Chapter One
The Kitten
The little black kitten had never felt snow. The snow was fresh-fallen powder, and a single pair of tire tracks led from the gate to the ranch buildings. She called for her mother. She tried to climb out of the tire track, but the snow crumbled beneath her paws and she fell back in. She could not walk very well, but she could walk, so she did, crying for her mother with every step. Night was falling.
She came to a building that smelled of food, and there were people inside, but there was also a dog barking. She continued along the tire track and came to a bridge. After a long moment of hesitation, feeling the deep booming of the water below, the kitten hurried forward, silent now. She followed the track to a wooden wall and could follow it no farther. She struggled along the wall through stiff grass and sharp-crusted snow, afraid, calling again for her mother. She found a little opening in the wall, just whisker-wide, and slipped through. The building smelled of strange things but was not so terribly cold.
She found a pile of rags, licked the snow from between her toes, and fell asleep.
The next morning, a still, cold morning, I saw a little black shape darting amid the unidentifiable junk in the equipment barn. A few clumsy minutes of chase and I had captured the kitten, who quieted as I held her with one hand and tucked her into the front of my jacket. She was shivering.
There was no answer when Elizabeth and I telephoned our only neighbor, an old Norwegian bachelor rancher, the only conceivable source for the miraculous appearance of this tiny furball. I went out looking for tracks, but there weren’t any leading from his place. Then I found the kitten’s footprints, smaller than a dime, still brightly visible in the snow all the way down our driveway from the county road, more than a quarter of a mile. There were tire tracks in the road showing that a vehicle had turned around. Someone—who? why? in the middle of the night, in a blizzard—had just dumped her there. What kind of person could do such a thing? We were twenty miles of icy dirt road from the nearest town, Livingston, Montana.
She gobbled the tuna and leftover chicken without looking up, and slurped the milk till her belly pooched out tight. It had a little white star at the center, matching the prim white bow tie at her sternum. She was otherwise all black. I cut down a wine box and filled it with spruce needles and leaf duff, and she used it right away, scratching busily to hide her deposit, watching us with wide eyes as we watched her back in proud delight.
We had no call to be so proud, for all cats naturally use litter boxes at first exposure as long as they feel calm and welcome, because the litter box sufficiently resembles the scent-marking spot that all their kind, including their wild ancestors, employ to proclaim, “This is home.”
We exiled her from the bedroom that night, but in the morning she greeted us at the refrigerator with her black stump of a tail straight up and vibrating—the universal cat gesture of greeting and confidence. Her evident understanding of indoor life and her readiness to be cradled in palm or elbow made clear that this was no barn cat, nor victim of abuse. The vet in town declared her female, healthy, about three months old, and likely to be “on the energetic side.” Her good cheer, he said, was probably partly due to having been tenderly handled as a baby and partly to an inborn sunny nature, a roll of the genetic dice.
Counting three months back made her birthday in August. We gave our gift from the god of chance the name Augusta.
Augusta’s first order of business on the ranch was to make a mental map of her new home. It was more than geographic. In the first days after her arrival, the snow kept her confined to the house, and she spent hour on hour tracing the contours of every chair, table, bookcase, telephone, carpet edge, window frame, and pencil holder. She also was also mapping things invisible to people—mouse trails, bug spoor, hundreds of scents tracked in from outside.
All this was largely an exercise in olfactory memory. Only when each scent impression is recorded deep in the hippocampus is it coordinated with an image in the visual region of the cerebral cortex. That coordination is then deeply engrained. The power of your cat’s memory is evident when he startles at the slightest change in his customary surroundings. Cats have five times more surface area inside their noses than we do, and three times more receptor nerves per unit of area lining that surface. Of those receptors there are hundreds of types—the possible combinations of scent perceptions, therefore, being nearly infinite.
A cat’s hearing is extremely acute—the widest range, in fact, of any mammal except bats. It is equally superior in its directionality: Watch your cat’s ears twitch and swivel, each moving independent of the other, as she tunes in on the precise place from which a sound is coming. For Augusta the faintest whisper of breeze on a screen, swirl of snow, or far call of raven was matter for instant, rapt attention. She seemed pure awareness.
During her explorations Augusta did not care to be interrupted. She knew her name very quickly, but she responded to it only selectively. If she was busy mapping, you could wait. She explored to the edge of exhaustion, barely managing to find a cushion or corner before sinking into dreamland. You could pick her up and haul her to bed unconscious like any other infant, all trust and contentment.
She would sleep for hours, limp as a rag doll, then suddenly be seized by a dream, moaning, teeth chattering, feet twitching, eyelids open to show not her eyes but the pink-pearlescent nictitating membrane—a sort of inner eyelid that distributes tears across the surface of a cat’s eyes, like a windshield wiper constantly clearing the eye of tiny debris as well as protecting it from infection or scratches. An adult cat’s eyes are as big as a human adult’s, and she can open the pupils three times as wide. A sort of crystalline mirror behind her retina, the tapetum lucidum, amplifies incoming light by as much as 40 percent. That’s what produces the familiar gold-green shine when a cat meets a flashlight beam in the dark.
