Battle ensues, and cat-rat rivalry for supremacy is expressed in no uncertain terms. There is an unpredictable intervention from a species not usually thought of as involved in these affairs.
It was just before dawn on the Istrian coastline of Slovenia, in the charming little town of Piran. Yet for three wild cats of Piran, there was no time to waste admiring the scenery or the sunrise. Felicia, Dragan, and Leopold faced their implacable enemy with courage: the terrible wild rats of Piran and their leader, General Rat. Ever the warrior, Dragan was the first to act. In one swift, animal movement he grabbed one of the larger rats in the front row, picked him up, and threw him over his shoulders, sending him tumbling and squeaking about fifteen meters out to sea. He did as much without thinking. If Dragan had thought it over, he would have remembered that the sea holds few terrors for a rat.
“Dragan! That’s no good; that’s where they came from!” Felicia reminded him.
“Very well, I’ll try another approach.” Dragan’s paw shot out and he grabbed another rat, and was about to wring its neck. Well, General Rat wasn’t going to stand for this, and both Felicia and Leopold knew it.
The twitching body of rats braced themselves for a battle. “Nctohw! (Charge!)” the General bellowed as loud as he could. They were rats. They took orders. They charged.
Dragan, it could be said, was equal to the moment, for here was an encounter that was red in tooth and claw. It was rather grotesque and gruesome, as nature in the raw can be. Inspired, Felicia reached forward, grabbing another rat in her agile little paw. “D’you know, amico (friend) Dragan, I think you might have the right idea.”
Confronted by vastly superior numbers of a species they considered vastly inferior, Felicia, Dragan, and Leopold were still determined to hold their ground. But they were so outnumbered that the rats’ victory seemed assured. It was only a matter of time.
IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE THAT ALTHOUGH DRAGAN was fond of telling old Slovene folk stories about a legendary figure named Martin Kirpan, he was at best only vaguely aware that his own great-grandfather had inspired one of the oldest Slovene folktales of them all.
The story involving Dragan’s great-grandfather “Zvonimir” was all about a cat that had singlehandedly solved an entire village’s pest or rodent problem. Zvonimir had done so by devouring every single rat, mouse, and gopher in the village and surrounding countryside. The townspeople, who were simple folk, were at first delighted. But by the time the wild and woolly cat had got rid of the very last vermin, the villagers became frightened that the greedy little beast would now start eating them. And so they offered old Zvonimir a fish that had been caught in Piran, quite unsure whether he would touch it or not.
When the cat happily ate the whole fish, including its tail, the people heaved a huge sigh of relief, and believe you me, they kept the fish coming for year-after-year to come to the cat sitting at the table. It was an alarming-looking beast, with wild whiskers and a rather disturbing smile.
Eventually, after expiring a few times from an over-stimulated palate, or from choking on fish bones, Zvonimir simply disappeared one night, and was thought dead. Yet in the middle of all this gluttony the old fellow had somehow managed to sire a litter of kittens, the oldest of which turned out to be Dragan’s grandfather.
Dragan carried those genes in his blood: he could be vicious when roused, and his appetites knew no bounds. In light of the threats the cats faced from rats in modern-day Piran, these attributes could be considered very handy indeed.
AN ANECDOTE CONCERNING DRAGAN’S ANCESTRY seemed a more pleasant way for you, dear reader, to pass the time, than for us to focus on the rather grisly cat-rat battle going on at the tip of Cape Madonna that morning.
And so, rather than giving the reader’s delicate sensibilities any more jolts with graphically violent descriptions of the battle, let us just say this: Dragan and the others had fought bravely. But as was inevitable, the rodents were now beginning to overpower them. Leopold was the first to go down, which meant rats were now swarming over his body, and he could depend upon being torn to pieces and eaten in seconds flat. “What a desperately ugly way to go,” he thought to himself.
Then, finally, Felicia remembered her errand of earlier that morning. She reached for some leaves of mint she’d been concealing under her belly and crushed them between her teeth, hissing as she did so. The rats backed away at once, repelled by what to humans may be a clean, refreshing odor but to rats is a revolting smell. She quickly passed a bundle of mint leaves to Dragan. “Just bite down hard on the leaves and hiss in your normal fashion!” Dragan did so, watching with amusement as the sheer smell of the stuff worked on the rat nervous system.
