Giant Rat Dinner

This is Mallomys Giant Rat, weighing in at 1.4 kg and found in the Foja Mountains of Indonesia. Some might say that the fur should be removed before consumption, but I prefer a variety of contrasting textures.

Ratless in Alberta

Trust me to live in the only rat-free place on earth. Not that I lack rodents. The feeders stocked for the viewing pleasure of B & G sustain my tender fatlings, those that creep as those that fly. But what fun it would be to stop a greasy rat under my claws! They say that a rat can scale a brick wall and push its body through a quarter-sized hole. You can flush it down the toilet, only to find it swimming back up to bite your arse. Feed them anticoagulants: they'll belch and ask for seconds. They laugh at traps. They dance on bedsheets in the watches of the night and bite the ends of your toes.

A long luscious rat tail is naked and smooth. In my dreams, I crunch and slurp, segment by segment.

Does Halibut return?

Gooney asks why I haven't posted anything since the end of May. (May, season of plumpness. Tender chicks that melt beneath the tooth ...)

Well, Gooney. Disgust. Simple, uncomplicated existential disgust.

Raptors

A fatter, sleeker, and faster Halibut writes now from the cover of lush foliage. All this month, the merlins have been screaming at each other from rival spruce-top nests. The sparrows have been too stupid to live in more than occasional terror. It is reassuring to know that the world, that way, does not change.

Gooney and Bhiksu have tried to keep up, as you may see.



(Yes, yes, I know it's on its side, but then I am cat. Cope with it.)

Even the humans have been killing things. I must admit I had a shock the other evening when I overhead them, grouped around the metal box in which they burn their prey. "Grilled Halibut." Fortunately, it was just a joke. They had caught some sort of inferior bird and were doing their best to disguise the flavour by dousing it with a black powder and a yellow liquid. I am too refined to mention the words 'dirt' and 'piss'.

Spring

We all woke to another morning of steady snow. This isn't the photo I took from my favourite window, but it will do just as well.

The sparrows might regret their life in these northern wastes. If they could feel regret. I've noticed them gathering with hilarity in a still leafless -- now snow-crowned -- bush, their mating hormones cheering them just enough. They don't notice there is nothing they can get to and eat. The gulls were skreeking overhead because they couldn't see any garbage, only white drifting snow. I worry. How many of the little morons will succumb?

Once, many years before me, I am told, the snow came again with the new leaves. That summer, only the conifers were green. Had it happened again the next spring, the deciduous trees would all have died. That is the way the Green World ends: we wither into Apocalypse. Happy Earth Day.

On not writing

Just over a week now since the migrants' return.

All on one day, it seemed: slim robins running across the blasted grass -- idiots, every one of them, thrusting out their rusty breasts like field marshals. (That's Turdus migratorius, of course, a stringy thrush, rather than the small but juicy Erithacus rubecula.) Then, gulls screeching, crows crowing, the sparrow hawk starting its mad trill from the top of the spruce tree. And best, and so out-of-reach, the long Vs of the wild geese.

Not so out of reach is the tiny nuthatch. His pneumatic beak has been tapping out a hollow in a nearby tree. An unlovely Manitoba maple, I think, but it's old and full of bugs. It's got a lovely corrugated skin, excellent claw-holds, a road to swarm up with a clatter and a snap.

So, I've been biding my time. And when spring and the flies have finally arrived, who wants to be typing away? Least of all, don't bother with the words of any posting human. They are all self-important idiots, like Monsieur Turdus. Nothing to do except peep their feeble triumphs, "Look at me! Look at my feathers! This is my branch! This is my mud!"

Exclusive Cat

Did you know that my friend the Goon is a celebrity? Oh yes. He is the poster boy for Clover Leaf Cattery.

Liza Skinnelli

I never met the kittenwarrior Liza in the skin. Her powers of endurance are heroic: as of writing, she has lost 5000 battles against cuter kitties, and still she battles on. G & B: Have you met her on the field -- as yourselves, or as your alter-egos, Snowball and Fluffie? I bet her claws are sharp. Heh heh.

The Panther

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly

Titillation

Delicate recently emerged from her cave to criticize my choice of pictures. A portrait of G, she said, was perfectly charming. As for jaw-jittering photographs of Cardinalis cardinalis, that is not wholesome, said she.


Not just wholesome, Delicate. Crunchy, juicy, toothsome too.

The souls of cats, whales, cabbages, and men

The majority are right, for a change. Animals do have souls, and if any human wants further guidance, she can do no better than to read David Albert Jones O.P. on the analogous question, "Do Whales have souls?"

To have a soul, anima, is to be animate, to be alive. Writes Fr. Jones: "Having a soul is having a certain form, a certain organization such that one can move oneself ... This self-moving quality, shown in the processes of nutrition, growth and reproduction, is common to all living things." Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas would affirm that a cabbage, so long as it is alive, is alive in virtue of having a soul. (Although, as Fr. Jones adds, "Plants are a bit of a borderline case, for though clearly alive they are not very lively.") One learns that Genesis uses the same word, nephesh, "living soul," to describe, on the one hand, the living creatures brought forth from the waters and, on the other, the lump that becomes man through the breath of God.

You may read more in the December 1992 issue of New Blackfriars.

Ich kann nicht anders ...

Yes alright I'm sorry

So. There. Are you happy? I am also supposed to say:

Did you know that G once wrestled with a baby Magpie? This is perfectly true. They rolled over and over at the bottom of the garden. I don't think Magpie was hurt. He may even be the ugly brute we all saw this afternoon, trying to pick his way into a rubbish bag. Our ears flattened at the sight.

Sketchy

I have drawn a picture of my friend Gooney.

I am not very satisfied with it, but it does capture his embonpoint.

He is pictured where he wants to be:
hunting flies in the grass.

Don't we all.

Breakout

My dear friend Gooney got his paws wet today. It was sunny, fresh -- the sparrows have not yet lost their winter sense of immunity. They came very close, very close on the twigs of my crabapple tree.

As soon as the back door opened, G shot out. Down Mosquito Alley, which at this time of year is a canal of meltwater on a bed of ice, chilled a degree or two further by the shadow of the house. Goon -- bless him -- waded through and tried to swim under the gate.

He was caught of course, and I saw him licking his paws inside.

(Later: he was allowed to sit in the sun, on his string. Brother Bhiksu was FURIOUS. He was asleep at the time and missed his chance.)

Lengthening Days

The birds have begun to change their songs here in the frozen lands, slowly thawing. I've been hearing delightful calls that I haven't heard since the leaves were green.

It will be a long time still until I smell any green leaves.

Today a cataclysm of nasty magpies were mobbing a spruce tree. I looked hard for an owl, or a raptor. They might just have been in flap about a cat. He he.