It is that amplification that allows cats to see in almost complete darkness. They do pay a price for that brilliant advantage, however, some of which you can easily see—the narrow slit that her pupils become in bright light, evidence of her intolerance of excessive dazzle—and some of which you may think a disadvantage but doesn’t really matter to the cat, namely, not much in the way of color vision. Another deficit is a meaningful one: Cats really can’t focus very well up close. When you extend your palm with a couple of treats as a reward for good behavior or a trick, you may notice that your cat hesitates a moment, sniffing—finding the treat not with vision but by smell.
Augusta spurned store-bought toys in favor of a feather tied to a ribbon. As long as we moved it in just the right way—making it jump from cover, fly from chair to chair, run for dear life—she was thrilled. But if it came toward her, or flew too low or too high, too slow or too fast, there was no game. She taught us to play with her, by her rules. Every toy movement had to emulate wild prey. In this she was not being arbitrary. One of the finest-tuned of cats’ senses is their perception of motion. The cat brain’s attunement to the slightest gradations of movement has evolved to gauge the flight of prey or the movement of the prey’s surroundings that might indicate imminent flight. The cat’s visual cortex records images much as an old-fashioned movie camera does—as a fast-moving series of still pictures (faster than the camera, however)—allowing a precise measurement of speed. Hence your cat’s ability to intersect the flight of a ball—or of a hummingbird—unerringly. And hence Augusta’s utter uninterest in a ball or feather that did not meet her criteria for prey emulation.
A few days after her arrival, the wind known locally as a chinook—the hot dry breath of an exhausted snowstorm—gusted down from the mountains, and in half a morning our snow was gone. Out went Augusta, fearless, tail held high, to map more of her new world. It must have seemed vast, but she was entirely undaunted. We worried that our frisking horses and blundering cows would be big dangers to the tiny kitten, not to mention our case-hardened ranch cats Walter and Penny.
Walter and Penny were big, serious, barn cats. They were not quite feral, but they weren’t lap kitties either. Our ranch manager kept a kibble dispenser topped up in the tack room, and on the bitterest winter nights he plugged in a little stove there, so they had a degree of domestic comfort. There was a raw toughness about them as well, however. We had had a number of nocturnal coyote forays that resulted in the deaths of our ducks (three, two, one, none in a week) and then of two ferocious geese. Coyotes had also put an end to a naïve attempt to establish a family of barn cats with a basket of barn-bred kittens. But when coyotes came raiding, Walter and Penny just took to fencepost tops and kept solemn watch. The coyotes knew better than to tangle with them.
When Augusta sniffed her way along the pole fence that served as Walter and Penny’s midday observation deck, we were ready to move fast. There was some reason to fear that a pair of long-established cats could well feel compelled to defend their territory, and a territorial attack against a kitten as small as Augusta could be quick and lethal. As she came near, however, and finally passed directly beneath them, Augusta seemed to ignore Walter and Penny altogether, and the big cats, eyes half closed, returned the favor. Undoubtedly both parties were intensely aware of each other, but they did not reveal their awareness in any way perceptible to humans. From then on, Walter and Penny and Augusta were good neighbors, never friendly but always polite.
A continuation of the same pole fence separated the ranch yard from the horse pasture, where we feared she could easily be trampled. The horses were curious, gathering close to snuffle at the furry little explorer, but from how they looked at us and then at her and then at us again it seemed clear that they recognized that respect was due to Augusta. Horses understand rules when they know you are a fair dealer, and it can take little more than a nearly invisible transaction like this one for an agreement to be reached. Horses and cats have a long history of friendship. Cats are not infrequently employed as stall companions for racehorses.
Augusta sometimes sat in the window or on the fence and watched the big beasts at play, but she never entered the horse pasture. The territorial boundary was easy to recognize, since the horses grazed it close all along the fenceline. The treaty required no enforcement. But even had Augusta unthinkingly wandered into the pasture, no horse would ever have harmed her.
What had once been a home corral behind our house was now a scruffy, weedy back yard riddled with the burrows of rodents. Augusta’s feather-and-ribbon practice probably hadn’t been necessary, for from the first she was a highly accurate tracker. She could smell her way along a network of scent marks, dried urine, scat, stray fur, and all the other clues small creatures leave for sufficiently skilled predators to decode. More useful still, Augusta could tune in to the ultrasonic chatter of rodents deep in their tunnels. Cats can hear higher-frequency sounds than any other terrestrial mammal, quite a bit higher even than dogs—up to one hundred thousand hertz (cycles per second). People max out at about forty thousand, if they haven’t been to too many rock concerts or ear-splitting bars (which probably eliminates about half of all American grownups).
Augusta’s predatory prowess required snowless ground, which we did have intermittently through the winter, thanks to our valley’s merciless winds. The unrelenting gusts drove visitors and unseasoned newcomers half-crazy and blew snow into heaping drifts downwind of dead brown-beaten prairie—huntable, if it was not too cold for the princess kitty, for such she was becoming.