“Just like garlic and vampires,” he reflected. Leopold managed to get back on his feet, and then he too bit down hard on the mint, releasing more of the odor into the crisp morning air. The rats were falling back, coughing and spluttering like soldiers under attack from mustard gas.
“Aaaaaaqqqqqkkkkkkvvvvvv!!!” they called out in horror and disgust. Many instinctively retreated, and a couple of them actually fainted because of the smell. But not General Rat—who instead berated his troops:
“Nctohw! (Charge!)” I said, “Nctohw!” The rats looked at each other for a moment, their beady eyes wiggling and their whiskers twitching faster than usual. They didn’t appear hugely enthusiastic. “Nctohw!” General Rat roared again in his unpleasant tongue.
This was it. This was the window of opportunity for the wild cats. They pushed aside a couple of rats and began running toward the embankment, toward the crypt, toward safety.
OF COURSE, FELICIA WAS DELIGHTED WITH THIS OUTCOME, and even wondered for a moment why she had felt the need to consult Leopold. But then she turned and saw him running alongside her, immaculate in his tuxedo-patterned coat. She was, after all, glad to have him around again. While it cannot be said that this was a conclusive victory over the rats, it was a lucky escape.
And then something happened to make the rats’ trouncing complete. You won’t have forgotten Zach and Niki, surely? They were the young couple who objected to the maître d’ and the way he mistreated the wild cats at the Martin Kirpan Tavern. Well, Zach and Niki had woken up and got out of bed especially early that morning, even before sunrise. They were taking a stroll when they spied the conflagration between rat and cat down on the tip of the peninsula. As soon as they saw what was going on, they began barreling toward Cape Madonna. They were both reasonably fit. They were also extremely large from a rat perspective and moving at a fair clip. And Zach had the presence of mind to stop long enough to pick up a rock and throw it at the rats.
Niki was quick to catch on, and soon she too had picked up a rock and thrown it. The rats didn’t like the look of this at all. They liked it less when Niki and Zach ran still closer and doubled their efforts, bringing a hail of rocks down upon them. Zach, as it turned out, had a pretty decent aim, the result of his days on the cricket pitch, and he knocked several rats squealing into the sea.
General Rat turned to one of his colonels, and they both squeaked at the other rats, “Kwfnpl!” which in Rat meant, roughly, “Hold your ground, gentlemen. We need fear neither feline nor human, now that I am at your side.”
After considering this advice for a few seconds, every single common garden rat began disappearing quickly, scrambling across the rocks to safety, diving into the sea, or otherwise making for cover. By the time the human couple had got to the end of the cape, even General Rat had done the same thing; he had jumped into the water and swum for it.
Like rats leaving a sinking ship, you might say.
ZACH AND NIKI EXCHANGED A LOOK that seemed to suggest they had made their minds up—that the best place to be was gone from there. They began walking briskly away from Cape Madonna and in the general direction of their hotel. Just before they reached the promenade, lined with all those waterfront restaurants including the Martin Kirpan Tavern, they came to Vegova Lane and made a sharp right turn, into the agreeable maze of streets comprising the body of the old town. At the corner of Vegova and Boniface they alighted upon the trio of wild cats, taking a moment to catch their breaths in the cool, early morning shade of Signora Fortuna’s porch.
Cats and humans regarded each other for a moment. Their eyes met. There was a glimmer of understanding. Perhaps some intimate vibration, some transmission of gratitude was exchanged. But you started making friends and being grateful to humans—and look where that led! Domesticity, for one thing, and that was unacceptable to a feral cat of Piran. Shaking her head almost violently, Felicia began running very, very fast. She whipped between Zach’s feet, quite startling him and almost throwing him off-balance. Dragan was as quick to run past Niki, his tail brushing her leg as he sped by. Leopold followed, running as fast as he could.
And the well-intentioned humans? Well, Zach regained his balance and Niki her composure. They both felt as if the cats had been, somehow, rather ungrateful. Didn’t this pack of pusses realize that they had only been trying to help them? That all they had wanted to do was learn more about the wild cats of Piran.
There couldn’t be any harm in that, surely?
LATER, AT RAT HEADQUARTERS, WHICH WAS A DUMPSTER hidden in a thicket of trees in the suburb known as Arze, General Rat paced up and down in front of his troops. “You are a miserable mischief of mice, the whole lot of you!” (In case you didn’t know, a “mischief” is a group of mice, just as you might say a “flock” of sheep, or indeed a “rabble” of rats or “colony” of feral cats.)
“I give the order to hold your ground, and what do you do?”
