Queen Cat Serena is not, strictly speaking, a "Tortie." Her type of coat is called "Calico." There are other variations on the pattern, as well as classic tortie and calico, but Tortie Tuesday has traditionally been inclusive of all three-colored cats.
Here's a Cat Sanctuary Interview, written through the usual method of translating the cat's nonverbal behavior. The only stimulant necessary for me to write these things is the gift of Irish-American whimsy.
PK: Serena, what's happened to you during the weeks I've been offline?
Serena: A lot of things, some of them very bad. In October I ate a bird in the orchard, the way you're always telling me not to do. It was horrible. Everything kept going around and around. I would try to go out and eat some grass and bring it up, and everything looked and felt and smelled so wrong that I could hardly tell where to set my feet. I heard you calling me, several times, but couldn't follow the sound of your voice. I figured you were on the porch but I had trouble getting from the shed to the porch. Those few bounds became a lot of slow, awkward, difficult steps. I came to understand that it's not just a joke when you humans say "Everything hurts, and what doesn't hurt doesn't work."
Silver: We tried to protect the human from you, because you were acting so strange.
Swimmer: Just as you always taught us, Ma, serious fighting is not allowed!
Silver: We tried to tell you not to go to her, but you kept staggering toward her, the way the humans did when they were playing zombies.
Swimmer: We tried to tell her not to go to you, but she kept calling your name and holding out her hand.
Silver: How could a human know that you were so delirious that we thought you were likely to bite her hand?
Serena: Never!
Swimmer: Well you tried to bite me! If you hadn't been so feeble, or if I'd been as slow as a human, you could have killed me. You were not in your right mind.
Silver: Some of these diseases are infectious. You might have spread whatever it was to us!
Swimmer: You were not fit to be around anybody, Ma. We were sorry.
Serena: No. I knew that. But I also knew that the human keeps that stuff that helps us get rid of things that have made us sick. So I wanted to go to her for help, but it was hard to be sure of anything. The human and the house looked strange and dangerous, spinning around, swaying back and forth, changing shapes. Her voice sounded all wrong too, and when she picked me up in those pathetic bare hands humans have, it felt as if her hands were covered in claws. I felt so bad.
I thought that the office room, where I was born, would be a safe place. I looked for my nest box. It wasn't there. Well, of course it had been moved out for my kittens. I wanted to get to the back corner of the closet. That always seemed the best place to hide, if a person wanted to hide. I wanted to lie down and be sick.
Silver: You never let us make excuses, so don't start now.
Serena: No. There's no excuse. The human would not let me lie on the rug and be sick. I heard her saying she was going to get some medicine for me, but I saw her looking like a huge, horrible, cat-eating monster, or maybe two monsters. I felt even the safe, dry rug sticking little sharp claws up into my paws. Then there was an object behaving strangely. I just knew it was going to kill me. I think it must have been a box, and the human wanted to scoop me up in it, but I didn't know that anything was safe any more. I bounded out of that closet and lay down near where the hot-air fan used to be. The hot-air fan was not there.
Swimmer: Well, of course not. It was a hot afternoon.
Serena: The air didn't feel hot to me--though the sun did. I heard the human say something about resting on some newspapers, the way Heather did once when she was sick. I thought that newspapers would be cold, and I couldn't bear the way they crackle under you.
And then she grabbed the back of my neck. I know now that she was only holding on to me, but it felt as if she were crushing my skin and choking me. And she had something in her hand that was hurting the side of my mouth. I know now that it must have been the syringe, because it had medicine in it, but it felt as if she were trying to cut me up with a knife. I kept trying to run away, and she kept crushing my neck and hurting my mouth.
Silver: Time out, Ma. That sounds like an awfully unpleasant thing to remember.
PK: I have here (I know you cats don't actually read English) a reprint of an article by Bob Story that my husband gave me, years ago, called "How to Give Your Cat a Pill." The article is about how much control cats have of their throat muscles, compared with humans. Once humans swallow a pill or anything else, it's hard for us to bring it up again. Cats' digestive systems are much shorter and can bring up things that seemed to be safely down in your stomachs.
Bob Story described a man trying to force a cat to take just one pill from a package of six. He wasted all six pills while the panicky cat did a lot of damage to him, and his property, and his friends. The way you went scrambling around the office, screaming and gasping, trying to scratch or bite anything that got near you, and not seeming to see clearly through your wide-open black eyes, was like the way Bob Story described his cat.
