The winter stay in Texas without the cats requires some explanation. Along in April and May of 1946, though I had begun to sell some stories here and there, they were to pulp magazines, and the money was small. I began to think we might not make it. The winter stay in Texas without the cats requires some explanation. Along in April and May of 1946, though I had begun to sell some stories here and there, they were to pulp magazines, and the money was small. I began to think we might not make it.
I found a job as Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Research Bureau in Utica. I made that jump a little too nervously and hastily. I spent every spare moment writing. Through the summer the stories began to sell at a greater rate and to better markets. We paid off our debts and began to build up a little surplus. By autumn I was still stuck with that job, and with an unwritten obligation to keep it for a year. There we were with the funds and the mobility to evade the misery of a Utica winter. I resigned on the basis of need to take Dorothy to a warmer climate. It was not entirely a pretext. She could have endured the winter, but she does not take cold well, and it was certain that she would spend a good portion of the winter in poor health. We arranged to go to Taos.
Dorothy’s long-widowed mother, Rita—pronounced in the Dutch manner, Right-a—was living in Poland, New York. It made sense to keep the inexpensive State Street apartment and have Rita move in from Poland for the winter and live there and take care of the cats.
We did not make it to Taos. En route we looked at that Hill Country of Texas north of San Antonio and approved immediately. In the spring Rita became ill, and we had to return before we had planned. We still had our little green prewar Ford convertible with huge mileage on it. We were towing a jeep trailer, an army surplus purchase. At anything over thirty-five miles an hour, the car gobbled both gas and oil. There had been a temporary lull in sales, and we were down to a hundred dollars and no credit cards.
I estimated that if we kept it at thirty-five, and stayed on the road fourteen hours a day, and were circumspect about food and lodging, we could make it in good season on the cash in hand.
We arrived with a little less than ten dollars to find two substantial checks waiting, Rita on the mend, the apartment closed, and the cats boarding at Dr. Sellman’s. When we went to get them we found they had ingratiated themselves with the management, and instead of being confined to the normal kennel cage, had the run of the cellar. One can imagine that if the earliest memories are of the damp and darkness of a cellar, that same environment will always be reassuring.
In fact, during all of Geoffrey’s life, he had a special thing about cardboard cartons. Roger liked them, but not to the same degree. Nothing could be unpacked without Geoff establishing himself in the empty box moments after it became empty, looking fatuously content. Though when well he was not interested in sleeping in a box, he definitely wanted one when he was sick. He was restless when sick, and a box was the only thing which would stop his roaming from place to place trying to get comfortable. To Roger a box was more of a game place, a place to hide and pounce from. To Geoff it was ancient security.
We took them back to the apartment and they re-explored every corner of it and settled back into their routine.
At just about that time we were dislodged from our low-rent haven. It was still under rent control, but the house was sold, and the new owner elected to move into our apartment. That was the only legal way we could have been cast adrift.
After dreary rounds of overpriced and depressingly gloomy apartments, we decided to buy a house. Believing in our innocence that a small college town might provide a pleasant atmosphere for the writer, we looked extensively around Clinton, New York, near Utica, where Hamilton College is located, and at last found a large and very pleasant house up on the Hill, almost surrounded by college property. It was being sold by a Mr. Prettyman, the Athletic Director, who had built most of it himself and had not gotten around to finishing off the upstairs, a factor that kept it within our rather optimistic price range.
College Hill, that spring, was the cats’ introduction to the out of doors at ground level. They were tense and apprehensive. It was one hell of a lot of space for small animals. It was full of unfamiliar scents and shapes. Geoff, though the first to adjust, retained a certain wary conservatism about the potential dangers. Roger, after a few exploratory ventures, became entirely foolhardy. I believe that if a bear had appeared, Roger would have made his typically clumsy attempt at stalking it. He seemed to have that quality of egocentricity which made him think nothing would dare eat him.
