If I was a small animal, I wouldn’t want to walk past my place.
Because lurking there in a tree or under my car is my cat Grumbles, the toughest creature in the neighbourhood, just waiting to pounce on some unfortunate, four-legged mammal which had the poor sense to choose my street to take a stroll down.
I don’t know why she is so hostile. I never actually trained her to go around laying beatings on other fur-covered carnivores. But I have seen her leave the house in frustration after I’ve scolded her for some transgression and head directly for the backyard to assault the first thing she saw.
Whatever the reason for her bad manners, I’m sure if she were human, she’d be a professional wrestler, probably meaner than a dozen Hulk Hogans. And if she were human, I’d be visiting her in jail a lot.
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But, it’s kind of a rule of life that no matter how tough you might be, there’s always some other sucker out there who’s just a little bit tougher and wants you to find out from first-hand experience just how much tougher.
And so it was, last Thursday night, that I discovered Grumbles in the flower bed by the front porch, obviously the runner-up in some sort of title fight which probably ended with a knockout in an early round. The champion, nowhere to be seen, had no doubt already headed for the showers.
I carried my poor little friend into the house, set her down on the floor on her favourite blanket, and expected to watch her die. Her one eye was slashed and she couldn’t walk. She put her head down on her paw, stared miserably at the floor and didn’t look as if she cared whether or not she lived to ever go out on another search-and-destroy mission.
In the morning, I expected to wake up to find a small, cold body stretched out on my living room floor, but Grumbles had somehow managed to drag herself onto the top of the furnace in the basement, her favourite nest in the winter time. And there she stayed, never eating or drinking water, for the next two days.
By Sunday, I was worried, and on the urging of a friend, I put my pet in a laundry basket and then in the car and headed for the vet clinic.
A close inspection by the doctor showed more than I had found, including a broken-off tooth, two broken claws, a chewed-up tail and a half-inch-long bite wound on one of her back legs. But, he expected she’d survive.
Grumbles could have done without the thermometer the vet shoved into her but at least she didn’t have to hold it under her tongue. And when she got stabbed with the needle which followed, she sent up a scream which even startled the man who administered it and who, before the session ended, indicated he agreed with my choice of a name for my houseguest.
Forty-two dollars later, my cat and I and a bottle of medicine rode home again. Twice a day since then, I’ve shoved a dropper between her clenched teeth and squirted a shot of yellow fluid in her mouth. And twice a day, she’s shook her head till there was medicine on the walls, on the floor and on me.
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Monday night, though she knows she can’t sleep in my bed, Grumbles hopped up there anyway, and lay down at my feet. I let her stay.
Tuesday night, she hobbled into the kitchen, and ate a bit of chicken, her first meal in five days.
Wednesday, night, she brushed my leg as I stood by a window, the closest she ever gets to a “thank you.”
Thursday, she wandered outside, limped down the front steps, turned and grumbled at me and ambled off to who knows where. My guess is, a rematch is in the works.
Somebody oughta get outa town while the gettin’s good.
©1988 Jim Hagarty