But as she matured, Augusta became not only a princess but a deadly killer. She would wait in what seemed rocklike stillness—an illusion, because in fact she was quivering within—till the moment came for the balletic arc that would pin her prey for the fatal bite to the spinal cord. She would chomp a deer mouse down in two crunches—an ounce, give or take. A shrew was one bite, no more than a quarter of an ounce. At two ounces and therefore, I thought, beyond her capability—I thought wrong—a vole was a real chew. Pocket gophers, ground squirrels, pack rats all truly were, at least for now, impossible, but that didn’t keep her from crouching flat and switching her tail at the sight of one: the infallible indicator of a mounting urgency to attack.
Augusta herself might well have been prey for quite a few of our neighbors: coyotes foremost, which were always nearby, also foxes, conceivably raccoons, black bears in chokecherry season, and abundant avian predators, including hawks, owls, possibly ravens, and certainly golden eagles. Our hope, perhaps naïve, was that keeping her indoors at dawn, dusk, and nighttime would keep her safe. We knew there were diurnal dangers—rattlesnakes, for example, which wouldn’t eat her but surely could kill a curious kitten—but we couldn’t imagine denying Augusta her hunting ground.
In the snow, in any case, Augusta was hopeless. It seemed clear that if she had not found her way down our driveway, she would have starved. She simply had no way to cope with snow—her paws were too small to walk on top of it, and she had no idea how to dig. Even in the absence of snow, she just could not stand the cold. When the back yard blew snow-free that winter, I would open the door and she would pad as far as the edge of the porch to survey the possibilities of a return to the hunt; with the first puff of breeze, though, one sniff of ten below, and she was back inside like a shot. We tried a couple of times just plopping her into the snow to see how she would cope. She didn’t. She plowed straight to the door mewing in pain, extending her feet to have the ice picked out like a lion with a thorn in every paw.
Once confined to quarters for the winter, which in Montana can stretch into May, Augusta loved to watch water, as long as she didn’t have to touch it. A full sink, even better a draining sink, was sheer fascination. She could watch the water in the toilet for hours, and was partial to drinking from it. She loved every kind of falling water. At first she preferred a thin stream from a faucet almost turned off, but over the course of the winter her taste grew more precise. She wanted a drip, not too fast, not too slow. She would slap her paw through it and then lick the water from her toes. Sometimes she was content just to watch the drip, for an hour or more. It was an ancestral image—of an oasis, where a spring often drips in precisely the same way from mineral walls. Augusta was a desert cat.
She was in fact only a few thousand years of descent from the desert wildcat of North Africa. The domestic cat and the North African wildcat were once considered separate species, but they are now recognized as members of the same—Felis silvestris. They differ only as subspecies.1 Unlike the young of any other wild feline, the kittens of Felis silvestris lybica can be tamed almost as easily as those of a house cat. They don’t look much different either. The big difference is that our cats, Felis silvestris catus, now live all over the world, some snuggling on laps, others struggling at the brink of starvation.
The first incontrovertible evidence of something resembling domestication of the modern cat was thought until recently to have been identified in northern China. In 2013 Yaowu Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a team of fellow researchers published their findings: In an archeological dig in the early agricultural village of Quanhucun, in Shaanxi province, they had found a number of cat remains that—as shown by analysis of the collagen in the bones and by biometric measurement—were, in their view, unmistakably Felis silvestris catus.2
The researchers also found ceramic grain containers designed to exclude rodents—proof that the people there had a rodent problem, hence a need for cats. The villagers’ primary food was millet, and although cats are constitutionally 100 percent carnivorous, the bone analysis also showed that these cats were so hard up that they also sometimes dined on that grain (something today’s manufacturers of cheap cat food may be relieved to know). In fact, there was one cat that ate a lot of millet—perhaps a house pet, or a cripple, in any case obviously hand-fed by humans.
The site was carbon-dated to between 5,280 and 5,560 years ago. The ineluctable conclusion is that well before that time there were already domesticated cats somewhere in North Africa or the Middle East. Presumably by trade, those Chinese cats had come more than four thousand miles from the land of their origin.
But a subsequent re-analysis of the Chinese cat bones showed them not to be related to the North African wildcat but another species altogether, a local one, the leopard cat, Prionailurus bengalensis (a species that would turn up in the late twentieth century interbred with our house cat species to produce the beautiful domestic hybrid now known as the Bengal, whom we will meet in pages to come). Apparently, the domestication of the leopard cat didn’t last, however, because there are no longer any domestic leopard cats in China, only wild ones. All domestic Chinese cats today are the same as ours, Felis silvestris catus.3
Meanwhile, it was fairly common knowledge among inquirers into feline prehistory that a single cat skeleton had been found some time ago on Cyprus buried next to a human skeleton, dating back about 7,500 years. The cat might have been domestic, or might have been a North African wildcat brought to the island. There had been no further evidence of cat burials there, however, so the single instance was insufficient proof of domestication. Then new bones started to appear in new diggings on Cyprus, in some numbers, including one other cat buried next to a person, carbon-dated at ten thousand years ago. Being buried with a cat did suggest some sort of association more significant than just commensalism (that is, cats hanging around people and people tolerating them for the mutual advantage of rodent control). Archeologists have found that cats were also buried near people in ancient Mesopotamia about five thousand years ago,4 and cat remains were recently discovered in the predynastic elite cemetery of Hierakonpolis in ancient Egypt, buried there with humans nearly six thousand years ago.5 Pets or commensals? We just can’t tell, at least yet.
