Max Gets Barked At

Circle Tail is a quiet dog. In fact, before last Saturday night, I'd never heard him bark. You may remember that Circle Tail is my brother's dog. Max has gotten fairly comfortable with having him around.

We were playing a board game, and not paying much attention to the animals. Circle Tail's food and water dishes are in the same room. They're in one of those elevated platform things that you can get so your large dog (or large cat, in some cases) doesn't have to reach down to the floor to eat. It helps ease stress on their neck muscles and bones.

When the other cats investigate Circle Tail's food dish, they are so small that their elbows stick up around their ears as they lean into the bowl, front feet on the edge. It looks like little fuzzy wings. One wants to go over and tweak them. (One is usually not quick enough.)

Max just kind of leans over and looks in. I don't think he was actually eating. Perhaps tasting, and just in general being a nosy cat.

Circle Tail knows he's not supposed to bother the cats, but this was really the end. I mean, just too much. He was whining, at first silently, and then louder, hoping to get one of his people to make Max go away so he could eat.

Like I said, we weren't paying attention.

So Circle Tail (much to our surprise and possibly his) let out a short sharp bark. Max backs off from the food dish, which was what the poor dog wanted in the first place, so Circle Tail moves up toward the food. This meant, since Max hadn't backed far, that from Max's point of view, the dog was coming toward him.

Oh dear no, we can't have this. (After the bark we were all watching to see how they'd handle the situation.) Max backed up another step, one front paw out and up, ready to give Circle Tail the smack down if necessary.Circle Tail hesitated, and that was all Max needed to get out of there; he put the paw down and turned and walked off in a little more haste than is normal for him.

For all the world like Max had been saying, "Don't you talk to me in that  tone of voice, mister -- and I'm leaving, I'm leaving, sheesh, you needn't bark."

By the way, when I say Max backed up, I mean it. Due to his Norwegian Forest cat heritage, Max is capable of backing up multiple steps using all four feet. He's also capable of walking down the cat tree (instead of jumping from it). It is fairly startling to watch, as it looks so normal -- until you think about it and realize you've never seen a cat do that before!

Max on high

Retrospective: Pippin as a kitten (now with pictures)

I am running into a problem here with my posts. My digitized photos only go back to 2006, and so if I want to put pictures of Pippin as a kitten, or even just younger than 2006, I have to manually scan in the photos. So I'm going to do that eventually (which means hopefully in the next two days over the weekend) but I had a post just bubbling up inside so I'm going to write it without pictures now. Maybe I will go back and insert them later ...

So, Pippin as a kitten. I have been thinking a lot about kittens lately, and reading on kitten behavior, and stuff, and trying to remember Pippin when he was a kitten.

And what I mostly remember is that I lived in a state of constant astonishment when he was a kitten.

Slowly, slowly, he sank beneath the sea ... I mean,
into the bed

Like, claws. Most kittens have these sharp little claws that they aren't quite sure of how to retract properly at all times. Pippin was almost ashamed that he had claws that could damage things and kept them always retracted.

This led to some odd difficulties. At the time my bed was a waterbed, and fairly low to the ground. Still, it was tall enough baby Pippin couldn't jump up on it. Thus he would try to climb onto it.

But since he wouldn't use his claws (on the comforter), he had no traction. Maine Coons have tufts of hair between their toes, so he had even less traction than a short-hair cat. I would look over, and see two ears slowly appear over the edge of the bed as he valiantly tried to climb up. And then he'd lose the battle with gravity, and the ears would slowly sink back down again.

Finally I had to take mercy on him (how was I to know he wouldn't eventually figure it out? Most kittens use their claws!). I actually had to teach him it was okay to use claws to get up onto the bed, by physically poking them out into the bedspread fabric and saying "yes, this is okay, this is a good thing, you can get up here with me like this."

Being a kitten, it took him a while to get the concept. I mean, when you're talking the attention span of a gnat and the retention ability of a toddler on halloween candy, it can be a while before a memory sinks in. But he got it, and soon was climbing up onto the bed like anything.

He didn't generalize. The claws didn't get used for anything else. I think he used them for the scratching post, but honestly, I'm not sure. It's not like I took high-speed film so I could slow it down and see if there were claws out or just paws scraping down the posts.

blurry Pippin enthusiastically using
his scratching post (he actually
got too big for this one later!)

Another astonishment moment. Kittens are usually quite willing to make a toy out of anything they happen across. I had lots of things that could be kitten toys like this. Pippin was also given a lot of his own toys. And I never once had to take one of my toys away from him. He always left everything of mine alone, even the Beanie Babies which were within easy reach, and soft and stuffed like his favorite toys. And I never even told him not to mess with my stuff. He just knew.

I got so I took it for granted. I had all sorts of breakables and knick-knacks on the bookshelves in front of the books. And even though he liked to lie on the bookshelves in front of the books, he always chose a place clear of my toys to lie down in and never knocked any of my stuff off the shelves.

