst (9 page)

That particular day stands out in my memory, however, because, as the boy scooped me up and put me on his shoulder, where I huddled under the fringe of hair curling down his neck—the part of him that seemed most like Mother—I slowly realized that I could see not only him but the man as well, and that I was looking down at my beautiful mother, at Git, and my littermates. The light was not good and colors were not strong but my new eyes were very sharp and I could see everyone and everything around me. I began mewing excitedly, and the boy plucked me from his neck and turned me to face him so that his huge blue eyes looked into my new ones.

“Pop, look, Chester opened his eyes!”

“Excellent! That means the rest of the litter will soon. Not too much longer and we will be wealthy, son.”

“But not Chester, right, Pop? We don’t have to sell them all. You said I could keep one and I want to keep him. That’s okay, right?”

The man sighed as Mother sometimes does when we are exploring her too actively. “I’m sorry, son. I meant it when I said that you could keep one when I brought the Duchess home, but with
her only having the four kits instead of seven or eight, like we thought, our profits were cut in half. So how about picking out one of Git’s babies instead? You can have any one you want.”

“No, Pop. Chester is the one who likes me.”

“Cats like whoever feeds them, Jubal. And he’s likely to get a better life than you do once we get him a good berth. Now you look after them while I’m gone and don’t let on to your mama, you hear? I have a little job to do on the station for the next few days.”

“You know I’ll take care of them, Pop.”

To the best of his ability, he did too, and the tragic events that followed were not really his fault. He was simply doing what we wanted.

During the time the man was gone, we kittens began to grow hungry for something besides milk. This became apparent the day Virgil, while nursing, bit Git and got himself slapped tail over nose into the hay pile.

Then she shook all of the others off and stretched her forepaws out in front of her and her hind end toward the ceiling and whipped her tail back and forth a few times before announcing, “Time for you young’uns to learn to hunt.”

I’d like to say that this happened at once and we all became the superb predators we were always destined to be, but first we had to learn to eat solid food. The boy helped. He brought us table scraps of cooked meat. The others growled and fought over it, but I realized immediately that the meat lacked something in juiciness and savor—that indefinable quality that I was hungry for without even realizing what I was missing. I looked up at him and mewed. He picked me up and asked, “What’s the matter, Chester? Don’t you like rabbit?”

Git rose and went to the door—that was what the opening was—and scratched.

“Okay, girl,” the boy told her. He pulled something out of a
pouch in a fold of his blue hind leg, reached down, and buckled the long tail-shaped strip around Git’s neck. “You can go hunting now if you want.”

Git streaked through the door. “Freedom!” I heard her cry as she disappeared.

The man returned and entered our room. “Hmm,” he said. He took something from
his
coat, very small, and aimed it at us. Several times light blossomed around his hands and the colors of our coats, the hay, the boy’s clothes and skin, all became bright and distinct.

Mother blinked placidly.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“I think it’s a camera, my boy. So the man can show our images to others. Come here. You’ve a tuft of fur sticking up on the back of your head. Let me fix it for you.”

The weeks passed quickly, though back then I had no idea what a week was.

I slept. I nursed. As my legs grew stronger, I practiced pouncing and running. So did the others. Our play was the work of kittens, which is a far more serious thing than it looks.

I don’t know what the others dreamed of, but in my dreams I often did what the boy did. We fed chickens, rode horses, washed dishes, ate things that for reasons unfathomable to me seemed to appeal to him and his mother. We also read books, and this was extremely exciting, the stories we shared leaving lasting impressions on my thirsty young mind.

Yes, our strange connection let me participate in many of the boy’s activities and learn his feelings and thoughts on more matters than actually interested me.

Of more interest were Git’s expeditions, after which she would bring in strange edible creatures for us to tear apart with our ferocious claws and needle-sharp teeth. We were fierce, voracious, and merciless.

But of course the early prey was dead.

When we got live food and started to attack it, Git growled us away, smacked it dumb and bit the back of its neck, severing the spine in her strong jaws. “This critter was a living thing,” she said. “It had a mama, like you, and maybe young’uns like you too. Its death helps you kids to keep on being living things your own selves. Treat it decent. Put it out of its misery. It’s an ill-brought-up cat that tortures its food to death. Quick and clean, just the way you’d want to go if it was your time to be something else’s supper.”

I was to remember that admonition ruefully the day Git took us hunting outside for the first time. She had taken her own kits the day before, one at a time, and Sol, Silvesta, Buttercup, and I lurked at the edges of her portal, waiting for her to bring them back, desperate to see what had happened. Wyatt and his brothers were cocky enough already, lording over us their day’s lead in life. What would they have to brag of now?

When Git herded each through the door carrying parts of prey proudly in their jaws, I was overcome with jealousy. I tried to snatch Bat’s rat rump from him but the others abandoned theirs to jump on me and thump me soundly. When they turned back, they saw that Silvesta and Buttercup had cornered two of their mangled prizes and were daintily gobbling the bits. When the boys squalled, my sisters gave them withering looks from their bright round eyes and continued dining.

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” I said. It was something the boy had read in one of his books, and my brethren looked startled to hear me say it but they didn’t disagree. My sisters might smell better than we did but they were the same size and didn’t mess about when it came to hunting. Mother and Git both favored them, actually, reminding them that someday they would have kittens to feed and teach too.

Wyatt and his brothers abandoned the pilfered prizes and began fighting over the remaining piece and thumping on Bat, trying to get his away from him.

But the next day was our turn. Git hauled me up by my scruff and I hung there, twitchy with anticipation while she took me into an outer world I had seen only through the boy’s eyes before then.