The first visual representation of an obviously pet cat—it’s wearing a leash—was painted on a tomb in Egypt between 2500 and 2350 B.C. Cats were common figures in Egyptian art for centuries thereafter. The ancient Egyptians loved cats. They worshiped cat-gods. They prepared dead cats for the underworld with the same respect they accorded one another’s corpses. One tomb, discovered in 1888, held more than a hundred thousand cat mummies. Sacred cats prowled the temples, and pet cats purred at the foot of Egyptian beds.
(The English are now renowned for their devotion to their pussycats, but in 1888 their ailurophilia was evidently not quite so sentimental. Only one of those hundred thousand cat mummies brought from Egypt to Liverpool was preserved. It is now on exhibit in London’s Natural History Museum. The rest were ground up for fertilizer.)
Once cats adopted the Egyptians, they were in civilization to stay. The relationship has not always been smooth, however. Think of all the superstitions about black cats. Cats were often blamed for the Black Plague. Cats have long been associated with witchcraft. Some people even today day are possessed by an angry hatred of cats. Yet cats continue to find their way into human homes and hearts. They live, comfortably, in civilization. But are they civilized?
When Augusta knew immediately to use a litter box and to cover her waste; when she devoted single-minded attention to mapping the minutest details of her new home; when she taught us to play with her by her own rules; when, despite her tender age, she made her own arrangements with the ranch cats and horses; when she hunted and killed and gobbled down her prey; even when she stared at a dripping faucet as though hypnotized—in all these ways our “domestic” cat was acting in patterns set for her by her wild nature. We would come to learn many more, none of which could ever be domesticated out of her.
However wild her ancient nature, Augusta’s dependence on us and her affection for us were equally real, and marked her as immitigably domestic. Her species’ capacity for love, and the needs that grew from it, emerged only recently in its evolution, and in many individual cats those qualities remain latent and unevoked. Kittens who grow up without human love will, in fact, most likely never show it in adult life. But given the merest touch of a tender hand, the warmth of a lap, the soothing of a voice meant to comfort and calm, even in some rather harsh environments the kitten’s innate capacity for human companionship will bloom. They will love, and they will need to be loved.
Like too many other cat owners, Elizabeth and I underestimated the depth of Augusta’s emotional needs. The conventional wisdom holds that cats are more attached to their territories than to their people, and that like their wild ancestors, they are essentially loners. Oh, so when she slipped beneath the covers and curled up between Elizabeth’s legs, she must have been just seeking physical warmth? When she stretched out on my chest in the morning and purred, it was only because she wanted to be fed?
When we larked off to Mexico for a week to look at birds when she was only six months old, we told ourselves she’d be fine. Worse by far was when we went to New York to be married, and then to Italy, leaving Augusta at home in the care of the ranch manager’s niece, whom we didn’t know at all. Our cat sitter fled altogether after the first few days, leaving the manager’s teenage son, the very type of irresponsibility, to pop in at our house twice a day to leave food for the now nine-month-old kitten. We asked that he also stay a while and play with her a little, but he didn’t even pretend to have done so.
When we returned, Augusta wiggled between our legs purring loudly, her tail quivering straight up in joy, and we interpreted her present happiness as proof that she had in fact been fine all along. I know a woman who lived in a bleak little studio and used to go away for long weekends with boyfriends and whose cat, when she returned, always leapt into her arms in delight. She took this as irrefutable evidence that leaving the cat alone had caused the poor creature no suffering. This particular cat did not seem to mind the buildup of waste in her litter box—did not poop or pee on my friend’s pillow as another cat might well have done. She ate dry kibble from a dispenser. Video cameras in experiments of parallel conditions usually show the cat looking out the window, perhaps excessively grooming, mostly just sleeping. What are we to conclude? Stick around, we’re going to find out.
First let’s think back a hundred years, or to anywhere even now where cats are not beloved pets. That would be most of history and much of the world. Where did Augusta’s inexhaustible affection for us come from? It was probably an emergent quality, which had lain dormant in her ancestors’ inner life through the centuries. Perhaps it had been selected for when cats and people first cooperated on those long-ago farms, and children and cats played, and probably slept, together. And surely it had been cultivated sufficiently in enough households through the generations that it became a reproductive advantage: Affectionate cats were protected, and well fed, and therefore their offspring were more likely to thrive—more likely, therefore, to produce more successful offspring themselves.
And probably that household affection didn’t have to be quite so specific to be sufficient. Probably we’ve developed a system of sympathy that has created a feedback loop, whereby the more precisely we focus our affection, the more fully, in turn, the cats explain their needs to us (“No, not there, scratch me there—ah—yes”). In any case, according to the growing body of scientific understanding of cats’ emotional needs, we were doing so many things wrong that we had no right to expect even loyalty from Augusta. And yet she loved us.
And you? When you read about all you haven’t done, all you’ve done wrong, do you also fill with shame? Or are you outraged? My grandparents on the farm in Vermont (or Iowa, or Mississippi) wouldn’t even have recognized this nonsense.