Big ol' bat ears

I guess when they handed out the "gravity tester" badges to kittens, he was standing in a different line.

He just didn't behave like a normal kitten. I mean, yes, he played with toys. He loved to play elephant cat. That is when they thunder through the house from one end to the other making more noise than a mere cat should be able to accomplish, thus, elephant cat.

When I got two pieces of cat furniture he played on them like jungle gyms. But the normal kitten behaviors of claws and inappropriate toys and destructiveness ... he just never did that. The one time he missed the litterbox was because he was locked in a room all morning without one (we didn't realize he was still in Mom's room when we left for church) and not only did he pick the easiest thing to clean (her sheets, on a waterbed with no mattress to be soaked) but he was terribly ashamed of himself and didn't feel better about it till I gave up and half-heartedly scolded him.

That perked him right up, as if he'd expected to be scolded for missing the litterbox and wasn't going to be happy until he received said scolding.

Every kitten is a little bit destructive. Every kitten misses the litterbox at least once (without the iron clad excuse of not having one available!). Every kitten accidentally claws you at least once.

Not Pippin. He may have been a goofy cat who was rather clumsy, but he had standards and they were not going to be compromised.

I must say that his restrained kitten behavior has left me rather unprepared for any potential kittens coming my way at some point in the future!

Retrospective: It's the Little Things

I am missing Pippin a lot today. And it's the little things I miss.

Whenever I was at home, I wanted to know where Pippin was. I'm not sure why. I feel the same about any living being in the house. So if I didn't already know where he was, I would search him out, confirm that he was sleeping or napping or watching the outdoors in one of his favorite spots, and in the process, greet him and pet him. Or sometimes I would just look out the window with him for a little while. And then I'd go do human things (like books or email or tv or supper) and sometimes he would come with or show up soon after, and sometimes he wouldn't.

And that was okay. I didn't want to disturb him out of a sound sleep, or make him come be with me when he was more interested in the chipmunk antics out the window.

The thing I loved was that Pippin felt the same way. He wanted to know where I was all the time. Sometimes when I was home for long periods of time, like the weekend, he would lose track of me during one of his deeper naps.

Then I would hear him call out, the closest he ever got to a straight-up "meow". It meant "where are you!" and I was to respond with my location. "I'm in the living room reading." And usually after a few minutes I'd look over, and he'd be lying on the floor by the chair I was reading in, pretending he'd been there the whole time.

He liked to pretend that way. Any time I was in a room, chances are, he'd be there too. And he'd appear to have been there for simply hours. Even if I'd just walked in and he had been in the room I'd left minutes before.

He and I were equally susceptible to our imaginations. Luckily, we rarely "heard" a noise at the same time. I'd think I heard a noise, and I'd look over, and he'd look back at me, ears not twitched back, calm with no indication of having heard something. Ah, I'd think, I must have imagined it.

Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me the same way, and I'd shrug and say, "I didn't hear anything," and he'd lay his head back down on his paws and calm down.

Rarely, we'd check in with each other to find the other with ears alert (figuratively, for me) and eyes a little wild. Yup, we heard something all right. And then I'd get up and go track down the sound, and Pippin would follow behind, a little nervously. Sometimes, if it was a big noise, he'd hide and wait for me to come back and tell him what it was.

When we first moved into this house by ourselves, we had a lot of noise-tracking-down to do. Houses make all sorts of odd noises that don't sound house-like, and with a different house than the one we'd grown up in, we had to make sure all those noises really were house-noises.

A lot of "Pippin noises in the other room" have turned out to be house-noises. I wonder if he thought I was making them in the other room, the way I thought he was making them?

He used to greet me at the door when I came home from work. But this wasn't a dog's greet-you-at-the-door. He'd simply be in the kitchen (where the door was), looking out the window, or in his cardboard box, and my entry into the kitchen from the outdoors would be greeted with a lazy look. Oh, I didn't know you were going to be there.

This, of course, was more pretending, since the driveway ends at the kitchen window, and even if he wasn't actually looking out the window to see the movement of the car stopping in the driveway, he could certainly hear the car. And the car door closing, and me coming up the steps.

In the last year I had to start giving him lysine treats to prevent ulcers (yes, it does work for cats). He got two a day, one in the morning and one when I came home. The treats were thus kept in the bedroom (so I'd remember the one in the morning).

When Pippin discovered that I reliably went into the bedroom and gave him a treat when I came home, he started cutting out the middle man and waited for me in the bedroom rather than the kitchen. Instead of following me from the kitchen all the way to the other end of the house.

Once in the other house, when Pippin was younger (but grown), I came in the house and wasn't feeling too good so I didn't say anything the way I usually did to greet him. I didn't realize until that point how much he depended on voices to identify people. He freaked out and ran when this stranger came into the room.