Everything smelled stronger, moved faster, and looked much bigger when I saw it with my own eyes.

Git set me down just inside the barn door. Outside it was bright and vast—there was more world out there than I could have imagined on my own. I oriented myself quickly, though, since I had been here before in the boy’s mind. The chickens wandered the yard. The house was over to the left. I couldn’t see the fields where the horses roamed but the waving of the grass in the wind fascinated me.

I took a couple of steps forward when Git returned with Sol.

“Stay put, both of you,” she said, “while I fetch your sisters.”

She taught us how to hunt through the barn that day, but only Buttercup caught anything.

“Mrrrr,” Git said. “Seems I’ve done too good a job. It was hard finding enough for the boys yesterday. Fine, then. You’re not likely to have a nice barn to hunt in all your days. Before I found this place, I hunted the meadows and fields on the way. There’s lots to be had but there’s farther for the critters to run. I’ll show you the way today but don’t be fussed if you don’t catch anything. It takes practice to run a meal down. We’re fixing to go farther than you’ve gone before. I have to carry you in and out of the cat door for my collar to work for you too, but you need to run on your own paws now. Understood?”

At first we kept up fairly well, running, leaping, tumbling after her. The blades of grass looked as tall from my own height as trees did to the boy. The wildflowers, purple-belled ones and frothy white, bobbed seductively enough that Sol temporarily forgot he was actually a voracious carnivore and attacked the plant. A bee flew out and would have stung him if he hadn’t jumped back in a hurry.

Deeper and deeper into the meadow we went, until Silvesta said, “I can’t see the barn anymore.”

Git, whose fine fluffy tail had been our beacon through the bush, turned back on us. “Good. Now then, I’m going to flush something your way. Before you go back to your mama, I want you all to catch enough to eat that you won’t be troublin’ her for milk. It’s high time you wean.”

She disappeared into the grass, but in a moment there was a thrashing and a small sparkly thing hopped toward us. These bugs were my favorite treat, and as eldest and the first one of us with open eyes, I figured the first kill out here at least belonged to me. Following Git’s instructions, I vanquished it far more easily than I would have believed possible and proceeded to eat it with pride while Sol skittered after a lizard that slid through the grass toward us.

Buttercup, full of her barn catch, had lagged behind us. It was Silvesta, waiting with waggling hindquarters for her turn, who heard Buttercup squeak.

Git heard it too. Although we had not seen her for some time, suddenly she bounded over us, snarling.

There was an answering snarl and then nothing.

A bite of my prey was still in my teeth. I looked up, surrounded by the waving grass and the blue sky up above. But with my inner eyes I saw the boy come out of the barn with the feed bucket in his hands. As if he saw me too, he dropped the bucket and began running.

Somewhere he picked up a stick. “Leave them be, you mangy mongrel!” he yelled, waving the stick.

But I knew even before the canine sprinted past us, our protectress dangling from his jaws as prey had so often dangled from hers, that the boy had come too late. Where our second mother’s strength, energy, and alert attention had crackled through the air, there was only stillness. The emptiness filled up with the boy’s panting breath and the smell of the dog trailing behind it. Then
came the first yowl of Silvesta’s life as she stood over our sister’s mangled body.

Git’s sacrifice had not been swift enough to save Buttercup.

The boy picked both of my sisters up. Buttercup was so small, he slipped her body into his chest pocket, and blood seeped through the fabric. Silvesta continued to cry, and the boy searched through the grass until he saw the cowering Sol and lifted him too. I, who was closest to him, was the last to be lifted up, but I knew even in the midst of terror and bewilderment that it was because the boy knew exactly where I was, and that I knew he was near.

Mother washed us all when the boy took us back but she couldn’t wash the life back into Buttercup, though the boy showed her the body, now oddly so much tinier than ours. Finally, Mother gave up and began washing Silvesta, and the boy took the body away again.

Wyatt and his brothers could not grasp it at first that their mother was gone. They searched the straw, they sniffed at us, who still bore her scent on our skin, and they prodded our mother looking for theirs. Wyatt understood first and stood by his mother’s cat door and mewed a pitiful, lonely keen, more mournful for being so squeaky and small.

Sol and I just stared at him and the others. They had always been bigger than we were, had bullied us, but now they were lost. I sidled up to Wyatt, bumping my weight against him, trying to purr consolingly. He hissed at me.

He and the others hid separately, forlornly, until Mother rose shakily and one by one rounded them up and brought them to nurse, then called us to join in.

We all fell asleep before we finished eating, but when we awakened and had fed again, Mother shook us off, rising onto her haunches, her forepaws planted like columns beneath her feathery chest.

“My children—and you are all my children now—the time has come to teach you one of our most time-honored and useful
rituals—bathing. A clean cat is a healthy cat, a respectable cat, and furthermore, a serene, deliberate, and decisive cat. Cleansing one’s fur refreshes the mind as well as the body.”

Washing hardly seemed as important as hunting, especially at a time like this, when we were all stricken by the sudden loss of Git and Buttercup. But Mom’s voice continued, demanding our attention. Perhaps she was trying to distract us from recalling the deaths.

“This skill is necessary for every cat ever born on the ground or among the stars,” she began. “But for we of the long fur, the plumed tails and full manes, the tufted ears and fur fringed pads, it is absolutely essential. Without proper grooming, our fur quickly mats into great clumps that hang from us like disgusting growths, that pinch and pull and catch on things when we are stalking, skulking, or attempting to slink. If you are fortunate enough, as I have been, to have a Kibble to care for you, she can assist you with the more difficult bits, but daily, hourly, and momentary maintenance are your responsibility, your duty, and your pride.