Nonetheless, only a sampling of Kathy Blumenstock’s “Ten Ways to Unknowingly Crush Your Cat’s Spirit”6 throws long, black shadows across the universe of guilty cat owners:
Shouting: Raised voices will terrify your cat…
Punishing: Yelling “bad cat,” throwing things, motioning in anger, and scolding your cat when she misses the litter box or claws your sofa tells her you are unhappy, even if she has no idea why. Grabbing her and shoving her face in a mess will leave her petrified.… All you’re teaching her is to be afraid…
Hurting: Hitting, kicking, physically harming a cat in any way, from a “light tap” to a hard smack, is inhumane, evil, morally wrong, and guaranteed to instill fear in any cat, breaking her spirit, and her heart, in the process…
How about Megan Kaplan’s “Top 10 Pet-Owner Mistakes?”7 At least she brings dogs in, to spread the blame.
Mistake 1: Buying a pet spontaneously.
Mistake 3: Being inconsistent with the rules.…
Mistake 4: Dispensing too many free treats.… Treats lose their training value if your pet gets them for no reason.…
Mistake 9: Failing to make your home pet-friendly.… Place litter boxes… in quiet areas throughout your home.… Plug in a night-light beside each one so your cat can find it in the dark.
Megan, had you not heard that they can see in the dark? Still, the night-lights could help us from tripping over all those litter boxes.
One more list to tell us how terrible we all, no, most of us, well, some of us, really are: “Ten Things Cats Won’t Tell You,” by Kelli B. Grant.8 Again, to be merciful, just a sample.
2. I pretend I’m fine, even when I’m not.… “What does a cat do when it feels good? Sleep. What does a cat do when it feels bad? Sleep.”
3. My bad behavior is a result of your bad behavior.
10. I’m not really that funny.
We thought Augusta was funny. After she tore the eight black pipe-cleaner legs off her favorite toy, the Furry Spider, we molded them into the Spider Ball. Our bedroom was long and narrow, with a bare wood floor. Augusta would bound onto the bed, and we would throw the Spider Ball to the far end of the room, and she would pounce on it with such savage glee that sometimes she would turn a full somersault, and then she would grip it in her front paws and try to disembowel it with her pumping back bunny-legs. This was of course an inborn enactment of hunting and killing. And Kelli, I’m sorry, it was funny.
And were we inconsistent with the rules? Did we dispense too many free treats? Did I ever yell “bad cat!” when she was ripping the bedspread to shreds and scare her? Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Did I ever hit, kick, or physically harm her? Not really, though I did bop her a few times. Did I do it like a good mother, without wrath? Guilty, guilty.
But as long as we love them, they bless us with their love. It’s like people, really. You can make a lot of mistakes, as long as you try to tune in to how your cat understands that you love her. It does require paying attention.
Have you ever seen anybody try to pat your cat on the head like a dog? Rare is the cat who won’t flee, duck, or bite. Soon enough, if we pay attention, we learn where our cats like to be stroked, how hard, which direction, with fingertip, flat of hand, tip of nose—and yet we never quite learn where the limit is, whether geographic (not there, you moron!) or chronologic (that’s enough already!).
One reason intolerant people can’t tolerate cats is that cats express themselves like cats. Dogs really do try to figure out what you want to see and hear, and they deliver it—good dog! Cats love for you to love them, but they’re just not wired for tail wagging, slobbering, and joyful woofing.
So what are cats trying to tell us? There is recent evidence that they and we share emotional centers in the brain of striking similarity, and that cats’ vocal expressions originate in those areas. Could it be that we recognize what they’re saying in ways we don’t consciously understand? Pascal Belin, of the University of Glasgow, and a team of other researchers were interested in Charles Darwin’s hypothesis that a common set of mechanisms underlies the expression of emotions in both humans and animals.9 The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine activity in the brains of several different species—including people and cats—in response to a range of emotion-related vocalizations. They employed positive ones, such as expressions of satisfaction, sexual pleasure, and hunger, and negative ones like alarm calls, distress signals, and cries of pain. Their first objective was to see if the same regions of the human brain were stimulated by these vocalizations as the brain regions of the creatures in the act of expressing themselves—and they were.10
Because it was possible that the humans’ familiarity with cats might predispose them to an understanding of cat language, the researchers also used vocalizations of rhesus monkeys, which neither the human subjects nor the cats had ever heard. The emotional expressions of both the cats and the monkeys, positive and negative, showed precisely the looked-for activation in the humans’ brains, and the human brains responded accordingly to the negative and positive emotions. (This result at least hypothetically demonstrates a line of emotional language development in mammalian evolution, dating way back before our hominid ancestors started actually talking in words.)
But the humans turned out not to realize how the cats’ and the monkeys’ emotional “speech” rhymed with their own. They might have understood some of the cats’ expressions, from their own experience with cats—though still not all that much—but they didn’t get the monkey talk at all. What their brains knew, they themselves didn’t know.
Perhaps someday we will be able to dig deep enough beneath our consciousness to sense what our brains are already processing. Maybe even now some yogi or other mystic could do it. In the meantime, if we listen well enough to what our cats have to say, we can understand quite a lot of it. More comes to us year by year from science.