I'm not the swiftest emotional thinker at the best of times, and it didn't occur to me at that precise point in time that he simply didn't recognize me. All I knew was I was feeling bad anyway, and here my cat was, fleeing me! I snapped in tired annoyance, "Pippin, it's just me!"

He stopped, halfway out of the room, frozen in a running pose for half a second, sat down, and nonchalantly washed himself. Of course it was you. Who else would I think it was? I meant to do that. And I realized then he just hadn't known who I was, and apologized for snapping at him. I made sure after that I always talked when I came in the door, and he never had to leave at high speed to escape the "stranger" again.

He was very fond of being with. I like to watch thunderstorms. From inside the house, through the patio doors, not from outside! The wind driving the rain into the patio bricks, the massive oak tree in the back yard flowing back and forth, the thunder crashing and vibrating through the air -- I love thunderstorms. Pippin didn't feel the same way about them. But he would sit with me on the floor at the patio doors and help me watch them anyway. Although most of his watching ended up being curled up against my side or washing himself.

I don't think he was scared of thunderstorms. I think, quite honestly, they bored him. The large movements of wind and rain and tree that I find so fascinating were possibly too large for him to see. Cats are small movement focused (like a mouse skittering by) and once you add his cataracts on top of that, I don't think he found much of interest in thunderstorms, aside from the fact they were great ways to make me sit still where he could be next to me.

Cats like routines. They like to know what's coming next. I really like routines. Pippin really liked them too. At bedtime I had a certain routine. This routine, in my head, did not include the last minute "I forgot something" trip out of the bedroom (which involved re-opening the bedroom door). But in reality, my bedtime routine almost always included a last minute trip into the rest of the house.

Pippin turned this into part of his routine by insisting that I follow him around the living room and back into the bedroom, no matter where the thing I needed to get was (water from the kitchen, my hair scrunchy from the tv room, etc.) I tried to get him to stay in the bedroom and "I'll be right back." This generally didn't work unless he was half asleep already.

Sometimes I was so tired that the last thing I wanted to do was make another circuit around the house. But Pippin insisted. He wouldn't come back of his own accord, but if I walked toward him (to pick him up and bring him back), he'd slowly walk away, at the same pace I used, and would walk in a big circle and end up back in the bedroom.

And then we would both eventually settle down in bed (sometimes Pippin had to go to the bathroom or get himself a snack or a drink, all of which were in the bedroom for his convenience) and turn the lights off and go to sleep. He would almost always lay down within touching distance (for me). I would reach out a sleepy arm and stroke a paw or tail or back, whatever I happened to touch first, and then we'd go to sleep together.

Retrospective: Pippin's Friend, the Chipmunk

I don't have any pictures directly related to this story. They'd be either boring or blurry anyway. You'll see.

When we moved in, there was a chipmunk, a cute little thing, who hung out on the back porch. He soon figured out that the new cat in the house didn't come out on the back porch. So he stayed. Pippin quite looked forward to his visits. The chipmunk would pretend he didn't know Pippin was watching, and Pippin (who if you've read the story of Pippin and the mice, you know he's not after the chipmunk for prey) would quietly and happily watch the chipmunk. Probably with dreams of playing with him, friendly like.

The next year the chipmunk turned up again. But it was this year that I started letting Pippin out in the backyard when I was out making the patio and the various flower beds.

The chipmunk wasn't stupid. He knew cats, so he made sure he was nowhere to be found when Pippin was out. He had a network of tunnels under the ground that let him go anywhere he wanted under the deck and the one side of the house.

But once the chipmunk made the mistake of poking his head up out of his hole before Pippin went back inside, and while Pippin was looking in his direction.

Pippin was fascinated and intrigued! The chipmunk wasn't just cat tv! It was real! He dashed over to the hole where the chipmunk had already ducked away. Pippin sighed, and with a cat's legendary patience, settled down to wait.

He outwaited the chipmunk. Up periscope came the chipmunk, and he was too far out to reverse direction when he realized Pippin was still there. (To be fair to the chipmunk, it had been about an hour). The chipmunk dashed madly for another entrance to his tunnel network. Pippin dashed madly after him. The chipmunk made it, just in time.

Pippin gave the hole a glare, sighed again, and settled down for another long wait.

About half an hour after that, I was ready to go in. I called Pippin from the patio door, wondering what his reaction would be.

I really was expecting hesitance to come in, but it appeared as though Pippin welcomed the excuse to leave the frustrating hole that refused to produce the chipmunk. Pippin came in quite readily, without even hesitating.

That was the first and last time Pippin ever caught the chipmunk outside again, although the chipmunk continued the porch visits when Pippin was on the safe side of the door!

Retrospective: Pippin Goes Outside (on purpose)

Since I got Pippin from a Maine Coon breeder, he was born to a cat who had never had to fend for itself outside, and he was never outside to fend for himself either. Along with his cautious personality, this led to a cat who would sit in the kitchen while I brought load after load of grocery bags through a door open to the outside, and never once even try to investigate the doorway, much less run through it.