“Uh, we, uh, swim away, sir?” replied one of the sergeant rats, reveling in his newfound eloquence.
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Huh?”
“Meaning to say, you gibbering idiot, that you weren’t required to supply an answer!”
“Oh.”
“I’m tempted to make an example of you, but we’ve lost enough lives today. They were Yfrtbm (Heroes)! And they shall be remembered as Yfrtbm, at least until they are forgotten!”
“Yfrtbm! Yfrtbm!!” chanted the rats, but to tell the truth, they were already beginning to forget the rats that had died that day. They hadn’t exactly been very popular rats. Mind you, what rat ever is? Aside from General Rat. And the only reason he was the most “popular” rat was that he was the loudest and, in a pinch, the most ferocious.
Growing weary of so much sticky sentiment, General Rat motioned to two of his most trusted corporals to join him in private, at the bottom of the compost heap.
“If we made any mistake today, it was this: we tried to bite off more than we could chew.”
“General?”
“I mean, the next time we attack, we make sure not only is there nowhere they can run, but we do it where we can go about our work unobserved.”
“Ah, a stroke of genius, General.”
“Of course it is! What do you expect from your brilliant leader?”
We shall not eavesdrop further on their conversation, most sensitive reader, for once again it is simply too revolting to audit. But to summarize, as humiliated and defeated as they felt, the rats of Piran would indeed be sure to fight another day. The wild cats of Piran would thus have to remain on the alert for this old enemy, one that had so obviously gained in strength and in cunning.
AND WHAT OF ZACH AND NIKI, THE YOUNG HUMAN COUPLE? How did they feel about their intervention in cat-rat affairs? Did they even believe what they thought they saw? Maybe they had sunstroke or perhaps they had drunk too much wine at dinner the night before. That would not have been so unusual for Zach, but Niki was of a somewhat steadier disposition.
The adult human mind is very quick to find so-called rational explanations for such things. As Zach and Niki walked back to their hotel in silence, they were both already rewriting what they’d seen. “It all happened in a flash, didn’t it?” Zach said eventually.
“It’s hard to tell.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I feel as well.…”
“We’ve both been under an enormous amount of stress recently,” said Niki, and Zach could only concur.
The human mind isn’t particularly supple when it comes to such matters—at least, not compared to the psyche of untamed Piranese cats. But the following night they both lay awake in the dark, repeatedly piecing together what they had seen, then imagining it from different perspectives. It was as if they were directing a film, a film about cats that were highly animated.
When Zach suggested prolonging their stay in Piran another night or two, Niki acted as if doing so was the most natural thing in the world. This was unusual because they both had something they called “careers” back in London.
IN THE CRYPT, FELICIA AND DRAGAN were treated as heroes by the other wild cats. Especially after the two of them had described in detail how heroic they had been. It’s enough to say that all of the cats were mightily relieved that their best and brightest were alive to fight another day. At the same time, although the wild cats had done a good job of depleting rat numbers, they were quite sure they’d be hearing more from them. And what about that young human couple? What could anyone say about that? The two lucky cats discussed the battle from their own perspectives, stressing their own bravery and downplaying the human role, which is the wild cat way.
As Dragan said: “It’s been a big day.” And as Magyar said, “Day big a been it’s.” The entire colony of the wild cats of Piran was now well aware that the peninsula’s rat population had become the team to beat this season, and that it had a leader, one capable of strategic thought.
Of course there had been one more surprise for the other wild cats that morning. Leopold had been waiting outside the entrance of the crypt for a signal from Felicia.
“Come in, Leopold. You’re among friends here,” she said finally. The mere mention of his name caused the fur on the back of Magyar’s neck to stand up. You can forget anything you’ve heard about Austro-Hungarian alliances. This particular Hungarian tabby cat bore his fellow feline from Vienna little affection.
“Leopold … has decided he cannot live without us,” Felicia declared as Leopold made his entrance. He blushed at this remark, the white of his tuxedo coat turning pink with embarrassment.
“Use good to him put better!” grunted Magyar.
“Don’t worry, my Hungarian friend,” said Leopold. “To good use I shall indeed be put—my first task being to draw up a plan to rescue Beyza from the house which, I believe, you call Dogboy Villa.”
That silenced Magyar for a while, which was an achievement in and of itself. But what indeed of that grander plan, to rescue Beyza from captivity? After pausing to gather your breath if necessary, do read on to find out.