Beyond the nice lists and internet advice whose authority one never really can know, there’s now solid, tested, scientific evidence for what we can do to improve our cats’ quality of life (or assure us that what we’re already doing is good). But a great deal of it has not yet made it to the public at large, or is intermingled with erroneous information that gets passed along from cat book to cat book without their authors bothering to check whether it’s true or not. The first great collection of scientific studies and essays, The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behaviour,11 was published only in 1988, and many of its findings have yet to reach the majority of cat owners.
The frustration the scientists felt about their work emerged in one of the essays, “Practical Aspects of Research on Cats,” by Claudia Mertens and Rosemary Schär:
Veterinarians… often lack scientifically funded knowledge of a) normal cat behavior, b) the minimum living conditions “acceptable” to the cat, c) the causes of behavioral disturbances, d) what humans expect from their cats and the ability of cats to satisfy those expectations.… The scientific basis of our ethological, ecological, sociological, and even psychological knowledge of domestic cats and the human–cat relationship is limited, and many of the existing studies summarized in this volume have not been accessible to veterinarians or the interested layman. On the other hand, popular cat books generally are not written by scientists and most often are not up-to-date (to say the least).
The last statement is still true, alas, and it’s still true that far too many veterinarians are not well trained in the full spectrum of cats’ needs. But just in the last few years that has been changing fast. A landmark document from the veterinary community12 opens with these words: “A cat’s level of comfort with its environment is intrinsically linked to its physical health, emotional well-being, and behavior.” As self-evident and commonsensical as that may sound to many of us, it is a very different order of values from those held by veterinarians only a generation or two ago—indeed from many cat owners’ ideas even now of what cats need. There are all too many cat owners, at this moment, whose idea of care is feed ’em, house ’em, take ’em to the vet if they break their leg, and otherwise, ptui—they can take care of themselves, for God’s sake, they’re cats. That’s why I didn’t get a goddam dog. You don’t have to walk ’em, they don’t slobber all over ya, they poop in a sandbox, you can leave ’em alone for any old time as long as they get fed.
This set of attitudes isn’t a myth. A well-conducted study confirms that dogs get much better veterinary care than cats, and significant numbers of cat owners don’t even believe cats can get sick.13
We put human beings in solitary confinement, after all. Slide their dinners through a slot, award sunshine, maybe, once in a while, for docile defeat. We put our own parents in “long-term care facilities,” to be strapped down, downed out with antipsychotics, scrubbed down like doomed livestock on the slaughter ramp. And funny thing? Recently some prisons and old folks’ homes have brought in cats, and even psychopathic murderers and previously unresponsive wanderers-in-fog begin to smile, touch the cats, cuddle them. Sometimes something breaks loose inside them and they weep.
An American psychologist based in Switzerland, Dennis C. Turner, has studied the effects of the companionship of cats on the emotional states of people living alone with cats, people living alone without cats, cat-owning couples, and couples without cats. Animals, science generally claims, don’t have the same rich inner lives that we humans do. This, of course, is anathema to many pet owners. Turner and his colleague Zana Bahlig-Pieren decided to test the widespread belief of dog and cat owners who believed that they understood their pets’ behavior, emotions, and intentions.14 The experimental subjects included roughly equal numbers of people who had experience with dogs or with cats or with both, and those without any. They were shown a sequence of photographs and videos of the animals and then asked to answer a series of multiple-choice questions. For each question there were three anthropomorphic answers (answers that “ascribe human mental experience to non-animals”) and three scientific answers. Each of the three answers was rated by three ethologists, independently, as “very plausible,” “plausible,” or “implausible.”
The people who had experience with both dogs and cats scored highest in scientific (“ethologically very plausible”) understanding of the scenes. Dog people were more anthropomorphic than cat people, but both still showed a high level of understanding. Even the people with no personal experience with dogs or cats at all were pretty good at interpreting the animals.
John S. Kennedy, in The New Anthropomorphism, published in 1992, vigorously condemned any use of anthropomorphism by scientists, but according to Bahlig-Pieren and Turner he also maintained that, “the capacity for anthropomorphic thinking may be a product of natural selection, probably because it proved to be useful to our ancestors for predicting and controlling the behaviour of animals.” Which kind of sounds like trying to have it both ways. Whatever—it does seem pretty clear by now, on the basis of a good bit of sound science, that at least some of our sense of understanding of Augusta was not just wishful projection.
Still, there was so much we did not understand. That first winter was very cold—it hit thirty-six below one night—and so Augusta’s life was an indoor one. Why did she flee at the sound of most men’s feet from the moment they came in the door but would trot right out to greet our one friend who was six feet eight inches tall and wore size fifteen boots? How could she settle gently in the crook of an arm, or lie curled in the curve of a neck on the pillow, but resolutely refuse to sit on a lap?
Another friend, a longtime naturalist practiced in close observation of all sorts of animal behavior, asked, “Why don’t you teach her to fetch?”