After Pizza and Tiger, who viewed Outside as the best toy ever and wanted to get there at every opportunity, Pippin's passivity in the face of access to the outdoors was quite startling, although very welcome. (It's hard to bring in the groceries when you have to do the cat dance in front of the door every time you want to go through it!)

When Pippin was about 8, we moved into our very own house. A year later, in 2008, I got a very strange urge to do things outdoors in my very own yard. Notice the house was "ours" but the yard was "mine." This was because Pippin showed no interest in it, aside from appreciating the cat tv provided by the chipmunks and birds on the porch. And I'm just as much of an indoor kitty as he was; being outdoors and doing things like planting flowers and making flower beds and all, that's just weird for me. I'm a book person, not a flower person.

But here I was, outside till it got dark every night, working mostly on a patio. My backyard is weird, and for this to make sense, I gotta describe it. It's surrounded by a fence. You go out the porch doors (which have windows down to the bottom) onto the porch. Then you go down a few steps to the deck. Then you go down some more steps to what used to be a circular above-ground pool, but was now just a flat area with sand.

The hardest part about making a patio with pavers is making the ground flat and sanding it. I already had that, so I was just placing the pavers.

Pippin was a little put out. Here I was, within sight, but out of reach. And he was bored after all day by himself. He wanted to be with me. And if I wouldn't come in and be with him, well, he'd just have to screw up his courage and come out and be with me.

So he asked. I considered the request. You see, he didn't jump if he couldn't see where he'd land. In fact, even then he'd usually just go around, and if he couldn't get there by going around, half the time he'd discard the idea. That meant a normal three foot chain link fence would contain him safely. And I could tell he didn't want to go outside. He wanted to be with me.

There came the big day when I opened the door and let it open. And watched, in mortal terror of my foolishness, for the great escape.

Pippin stood in the open door watching me work for a long time. (I didn't get much done, as I was watching him out of the corner of my eye.) Finally he ventured out onto the porch.

That's my brave boy!

The first day he didn't go off the porch, just sat on the edge and watched me.

The outdoors is a highly suspect place.

The first week, although he ventured off the porch, and even into the grass, he wouldn't sit down unless he was on a man-made substance. This led to a funny incident where he was far from "land" and got tired, so he sat down on the only thing he could find close by that was man-made--the downspout at the corner of the house.

To add insult to injury, the grass is also WET.

He inspected the patio quite often, approving of its slowly growing larger (more "land" for him to be on). I started from the middle, placing pavers until I got tired of doing it each night. They were heavy, and I could only carry one or possibly two at a time, so it exhausted wimpy me quite quickly. When I was tired of toting patio pavers, I played with planting flowers and stuff, and making flower beds.

The patio is almost finished, much to his approval.
I only had to put the triangle pieces in at this point.

This next series of pictures is Pippin on his third day out. He still wasn't sure about going off the porch, so he was investigating the flower pots on the porch. I'd previously observed his behavior with inside-plants, and I knew that although he sometimes opened his mouth and looked most alarmingly like he was going to bite into one, he was only using his Jacobson's organ to smell the flower/plant more intensely. (Cats, oddly like snakes, have a secondary ability to smell that's located in the roof of their mouths. If they open their mouths and breathe deep, pulling air across that, they get the secondary ability more intensely involved.) So I knew he wouldn't try to eat any of the plants.

I still watched him carefully, just to be sure no new plant sparked a sudden vegetarian desire.

Still not sure about leaving the house behind!

Sniffing the plants to see what I'd been doing
with the flower pots and plants he'd been
watching all this time.

All the way to the edge of the porch!
He's being so brave!

He even speculated about leaving the porch
for nature's ground.
He didn't, not this day, at least.

Much safer: no one can get him here.
But he's moved from the porch to the deck.

He's done exploring. Would I care to come in as well?

Now every time from the first time I let him out, I'd call him to come in when I was ready to go in, and give him a treat once we were inside the house. Even if he'd already gone back in, during the early days of his explorations.

At one point, when the outdoors had become commonplace, Pippin suddenly thought about this whole process. Wait a minute. I go out, I come in, I get a treat. Cool! He made sure I was watching him. I'd opened the door, but hadn't yet gone out myself. He stepped out onto the porch. He knew I had a tendency to be legalistic about things, so he made sure every bit of himself was Outside. Even the tail. Then he turned around and came right back in, and gave me the look that meant, "Treat"? 

I busted out laughing and said, "sorry, no, you have to come in when I call you in, not just any time you walk back in the house!" (Because by this time, that was the rule; he didn't need the reassurance for venturing outside anymore!) He looked most disappointed.

But the treat thing worked. He would come or not as he pleased when he was in the house and I called his name (which was fine by me; I didn't want him showing up every time he heard me say his name. Poor guy would be run off his feet, considering how much I talked about him.) When we were outside, though, I could call him and he'd come.