It was there that we arranged the first cat window for them. You cut a square hole of sufficient size in a window screen, trim the removed portion down a bit, and hinge it back on with two small pieces of wire. A piece of plywood as tall as the exit and as long as the rest of the window opening keeps too much wind from entering on cool days. To the outside of the house, depending on the height above the ground and the agility of the cats, you affix one or two cat shelves in place with angle irons. It helps to have another at sill level, just outside their exit. On cool days when the sun is just right they will take their ease on the shelves, watching the world from a benign height, knowing the retreat hatch is handy.
Roger came and left in silence. Geoffrey left in silence, but would always announce his return. Rahr? Rahr? He would stump through the house toward us, saying, Geoffrey is here. If that announcement was curiously distorted or muffled, it was wise, we learned, to pay attention. He would have a mouthful of victim.
Dorothy and I have tried to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of birds Geoff slew in his lifetime. We think that twenty would be the absolute top, and that ten is a more likely figure. Many of those were killed because he caught them before Dorothy learned a system of taking them away from him. We thought the birds were being mangled, and when we leaped at Geoff with shrill cries of consternation, accusation, and dismay, he would give one emphatic crunch and the bird would be dead. I imagine nothing is more futile than trying to convince a cat he is morally wrong to catch birds.
Soon we discovered that the shocked and bedraggled look of the birds was a product of the actual capture, and that Geoff held them in his mouth with an uncanny delicacy. The curve of the fangs held them in place. He was inflicting no wound or bruise.
The proper procedure was to admire him extravagantly, and in the right tone of voice. Geoff, you are a great cat. Stroke his head. Tell him it is a lovely bird. Then he would, more often than not, lay it down gently. If he did not, you could stroke him again and bring thumb and finger around for gentle pressure on the hinges of the jaw. Then you could pick up the undamaged bird, shocked into immobility, and put it in some high, safe place, usually in a shallow cardboard box atop a car or high hedge or edge of a low roof. After minutes of shock-induced lethargy, the bird would suddenly jump up, stare around, and go rocketing off, yelling about its horrid experience.
The well-fed cat is not terribly interested in eating a bird. And apparently the instinct is to bring the game home undamaged. A few times, a very few times, when we were not at home, Geoff would eat a bird. We would find a few feathers by his dish. He was the methodical cat. If you are going to eat something, you take it to where you always eat, and you eat it there. I think we averaged about ten or fifteen birds a year released undamaged.
We cannot remember Roger ever catching a bird. Maybe he grazed a few. He exhibited extreme nervous enthusiasm when Geoff would bring one home, and the problem was to keep him from falling upon it when Geoff set it down.
There was a considerable difference in their hunting technique. I have watched Roger trying to sneak up on something. He worms along on his belly, ears flat, tail thrashing. I think it was the tail which made him so ineffectual. Secrecy seems improbable when the tail is whacking the grass and the brush. And possibly his breathing was audible. It might have seemed to any bird that a rackety little steam engine was slowly approaching. Roger’s proficiency level limited him to bugs and beetles, small hoptoads, the infrequent butterfly, and, on a very few triumphant occasions, a rodent. It would please me to give him credit for one entire rabbit, but the implausibility of it would seem to make Geoffrey the captor and donor.
We were privileged several times to witness Geoff’s curious and effective hunting method. I suspect that it was only one of his methods. I believe that it was the result of his lumpy feet, odd gait, and unexpected agility. I think he invented the system, finding that he was not very apt at sneaking up on things.
He would go trudging across the lawn, frowning, staring straight ahead, obviously unintersted in anything around him. His route would take him under small trees. Birds would scold him and, growing bolder, come down into the small trees to cuss him out at close range. One of them would get just a little too close. That solemn, square cat could suddenly, without warning, without even seeming to break stride, go five feet into the air and clap those two front feet onto the abusive bird just as it took off from the limb it had thought safely out of reach. In effect, he was using himself as a lure. Perhaps this system is not unique, but I have never heard of any other cat using it.