Cats can fetch? Many a morning we would throw the fuzzy Spider Ball down our long skinny bedroom and Augusta would give chase, as any cat would do, then wait for one of us to go get it, go back to bed, call for Augusta to follow, wait for Augusta to figure out that she was being summoned, wait for Augusta to jump back up on the bed, and throw the Spider Ball again. But finally, one miraculous day, she brought it back, sort of, at least to the foot of the bed, to cheers, huzzahs, good kitties! and a single crunchy treat. From then on we brought her gradually up to about 60 percent success as a retriever cat, at which point her boredom, or ours, or both, intersected her rising retrieval curve and flattened it flat. Probably that was just a pause and, if we had kept up the good work, she would have gotten better, but all three of us were, frankly, sick of the Spider Ball. Augusta’s future as a trick cat went dark.
Spring in Montana begins as melt, mud, overcast, and thunderstorms, and then one day the world is green, wildflowers spangle the hills, and your cat is bounding across the ground squirrels’ lawn, a black wiggle monkeying up a spruce and gone. Gone all day. Had an eagle gotten her so soon? It was too cool for rattlesnakes yet; too bright for coyotes; the chance of a cow stomping her were slim; the horses were her friends; my ranch partners’ dogs were harmless Labs. A bear? Old-timers assured us they didn’t come down till the chokecherries ripened, hot summer. We were a long way from the road, and there was hardly any traffic anyhow. It was a good, safe place to be a cat.
The ecosystem was swirling and spinning into order minute by minute, first algae clinging to cold rock at river’s edge, first grasses slicing up through winter straw, first frog eggs bursting into tadpoles in the pond, eggs everywhere, tiny green ones curling new leaves around their sticky fuzz, pearlescent butterfly eggs disgorging caterpillars, magpie eggs cracking from within at the insistent tap of naked black blind chicks, chartreuse willow shoots swelling with yellow catkin buds. The deer mice in their hundreds were setting up housekeeping, the dominant males marking territory with urine and all their followers racing about, checking, checking to be sure they were getting the system straight. Augusta followed the re-establishment of mouse society with close attention, in no need of schooling. Augusta’s gift was evolution’s gift.
Her sense of smell was uniquely attuned to this kind of signal. When the complete genome of her species was published in 2014, one of the more remarkable findings was that the gene “repertoires” of dogs and cats have evolved to differ in a particularly significant way: As is well known, dogs are terrific smellers, exquisitely sensitive to what researchers call odorants; but in the same gene region of cats, the repertoire is specific to an equally exquisite sensitivity to pheromones. “These results,” the researchers write, “add further evidence supporting cats’ extensive reliance on pheromones for sociochemical communication.”15
When your cat looks at you in a puzzled, dreamy way with her mouth hanging open and her upper lip pulled up, that means that she has been using her “booster” sense of smell, which requires her to open her mouth in this oddball gape expression, usually known by its German name, flehmen. Behind her upper front teeth are two tiny tubes, each of which leads to what is called the vomeronasal organ, a sac containing an array of at least thirty exquisitely sensitive chemical receptors.16 Cats displaying flehmen are usually engaged in a subtle reading of scent marks left by other cats, and they are in a state of almost hypnotic absorption.
All that pheromone gab doesn’t go on just between cats. Augusta could read the deer mouse community map like Leonard Bernstein scanning a Beethoven score. Her perception of spring was not like ours. We see the world around us and we glory in its multiplicity of wonders. The cat tunes in to an invisible web of scent, of creatures she is designed to kill.
Montana summer is all allegro. The sun may paint the northern sky red till midnight: Augusta’s first summer solstice never got truly dark, for the moon was a waxing crescent, and even when the moon is new, unless the clouds are thick indeed, the stars over Montana are sufficient to illuminate a path. At 2:52 A.M. the sun began to brighten the sky, albeit dimly. Fog filled the valley, and a thin, steady rain was pittering on the roof. Augusta sat on the windowsill disconsolate. She hated rain.
Outside, it looked as though every animal visible also hated rain. Magpies hunched in the spruces, soaked and cold. Two golden eagles brooded on fence posts, disheveled and not on the lookout. The famous big sky hung heavy and silent. The horses stood nose to tail, heads down, glistening eyelashes closed. The cows found a lee slope and turned their butts to the wind and did what they always, reliably, in all weather, did: eat. Leafblade and root were in joy, the soil still warm from yesterday’s long sun, their growth rate astonishing, as was that of the cows and their scampering, mud-flinging calves. Buds were splitting, petals slick with light, mayflies new-hatched clinging to the underside of streamside leaves. When the midday wind blew the clouds apart, the whole orchestra swung into its principal theme, at a storm-driven pace. In fact already the late-day-to-come’s black thunder was grumbling in the mountains, with the impatience of an omnipotent monster. Augusta sprang through the tall wet grass like a stotting mule deer and disappeared among the granite boulders behind the house, some of them tall as the house, on her own, free.
She returned when called, drenched and shivering, and loved the rough toweling we gave her. Her underfur didn’t amount to much—truly she was a desert cat—and when she was dry she was soft and fluffy as a baby toy. When I ran my hand down her spine to her tail and her tail in reply lifted to flag-high, we felt each other’s full attention. I didn’t know at the time that the sweet spot just above the tail is a scent gland (humans can’t smell it) and that my fingernailed trace across it, picking up a mark from her, was a sort of kiss. She closed her eyes, slowly opened them, and between her black lips gave a quick downward flick of her pale pink tongue—gestures of affection. She smelled so good I wanted to bury my face in her, which she recognized as a genial howdy and reciprocated by sniffing around the hem of my pants and the soles of my shoes. Satisfied then, she took up her finely detailed grooming, one back foot held high. A few tongue-strokes up the back of the thigh, then a chew on the belly, then a licked-paw half-face wash—was there the slightest order to it? We pattern seekers are tempted to see one, but there wasn’t, and there isn’t.