Even if he didn't want to. Pippin discovered that Outdoors had its own appeal besides me. He liked the little hoppy bugs in the grass. He liked to sit and sniff the breeze to see what was around. Most times when we'd come back in, he'd spend five to ten minutes vocally talking to me about everything he saw and did and heard and smelled Outdoors. I didn't understand exactly what he said, of course, but I understood he was talking about the experiences he'd just had.

The mighty explorer in his domain.

Once I remember especially, I called him to come in, and he really really didn't want to. It was getting on dusk, his favorite time when all the hoppy bugs came out. He was on the other side of the porch (there are only stairs to the porch on the one side, and he didn't like the deck stairs on the other side. Don't blame him--I don't like them either. They are rickety now and were rickety then.)

So he finally looked up from his hoppy bugs and trotted around the patio area, disappearing under the deck. "Pippin!" from me again. After a bit he appeared on the other side, hurrying now that he'd managed to tear himself away from his toys. He came right in, wanting his treat. Which he got, of course.

Once he scared the living daylights out of me. I left the stupid gate open. No, the gate isn't stupid. I am. I forgot he was out, because he was being his usual unobtrusive self, and I forgot. I left that gate open for ages. Probably fifteen minutes. I was taking debris from the trees out to the street. Back and forth, because there was too much for one load. And then I forgot to close the gate.

Suddenly I remembered. No, please no. I looked for Pippin, only to find him about five to ten feet on the wrong side of the open gate. Okay, good that I know where he is. Bad that he's out where there is no fence to corral him. 

And I can't let him know I'm panicked. It'll either panic him, or he'll find it amusing and want to continue the game. With him, it was more likely to be the first, but either way, I wouldn't be able to catch him. So, keeping my voice normal and cheerful like always, I announced that it was time to go in, and Pippin! Let's go in!

He looked up, grinned his cat grin which isn't a smile on the face like a human people but instead a whole body change, and came bouncing right over to me. Let's go!

I scooped him up, relief flooding my body, and hugged him rather more tightly than he appreciated (which he let me know with a mild squirm and a vocal comment rather like "meophf". I closed the gate, scolding myself internally to remember the next time to close the gate every time I went through it no matter how inconvenient it was, and took us both inside, where he got a treat. (Because he came when I called him.)

And then confused him by going back out again (as I wasn't done yet--the sun hadn't set). So that night he got two treats for coming in. Luckily he didn't figure out it was being beyond the gate that caused the multiple treat night. 

Although I didn't let him out while I was mowing (I'm not completely insane), he could observe this process from the patio door (the other side of it, obviously). He was very dismayed to find that the new room to the house I called Outdoors was subject to the same vacuuming monster that the Indoors part of the house was. Different sounding monster, but it worked much the same way, covering all the floor. I found him glaring at me indignantly when I came back in after the first time I mowed after he'd gotten brave in the Outdoors. It took me a while to figure out what he was ticked about.

Poor Pippin. I'm afraid I found it most amusing when I realized it was the lawn mower / vacuum cleaner comparison! 

I did have sympathy for the poor dear with one problem he had with the Outdoors. The first bird he encountered was a nasty mockingbird defending a nest (that he couldn't even get to; it was in the next door neighbor's yard!). If you don't know mockingbirds, be glad. They're worse than blue jays. It's intimidating have one dive bomb you even if you're a big human person. Imagine how much worse this menace from the sky is when you're a little cat! 

Pippin didn't know cats could make birds stop dead in their tracks (literally). All he knew was this scary monster was yelling and attacking him from the sky. (The bird knew cats. It stayed out of reach, so it wasn't physically harming Pippin.) He didn't like the mockingbird at all. Luckily it didn't put him off exploration entirely, since it made a lot of noise before attack, it could be avoided.

Unfortunately for my cat's reputation, he generalized the bird size and shape to all birds of similar size and shape. Which meant Pippin was afraid of even a mild robin (who wasn't paying attention to the cat who just emerged onto the deck). Pippin turned around and went right back inside. I felt so sorry for him, being scared of little birds, even as I found it hilarious (and thought I was quite the meany thinking it was funny!)

Pippin's flower bed

That picture is captioned Pippin's flower bed. This is because I made that flower bed from scratch. There was nothing but weeds there when I started. And I dug it up and put weed-stop fabric down and put holes in the fabric to have the plants come up through, and put an edging on it (the gray block in the left front corner of the picture). And I finished it on Pippin's birthday, so I called it Pippin's flower bed.

The patio is finished at last. Pippin approves.

Retrospective: Pippin and the Great Mouse Invasion

Before I moved out into the house I live in now, I lived in my parents' house in the basement room. Pippin lived there too, for what was actually the larger portion of his life, although it seems like he lived for the longer part of it here in my house with just me.