Does this give us any insights into the way cats often do react to pills?
Serena: Yes. Even if they're as sick as I was, vets should prescribe medicines in liquid form. When everything else feels all wrong, of course pills feel strange and nasty too. And anyone who's trying to sit on a cat and force the cat to do anything, when the cat is as sick as I was, deserves what he gets. He does not deserve a goldfish, which is what Bob Story said he was trying to get to replace that poor sick cat!
PK: Most humans learn, at least from what other humans tell us, about being delirious--not perceiving things the way we normally do, not able to tell dreams and memories from real things around us. A high fever, or some things we use as medicine for ourselves, or some disease conditions like kidney failure or thyroid failure, can cause temporary insanity for us too. There was no question in my mind what was going on with you, Serena. I've never been delirious enough to run and scream and fight people who were trying to help me, but I've had enough experience of fevers and vertigo and pinched nerves that what you were doing made perfect sense--in a horrible way.
Serena: I thought it must really be you, and you must have been saying you were trying to help, but I couldn't be sure of anything.
Swimmer: You did scratch our human. We smelled and saw the blood. How many times have you told us, Ma? She's only a human! She has no fur!
Silver: You would have banished us for life if we'd ever behaved like that!
Serena: I know. I'm not proud of it. I did have to clean disgusting human blood off my claws. Humans can't help that one reason why we find them so useful for protection is that every other creature on Earth, except for a few perverted creatures like mosquitoes, agrees that they smell and taste about as nasty as it's possible for an animal to smell and taste while it is alive. Those of us who've learned to tolerate human odor like to sit or lie where humans have been because so many nuisance animals, even big ones, will avoid their scent! And I was already sick, and I had that on my tongue.
Swimmer: And it served you right.
Serena: Yes. Well, there's no need to be tiresome about it. I thought I might have died and gone to the Bad Place already. The big black cup she puts the black powder in, and the sound of water being stirred, and the syringe, all seemed strange and horrible. Even when I could feel the medicine diluting the acid inside me, even that made me want to run out and be sick. So when she opened the door I did.
PK: That was actually a reassuring sight. When Heather had food poisoning, instead of becoming aggressive like you she became passive, but the staring eyes, the unsteady walk, the fever, and the germ-fouled breath were all just like yours. When she went out to be sick, the worst of it was over. She got rid of the bad stuff, buried it deep, slept for several hours and was normal the next day. When you rushed out to the sand pit I thought there ought to be hope for you. At least, theoretically, it couldn't be rabies. (And I'm quite sure that, even if you'd had rabies, you would've gone to a Good Place.)
Silver: Nobody gets rabies any more.
PK: Nobody in our part of the world has had rabies lately. The disease still exists. All pets, even friendly wild ones like skunks, should have rabies vaccinations for safety's sake. An animal with food poisoning, which is usually short-term and harmless, or distemper, which is usually fatal, can inflict as much pain on a human as an animal with rabies would. The difference is that when it's food poisoning or distemper, once the skin wounds heal we'll be all right.
(For those who are wondering...no, even in the year when rabies was found within a hundred miles of us, so far as I know nobody tried to take the skunks in for rabies shots. They weren't all that friendly. We just vaccinated the cats, and dogs, that year, and prayed for Pepe and Hepzibah. Humans' reactions to rabies shots seem to be more painful than other animals', although that may be partly because humans can describe our reactions in words. By watching other animals we can imagine what they're feeling, but we never really know.
Serena: Well, I'm all right now. Say, I know that when I bounced off the computer I "said" something to our readers. What did I say?
PK: You inserted a lot of blank lines into a document. Maybe that meant "Fill in the blanks! What does it look as if I'm thinking?"
Serena: I was thinking a lot of things. I'm glad I didn't actually say them. I didn't bite you, either, did I?
PK: It looked as if you thought you were biting me, but I'm glad to report that you missed.
Serena: I'm glad too. If I smelled the same way that other cat smelled, I wonder why I was sicker?
PK: Possibly because Heather let me know right away when she started to feel sick, and didn't spend eighteen hours hiding in the shed.
Serena: I didn't want to bother you. Nobody would have wanted to smell all the stuff that kept coming out of me.
PK: No, but your feeling better sooner would have been worth it.
Serena: I feel better now. Which of these switches should we play with next?
No comments:
Post a Comment