Our property was bordered on one side by what was known as the Saunders Strip. This was where a Professor Saunders, a delightful old man with astonishingly young eyes, bred tree peonies in great profusion, huge sizes, and uniquely beautiful colors.
One day Dorothy called me from my typewriter to see what Roger was doing, and there was enough urgency in her voice to bring me on the run. There was Roger in the taller grass of the Saunders Strip beyond our lawn, stalking a magnificent cock pheasant larger than himself. Stalking is not exactly the word. He was following it, using the posture and attitudes of the stalk, about six feet behind it. But the bird was entirely aware of him. It would stop and look back at him with assured, beady malevolence, and Roger would stop. When the bird moved on, he would follow.
It is, of course, totally pointless to call a cat when it is intent on the chase. They are deaf to the interruptive nonsense of humans. They are on cat business, totally serious and involved.
Dorothy called Roger.
He lifted his head, stared toward us, and came bounding out of the field and across the lawn right to us. Did someone want the cat? Did someone call me? He came when called only when it pleased him to come, and so it could not have been more obvious. That big bird was making him terribly nervous. He had not known how to break off the relationship, how to extricate himself from impasse. He had leaped at this chance of retreat with honor. (Damn it, if they hadn’t called me just then, I would have caught that thing, whatever it was.)
One day when there were several adults and a batch of kids out in the driveway, Geoff came walking out of the tall grass in our back lot making a very curious sound. He had a grass snake in his mouth, an extremely active little snake about eighteen inches long and as big around as a lead pencil. He was holding it by the middle, with both ends writhing about Obviously the taste and texture displeased him, as he had his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fixed sneer of distaste, accounting for the strangeness of the sound he was making.
When he reached the group he put it down immediately and backed away, making little tasting motions, lapping his jaws. Roger was there and witnessed how Geoffrey was commended for skill and valor as the snake fled rapidly off into the grass.
Not five minutes later Roger came out of the grass with a snake of his own. Not the same one. This one was smaller. He came bounding out of the grass, dropped his snake, batted at it a couple of times, and watched it flee. I realize all the dangers of imputing more awareness to these animals than they had. But when Roger sat and began sedately to wash, it was as though he was saying, “See? I’m pretty good at that sort of thing too.”
Geoff soon became a very proficient mouser at College Hill. And generally he preferred to eat them. He hardly ever made them the objects of that game humans think so cruel and horrid, of grasp and toss and bat about, almost but never quite permitting escape. He would bring his field mice back to the yard or into the house, and if they tried to leave while he was getting ready to eat, he would make a lightning movement of one paw and hold them down. When he was ready, his precision was surgical—the nip of the spine which killed instantly, the long abdominal slit to permit removal of the tiny gall bladder, and then swift, efficient ingestion.
Once in a while he would let Roger have one of his mice. He would sit then and watch Roger play the horrible game. Roger was not interested in eating them. But there seemed to be two inevitable results. Either he became too rough and inadvertently killed them or in trying to work the narrow escape bit let the mouse genuinely escape. In either event, Geoff would get up and trudge away, as though anxious to disassociate himself from the whole clumsy mess.
This mousing reputation of the younger cat came to the attention of our neighbors on the other side, Professor and Mrs. John Mattingly. There was a small barn behind their house. That year John had constructed a corral and purchased a middle-aged, five-gaited show horse named Blue Genius. We had a small terrace on that side of the house which overlooked the corral. Blue Genius was an incurable ham. When he was aware that he had an audience, he would go around and around the perimeter of his corral, neck arched, springing nicely, exhibiting his gaits. Then he would come to the nearest portion of the railing, stick his head over, blow, and wait for the applause. If the quantity pleased him, he would repeat the whole business.