One year when Pippin was a fairly young cat, but still an adult--so maybe five or six or seven years old, we had a mouse incursion. Now I don't have any pictures of this, so I will be scattering random Pippin pictures through the post just because I want to.

May 2006: Pippin's goofy when he sleeps

The Mouse Invasion started out very small. Literally. Mom came into the den one day while I was at work, and saw what she thought was a kitty toy on the floor. You know those tiny furred mice that you can get in packs of twenty at the petstore? They look very realistic, like baby mice. Mom thought I'd gotten Pippin one of those. She was going to pick it up and give it to him, or toss it downstairs to the basement where it would eventually get into my room with other kitty toys ... but the closer she got to it, the more she doubted it was just a kitty toy. It looked far too realistic.

Closer, and she realized with a jump that it looked realistic because it was really and truly a baby mouse! EEK! But it was dead. Completely unharmed. No marks, not even ruffled hair. But the baby mouse wasn't alive. This was strange. Our previous kitties, when they played with mice, there was definite evidence on the mouse that it had been played with. If Pippin was responsible for this mouse being dead, how in the world had he done it without visibly harming the mouse? We were most puzzled.

Dec 2007: Getting settled in his hammock
takes some doing, considering the relative
sizes (it's theoretically too small but
since when did cats pay attention to physics?)

Well, my mom got an old newspaper to use to scoop the baby mouse up and toss it out into the backyard to join the circle of life, so to speak. She didn't realize that Pippin was watching her. At least, that's what we figure happened.

Because that's the only thing that makes sense out of what happened with the second and third mouse that year.

The second mouse: I was sitting at my computer desk in my room downstairs. It was a big room, and so had one half as my "bedroom" and the other half as my "everything else" room (I used the communal kitchen and bathrooms that were upstairs. Do you know how challenging it is to have to climb stairs in the middle of the night when you have to use the bathroom but you're still half asleep? Anyway, back to the story).

Pippin comes in and wants to show me something. He trills and purls at me, little funny noises that Maine Coons use to talk to their people. Doesn't want petted (although the offer is accepted briefly). Finally I got up and told him to show me what he wanted. He walked out into the basement past his litterbox (okay, that's clean then) and past his food and water (so he doesn't need more of either). He walked all the way to the base of the stairs where the washer and dryer stood on either side of the corner the stairs start from. Next to the dryer is a tall endtable that has a lower level that you could put like a plant or something on it. It's empty.

My cat who really wasn't a dog, swear it, does everything but point at the end table, at the base of it. He was so insistent that I got down on my hands and knees and peered under it. I mean, normally he retrieves his own kitty toys after he "puts them away" under furniture, so I wasn't used to him asking me to look under things for him.

And there I found the second mouse. This time it was a grownup mouse, a grey oblong field mouse. Once again, there was not a mark on it, but it was not alive. Okay, this is strange. The first one was a baby and babies can have birth defects and stuff like that where, while it would be unusual for one to drop dead on its way across the den floor, it wasn't out of the question. And Pippin had been nowhere to be seen.

But this mouse ... Pippin obviously had something to do with it, otherwise how would he know where it was? And why show it to me? Ah, but think. If he saw Mom take the baby mouse outside, and then this one shows up inside--obviously "outside" is a magical place. His toy ran down and wouldn't go anymore. Mom takes it outside, and then it shows up back inside, ready to play again.

Still ... how is he making them dead? The second mouse, just like the first, doesn't look played with. At least, not by a cat. So I got myself rolled up newspaper to scoop the mouse up with and took it outside. Pippin followed at my heels, stopping at the door and watching me take the mouse out, with apparent approval. So, obviously I was doing what I was supposed to do with it.

January 2008: Pippin loved that box.
Again, ignoring the laws of physics that says
he was too big for it.

The third mouse: Pippin had obviously decided that when these fun toys run down, it is our job to take them outside and repair them. When he found and played with a third mouse, I must not have been receptive to his entreaties to follow him to it. (I never would have found the other one if he hadn't showed me). So he took matters into his own paws and put the mouse where we would have to find it.

Only, um, we didn't. You see, I did my own laundry. My parents' laundry baskets were in the upstairs bathroom closet, whose door was often left open. The white laundry basket (a tall trash can with a lid) usually had the lid in the "up" position since it made life easier all around (you have white laundry every day, but not always do you have dark laundry). Mom, who is a routine fanatic just like me, did the white laundry every monday. 

From what we can figure out, Pippin put the mouse in the white laundry sometime Sunday night. I remembered smelling something off in the bathroom on Sunday, but I just figured it was, well, what normally causes a bathroom to smell bad. Pippin knew Mom always emptied the laundry on Monday morning. He just didn't realize that she emptied it by turning it upside down over the top-loading laundry machine. She didn't empty it by looking and reaching in it.

(The position of the shelving, the laundry lid, and the laundry basket made it highly unlikely the mouse simply fell in. As unlikely as it seems, Pippin must have put it in the basket. He was certainly tall enough to stand on his back legs and drop it in.)

