You all
think we cats have a pretty nice gig, and you’d be right about that. But what
nobody understands is that it’s not easy being at the top of the food chain. We
cats still have our differences. You shred a mouse, I shred a bird. All a
matter of preference. Some kitties have babies, most of us don’t. Not sure if
this is a good or a bad thing, having kittens. Seems to me that’s more competition
for me, four or five extra heads in my area. There are only so many birds to go
around. There are at least a thousand birds in my twenty acres of land. Who
seriously expects me to share those?
There are
two things that most cats can agree on. One, we were chosen to rule. Two,
nothing in the air can ever be trusted. Flies are annoying. Birds live in the
trees and as such look down on the rest of us. Forget it, tweeties. The high
ground is ours. That includes the trees. If you don’t believe us, we might have
to climb up one day and say hello to your cute little chicks munching on worms
in your nest.
A couple of
bigger birds, the hawks and the eagles, like to swoop down, and they might get a
bunny or the odd rat. Only thing is, our friend Sam soon understands that there
is an army on the ground. With many
cats who don’t like birds to begin with. Best to stay in the mountain tops, Mr.
Feathers.
Then, of
course, there is the ultimate hell machine in the sky, the plane. It’s a good
thing planes don’t swoop in here for worms, because then that would change the
bird-cat dynamic forever. Not that the birds would know.
Andy is a
nice guy, he’s the only person here who speaks German, the lingua franca of all
cats. But he is a traitor who can never be trusted. Imagine the pure bliss in
our house by the sea until the day he finally snapped. I trusted him. Put me in
a cage like a friggin’ bird. You get used to the car, it’s a necessary evil. But
the plane changes the way I see things now. So the birds have this little
advantage they’ve been hiding. How come they don’t attack? One of them ate me
up, but that was because of Andy’s help. Spit me back out too. And he didn’t
even drug me. He and Gin are the ones in the way, clearly. He and the birds.
The kids
are my allies, they don’t trust their parents either. Alliances, everyone must
have them. It’s the cats and the kids versus the birds, the dogs and the
grown-ups. Oh, well. Nobody said this would be easy.
If this
sounds stressful to read, then I suppose it’s meant to be. Every cat needs to
fly in a plane to understand what we are up against. I have been there. I still
haven’t forgiven Andy…and I haven’t quite forgiven the birds. The birds, true
to form with their micro-brains, haven’t talked about the planes with a claw held
to their throats. They know nothing. Nothing about planes. We can’t afford to
believe them right now. The moment we have a cat that size with that capacity for noise on the ground,
we can talk about a balance of power.
But I am a practical
cat. Why kill your neighbors when you can just as easily harmonize with them? A
mouse – in your world better known as a hackysack – has entertained us for
hours at a time. I hate it when they quit in the end. They play dead, and for a
second you almost want to believe they are. I say our little friend just got a
nice workout. Imagine what his life span would have been without me? Two years
longer, but infinitely more boring. We can be heroes.
So that’s
it in a flying nutshell. Never trust anything in the air. Not until we have an
air force of our own. As cats, we are entitled. 