John asked me if they could enlist the assistance of Geoffrey in ridding the small barn of mice which were eating the grain. I said certainly, and a day or so later he asked if I could bring Geoff over to be introduced to his duties. I did so and found that Professor Mattingly had cut a small and perfect Gothic arch in the sliding door of the barn, about a foot above the bottom sill. He felt we should acquaint the cat with this mode of access. As Geoff was accustomed to the window system, I was certain it would take but one trip in and out through the arch to give him all he needed to know. John went into the barn and closed the door. I passed Geoffrey through. John picked him up and sent him back out through the arch. At John’s insistence, we repeated this at least a dozen times. Geoff endured it with his usual obliging stoicism, but I can imagine he must have thought we had both gone mad. After the final passage into the bam, John picked Geoff up and dropped him into a grain bin. There was a scuffle of about two seconds duration, and Geoff arched out of the bin with a mouthful of mouse, leaped handily through his arch, and trotted on home. John was delighted. Thereafter Geoff apparently made it a standard part of his rounds because the mouse trouble diminished slowly to zero.
I shall skip cats for a moment to pay tribute to the Mattinglys. They were childless at that time, and both scholars. He taught Latin and Greek. Her specialty was Sanskrit. It was their habit in good weather, when schedule permitted, to go out onto the hillside behind their property and read to each other. It seemed a charming habit. One day our Johnny was missing so long that we began to worry about him. He came home and when asked where he had been, he said he had been out on the hillside reading to the Mattinglys. He said he had read them a whole book, and showed it to us. It was one of those one-dollar, inch-thick collections of Dagwood and Blondie comic strips. He said they both liked it a lot. It still touches us that those gentle and gracious people should have so politely endured one small boy’s intrusion upon their private pleasure.
That summer we were able to take our two-week turn at Wanahoo, Dorothy’s family’s camp at Piseco Lake, fifty miles northeast of Utica on Route 8. So many branches of the family were sharing the camp, scheduling was tight. Piseco Lake is a part of Dorothy’s life and now a part of mine too. The family camp was built in 1878. Dorothy’s grandmother used to go there when it was a two-day trip by carriage from Poland, stopping overnight at the inn at Hoffmeister. Dorothy was taken there for the first time when she was three weeks old.
When she was a child her father had tried to buy land on the other side of the lake. There were no camps over there. It was owned by the International Paper Company. While I was in India during the war she wrote me that the paper company had decided to sell that land in two-hundred-foot lake-front pieces, some eight hundred feet deep, extending back to the dirt road called the WPA road. I had just had a very fortunate session at the poker table with some people heavy with flight pay, and I was able to send her a little sheaf of hundred-dollar money orders. She got the other few hundred needed from her brother and bought the land. She and Johnny and the surveyor went back and forth through the woods during the black-fly season, trying to set the lines so they would include the point of land on the lake shore she wanted. Gas rationing kept people from getting up there and buying the land. Our piece was the first sold, and they used our lines as the basing point for all subsequent two-hundred-foot sites east and west of us. By the following morning, after surveying the site, Johnny was an awe-inspiring object. His black-fly bites had puffed him up so that he had no neck at all, a bulging and distended face with a nubbin of a nose and slits for eyes. He looked like a small, expressionless Siberian assassin. He insisted he felt well enough to go to school, so Dorothy walked him to the school nearby so that she could explain to his teacher what had happened and tell her she would come and get him if he felt badly. As she approached the school, holding him by the hand, the other kids out in front stared at him in awe and fell back in silence. They did not even know who he was, or, probably, what he was.
So part of our Piseco time that first summer we took the cats up was to start planning the camp we hoped to put on our land some day. We had learned during the few necessary local trips how loudly and bitterly both cats objected to riding in a car. This was the longest one yet. Twelve miles to Utica, and then (past Toppy’s tree) fifty miles to the lake. They made the trip hideous. They complained with every breath. By the time we got there Geoff was down to a breathy baritone rasp.