When I got home from work that Monday, I was greeted by a highly indignant mother, who said "Do you know what your cat did?!" Um, no, what? "I washed a mouse!"

You what?! 

"I WASHED a mouse! In the laundry!"

Me: EEWWW!

Her: Precisely!

The mouse, luckily for the ew factor, didn't like, um, come apart in the washing machine. It just lost all its hair. Mom washed the laundry load twice without the mouse afterwards! Not that I blamed her for the "excess" washing. I might have run it through the laundry three times. With bleach.

July 2008: See, he does fit quite nicely

The last mouse was different. First, this is the mouse where we found out how Pippin was killing them. Second, this was not a field mouse, but a different mouse species. And third, this time the mouse survived.

I'm downstairs at the computer again. Being boring. Mom and Daddy are upstairs in the living room, reading and watching tv with headphones (respectively). Also being boring. So, to Pippin, two boring people were better than one boring person, so he was upstairs playing. This is where he found the last mouse. 

As he was a rather social cat (when he was completely at home and comfortable) he wanted to play with his toy in the living room with Mom and Daddy, so he picked it up by the nape of the neck, walked into the living room from the den, put the mouse down and starting rolling it back and forth between his paws.

Mom was curious as to which toy he had; got close enough to see, and then (so she tells me) she did a perfect imitation of the stereotypical farmer's wife where she jumped onto the coffee table and screeched for Daddy to kill it, kill it! (I imagine there was not much actual volume involved in the screech, or high-pitch in the voice, as that is not my mother's way, but let's not spoil the fun now). Daddy rolls up a newspaper and grimly goes about his duty.

Pippin is astonished and taken aback. If you people don't appreciate me, I will take my toy downstairs and play with it there! So he picks up his mouse by the neck again and trots downstairs where he sets up camp right outside my (open) door and starts rolling the mouse back and forth between his paws again.

The first I know of any of this is when I hear Daddy in the hallway, saying "Josie come get your cat!" (Notice how he was always "your cat" when things went south, but just Pippin otherwise! It was like having a child!) I came out of my room, nearly tripped over Pippin because I hadn't expected him to be right there and managed to regain my balance with the aid of the door frame.

"What's he done now?" I asked, not seeing the mouse as it was under Pippin's head where his paws were, and I was standing almost on top of him. (Pippin never even bothered to notice I nearly tripped over him. He trusted me not to, and that was that as far as he was concerned.)

Daddy explained the situation. I needed to get Pippin so he could get the mouse. 

This was complicated by the garage door which was right next to the whole setup in the hallway. The gloves that would fit Daddy were out in the garage, but if he went out to get the gloves, the mouse might take the opportunity to escape the lethal cat and run into the garage, and then we'd never find it. And mice, although I do think they are cute, are also deadly to humans in that they chew wires in the walls, cause shorts, which then cause house fires. So, no mouse colonies in my house thank you very much.

Mom happened to have left some small gloves in the basement. I can fit into her gloves but Daddy never could in a million years. Unlike cats, we have to obey physics, and his hands are too big for her gloves. So I said I'd get the mouse if he tossed the gloves to me. 

I caught the gloves (much to my surprise), knelt down next to Pippin, and told him, "Okay, playtime's over, I need the mouse now."

Would you believe he backed right off? I was amazed even as I was mostly focused on catching the mouse. I figured by this time the mouse was going to be bloody and probably not very intact, and I was cringing inside at the thought of touching it, even with gloves on.

The mouse was perfectly unharmed. I also think it was used to people, because it wasn't a field mouse. It was fat and round and brown, with ears that were like circles pinched on one side to fit into the head. It had a little tail and didn't try to get away from me at all. 

And it wasn't the least bit alarmed at having been played with by a cat for the last half hour, or being carried around by one. It sat in my fist and washed its ears and looked around with bright black button eyes. I was trying not to harm it any further, and if it had tried to get away from me, it would have succeeded, because I wasn't holding it at all tightly.

Well, now what? I wasn't about to kill it. But I thought that no matter how unfazed it seemed, it probably wouldn't come back into the house if I took it outside, not after knowing that there was a playful cat inside the house.

So I took it upstairs and out the back door. Pippin followed as far as the door and watched with interest. I put the mouse down, accidentally on my shoe instead of the ground because it clung to my glove and didn't want to be put down. And then I had to urge it gently off my shoe, because it didn't want to leave. But it didn't act like it was in shock or anything.

Later it finally occurred to me that it was probably someone's pet mouse and had grown up with a cat. I wished I would have kept it, gotten a rodent house with a ball like you get for gerbils or hamsters. It was such an adorable mouse, and I don't think it was used to surviving in the wild, so it probably was lunch for something out there very quickly. The poor thing seemed to be very used to people, and cats, and wasn't inclined to run away from Pippin.