The afternoon closed with a grand finale, the sun engulfed in blackness and then the earth-cracking, gut-pumping fortissimo of the full storm, sheets of rain, hammering hail, wind in waves across the pastures, then sudden stillness and the thunder suddenly far, echoing out across the prairie north. Meadowlarks resumed their liquid arias, and yes, there was a rainbow, double in fact, in the east. The cat had slept through it all.
As the bright days hurried by, Augusta grew rapidly more independent. Her forays out among the rocks and sagebrush lasted longer. We reassured ourselves that she was too big and claw-capable now for a red-tailed hawk (our commonest daytime raptor) to try to take. An eagle was possible but somehow seemed unlikely so near the houses and barns. The dangerous predators were all, at least so we believed, twilight dwellers—the fox, the bobcat, the great horned owl. If one of them happened to break that rule, as a coyote might, surely Augusta would shoot to the top of a willow or aspen or big rock out of reach, as we had seen her so easily do. (She had still not mastered coming down from high in a tree, but word was that any cat would figure it out if left up there long enough. We did hope so: Our local fire department, all volunteer and twenty miles away, would not have mobilized eagerly for a cat-up-a-tree call.)
And proud she grew, too, the little huntress. Like all her kind she brought gifts home. Sometimes they were fully alive and so much fun to chase under the refrigerator (where her staff could be counted on to shoo them out somehow, with wooden spoons, broom handles, straightened coat hangers) or to bat from chair top to lampshade, bleeding only a little; and sometimes plumb dead. She would drop a deer mouse at our feet, give a mrop! of victory, bite it in half amidships, and disappear it in two bites, chomp chomp and swallow.
Now sometimes she did not come to the call of her name. Now sometimes she would stay out even into the long shadows and chill that tell the always shockingly early onset of autumn in August in Montana. I’m hunting, don’t bother me. But we knew that as dusk came on, danger was real. We called and called, and finally there she would come, bounding through the grasses now two and three feet tall, black shape and bright eyes for an instant, then a dip in the green, then her eager face again, indefatigable, full of joy, straight into the bright kitchen, Where’s my dinner?
Then came the time she did not come. It was an acutely inauspicious time for her not to come: At the base of many of the giant boulders, where runoff rain collected, chokecherry bushes grew and the chokecherries were ripe and black bears had come down from the mountains to feed on them. There’s not much cherry on a chokecherry, a leathery skin and little more than a thin squish of fruit, and the fruit pretty sour, but the bears went crazy for them. They lost all their customary sense of where they ought not to go. As soon as the sun was good and down, the bears would pad through the riverside willows and up along the corrals and between the barns, just under the lighted windows of people (us) having dinner, listening to music, watching videos (we didn’t have satellite TV yet, much less cable), laughing, and in a nervous or accidental pause you’d hear them, their claws scraping on the tin roof of the root cellar, the snap of whole branches breaking as they ripped them down to reach the cherries at the tip, sometimes the mawww or bark of a mom scolding her cubs—the truly dangerous bear, that mom. You damn well stayed inside. But Augusta was out there amidst them.
It wasn’t night yet, yet. We called and called. We ventured as far as the fence with flashlights and called. I, having written a book about grizzly bears, supposedly knew that black bears could be scared away if you took a strong enough tone with them. But: I had met a black bear mother and cubs once on a trail in Idaho and they had not gotten my message. The mother had sent the cubs up a tree and then turned to me, snapping her jaws, a bad sign, and stamping her front feet, another bad sign. By the grace of chance there was a footbridge not far behind me, and I took one very, very slow step backward toward it, saying very, very quietly something like, “Now, you know, Mrs. Bear, I have only the most peaceful of feelings toward you.” And as I reached the bridge, which smelled of creosote and blessed humanity, she snorted at me, then woofed at the kids up in the tree, who came scurrying down. Family assembled, they ran like hell away.
Plus, chokecherry bears are not in their right minds. So. I was scared. But if I could help it, I wasn’t going to let Augusta be eaten by a bear.
Hence, stupidity having taken over, I ventured forth, flashlight in hand. (I did not have a firearm—that’s another discussion.) Calling, quietly now, Augusta, Augusssta. Between those big rocks by now it was really quite dark. Then I saw, in my flashlight beam—this all happened very fast—the eyeshine at just the right height and just the right narrow distance apart to be the eyes of a bear, walking placidly not at me nor away, just along, and then, behind, that, the eyeshine of, oh, God, no, a cub, and then another cub, and then, smaller, a little behind but not far, a cat.
Augusta was out walking with a black bear and her cubs.
I did not know what to do, so I did nothing. For a long time I just stood there in the dark. Then I went home. Augusta arrived shortly thereafter.