Cats will travel well if you start them early enough and take them often enough. On our way to Texas we had stopped in Virginia to see my sister, Doris, and her husband, Bill Robinson. Bill was getting an engineering degree at V. P. I. They had a black female cat named Buckethead. When they started the gypsy existence of a civil engineer, Buckethead traveled well. They had a sandbox on the back seat for her to use in transit. It made such an unsteady platform that, after using it, Buckethead would lie on her side for the essential cat habit of scratching at the sand to cover it up.
This is, I have heard, an ancient feline instinct based on making it more difficult for other predators to get on the track of the cat, rather than out of some sense of fastidiousness. Yet this does not explain in any satisfactory way a habit which Geoffrey began in his early maturity and continued all his life.
Dorothy always placed their dishes on waxed paper or aluminum foil. Geoff was forever the glutton, falling upon the food in his own dish and then shouldering Roger away from his dish. Roger always accepted this. Possibly it was a carryover from his maternal interlude. When elbowed aside, he would back off and sit and wait until the other cat was finished. As Geoff had a tendency to eat until everything was gone, Dorothy had to save out Roger’s food. Roger never ate much at one time. He liked to leave food and return to it off and on for snacks. Roger has always had a standard routine for showing his distaste for food which does not please him. He stares into the dish, then up at the donor, then into the dish, then up at the donor. He seems to express a bewildered disbelief. Do you actually expect me to eat that? Why are you doing this to me?
But Geoff’s critique was brutally direct. He would plod to his dish. He would lean and snuff and perhaps try one bite. Then, if we were out of the room, we would hear the sounds of his nails against the paper or foil. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Working his way around the dish he would perform a symbolic ritual of covering it up, then plod frowningly away. I can think of no more vivid way he could have expressed his opinion of what had been served him. What particularly infuriated Dorothy was that it might be something he had been eating with gusto for weeks. Cooked hamburger perhaps. Suddenly he would decide there had been quite enough of that. The healthy, well-fed cat will demand changes of diet at almost predictable intervals. It may have something to do with the digestive process. When the demanded change is not forthcoming, he will simply stop eating, despite all appearances of ravenous hunger. The better boarding kennels recognize this cat trait and cater to it when the boarding period is long, even though they continue to give their dogs standardized fare.
We hauled them squalling to Piseco and released them into an out-of-doors unlike anything they had seen. Here were steep slopes, the black silences of thick woods of pine, hemlock, birch, maple, a thousand hiding places, the strange scents of indigenous animals much larger than mice and moles, curious noises in the night, a lake shore, boats, live fish. They explored with great, quivering caution. We did worry about them up there, then, and in all the years to follow. House cats disappear in Adirondack country, taken by fishers, foxes, wildcats, coydogs and perhaps, sometimes, raccoons, weasels, and those bored, bourboned sportsmen with their mail-order artillery who come racketing in upon us each autumn in search of a dubious manhood.
Once adjusted, the cats relished every minute of it. They would come exhausted back to camp for a quick meal and a short nap, and head on out again. This was a real jungle, man. This was what the cat business was really about. Red squirrels and gray squirrels cursed them. Geoff caught chipmunks, and all but one or two managed their escape. Roger bore proudly back to the porch a shrew the size of an infant’s thumb. It had bitten him severely about the chin.
A word here about a strange talent chipmunks have. Johnny discovered it years later when he and his wife were living on a farm in Michigan. Their cats, Jaymie and Grey, caught many chipmunks. They would apparently maim them cruelly, inflicting some sort of injury to the spine. The chipmunks would writhe about, rolling and thrashing once the cat put them down, rolling right toward the cat, a reaction the cats found objectionable. Johnny shot four of the pathetic things to put them out of their misery, and, one day, when he was about to shoot the fifth, it suddenly seemed remarkable that all five could have been injured in exactly the same way, and reacted in the same way.
So he watched. When the chipmunk would roll toward the cat, the cat would back away with a pained expression. The cat would watch it thrash aimlessly in the grass and, confident that it was unable to flee, the cat’s attention would wander. The chipmunk writhed ever closer to a thicket and then suddenly shot off into cover, a little streak of pale brown a good safe distance ahead of the cat’s belated pounce. Johnny told me that he then realized, to his dismay, he had slain four skilled thespians right in the midst of their art.
We found this hard to believe. When Johnny and Anne brought Grey to Piseco, they called me from the typewriter one afternoon when Grey had caught a chipmunk. The chipmunk lay rigid and unmoving in the cat’s jaws. When Grey put it down, that little animal put on the most convincing act I have ever seen. It looked like the final agony, the last wild spasms. It imitated a broken back, and rolled wildly right into the cat. The cat backed away. The chipmunk rolled in random directions, flopping about, then abruptly it sped off to safety. This is apparently a talent shared by chipmunks everywhere and one of the strangest and most specialized defensive instincts I have ever seen. Many animals and even some insects will play dead. But as far as I have been able to tell, only chipmunks play dying.
The lake intrigued Geoffrey far more than it did Roger. The front porch of the hillside camp overlooked the boat dock and the tethered boats. One late afternoon several of us, sitting on the porch, saw Geoff jump down into a skiff. He explored it carefully, sniffing at elderly traces of fish, working his way to the stern. He got up onto the rear seat and from there onto the housing of the outboard motor. The motor was tipped up. Stepping quite daintily, he went cautiously out onto the narrower housing which encloses the drive shaft. When he took a step halfway to the propeller, his weight tilted it down abruptly, dumping him into the lake. Shocked, and doubtlessly furious, he cat-paddled to shore. A soaked cat is a sorry, spavined sight. He moved off into heavy brush, and when we saw him next he was totaly dry, fluffy, unconcerned—and probably would have told us that we were all mistaken—it had been some other cat.
When we went out in a boat he would sit on the dock and look after us so wistfully that one day Dorothy took him into a boat and rowed him down to Big Sand. It terrified him. He wanted to jump out but could not quite bring himself to do so. Dorothy let him out at Big Sand so upset he threw up, and she rowed slowly back, with Geoff following along the rocky shore line, making pitiful noises. Perhaps he noticed on that return trip that the shore line was where you go to look for frogs. Years later he owned one.
When our time was up and the next contingent due, we drove back to Clinton. The cats made loud objection the entire way, and I know it was only my imagination, but I seemed to detect in their mournful cries not only their objection to automobiles but also despair that they should be yanked out of paradise with so many woodsy tasks yet undone.
It was at Wanahoo that they became sophisticated and deft about trees. As we sat on the porch we would hear thrashings in the leaves of the smaller trees on the slope of the bank, and then, at our level, a cat face would appear to stare at us. This was a look-at-me, look-at-me device, typical of all young males. Roger made up in reckless abandon what he lacked in co-ordination and judgment. Ascending he was superb, but descending was a frantic and perilous procedure, usually ending with a quick twist, a shower of shredded bark and too long a drop to the ground. Geoff descended with all the careful assurance of a middle-aged lineman. He backed down tree trunks, setting each foothold firmly, looking down over his shoulder exactly as in those pictures of koala bears Down Under. His final drop was usually of one foot or less, followed by a glance up at where he had been.
Also it was at Piseco that they became acquainted with the half brother, Heathcliffe. Geoff and Heath soon learned to tolerate each other, though in grudging fashion. Geoff was not belligerent, at least not when he seemed to feel it a waste of time. He was ready to make those small, constructive adjustments which simplified life. But Rog and Heath reacted to each other with an undying malevolence, noisy warnings, frequent displays of claw and fang, springing back with steam-valve hissings when they met unexpectedly in doorways. It was hate at first sight, and it never lessened.
The world of the cats was growing more complex, and they were learning.