Because you see, that's how Pippin killed the previous mice. He wasn't harming them directly. When he batted them between his paws, it was very gentle and he didn't have his claws out at all. He just rolled the mouse back and forth like a toy ball. The mice kept running away from him and he'd retrieve them, and finally they just ran themselves to death. This mouse survived because it didn't run away from him, just let him roll it around. I do wish I'd kept it!

My mother is probably quietly grateful that I didn't.

Dec 2008: Inquisitive Pippin

Retrospective: Pippin Goes Canoeing (June 2009)

My parents have a canoe. It holds four adults. My sister came from her place to visit us the spring of 2009, and my mom wanted to go canoeing. This was somewhere new for Pippin, and I trusted him enough that I knew he wouldn't go swimming (unless we dumped the canoe over) (and there were dire warnings issued to all the humans involved: you dump my cat in lake water, you get to give him a bath!) (Not that he was particularly hard to bathe, actually).

I shall try to refrain from excessive use of parantheticals for the rest of the tale. But no promises.

Driving to the River

We went to a new place since the lake we used to go canoeing in wasn't really open anymore for canoe people. I think. Not clear on this. But instead we went to what is a lazy wide river with very little current. The principle is this: you pack the canoe with your people, your lunch, and your canoe equipment, and you paddle upstream till you get tired. Then you tie the canoe to an overhanging branch and eat lunch. After a lazy lunch and possibly a short nap, you untie the canoe and leisurely paddle back downstream with the current helping you along till you get to where you put the minivan.

Pippin is loving it

Here's what no one expected. Pippin, instead of being his usual resigned self (she's dragging me somewhere else. Again) loved it. I think it had something to do with being in a safe, confined space surrounded by stuff no one could get through to get to him, but he could sniff and hear and (limited) see all he wanted to. Plus the water magnified the scents and sounds. He was fascinated.

He also got wet, because it had been such a long time since we went canoeing that I forgot how you have to flip the paddle from one side of the canoe to the other, and in doing so, you drip all over the inside of the canoe (and the person in front of you). My father, in the back, steering the canoe, always took quite a lot of glee in dripping water down my back between my lifejacket and my clothes. This time I do believe he tried to avoid dripping lake water on Pippin, but it's not really something you can avoid altogether.

Pippin didn't seem to mind. In fact, he didn't even seem to notice.

My mother was in the front of the canoe, and my sister and I were side by side in the middle of the canoe, trading the paddle back and forth (we only have three paddles). And Pippin, as you saw, was on my lap.

No, he doesn't get Gatorade.
He won't eat or drink anything till we get home.

As we were traveling upstream, we were passing lake-front housing and some of the people were out in their backyards, doing back yard stuff. One backyard had two dogs in it. The wind was blowing toward them, and so they smelled Pippin.

There was a cat in the middle of the river. In that canoe!

This was a horrible state of affairs and must be corrected immediately! The dogs rushed down to their little pier and went barking like crazy, trying to get their humans' attention to rectify this awful error. It is a good thing the humans couldn't understand the dogs. It was bad enough that they were visibly annoyed with their dogs suddenly barking at a passing boat (you could tell it wasn't a usual thing the dogs did based on the humans' reactions to the barking) but if they'd been able to understand what the dogs were protesting, those poor dogs would have been told they were a bunch of liars.

Because Pippin, hearing the dogs, decided to duck his head down below canoe edge level, and thus could not be seen from the shore!

When we tired of paddling and found a nice place to tie to an overhanging branch, we stopped for lunch. We used to tie to a branch on the side of the river/lake, but when I was younger we had a snake drop in for lunch (quite literally) as we were snugged up against the land. This then involved the snake, my shoe (no foot in it at the time) and my father using a paddle to eject my shoe into the water, along with the snake. While I wasn't sorry to see the snake go, I was rather indignant about the shoe. Granted they were worn out dirty boat shoes, shoes that weren't fit for anything else from the holes in the sides and the wear on the tread, but still.

Anyway, now we make sure we have a nice branch that overarches the water, where we aren't right next to the shore, and we can see if there's any snakes (or wasps' nests, or giant spiders) hanging out on the branch.

We ate lunch and had our food coma nap afterwards. This wasn't like deep sleep or anything, and I kept an eye on Pippin, because I figured he'd take the opportunity to investigate once everyone stopped moving around and things settled and became quiet.

This is what he did. He was curious about this stuff the canoe moved through. Pippin had had plenty of baths at this point, so he knew what water was, and unusually for most indoor cats, he knew what "deep" water was (water that isn't just running like from a faucet or kitty water fountain).

Look, I know he's out in a canoe. But he was an indoor cat unless he was escorted. I never let him run loose without me around and either a harness or a fence involved. You could fence Pippin since because of his poor eyesight meaning he wouldn't jump the fence. I was still there the whole time. So, indoor cat.

Now I didn't see the other side of the canoe edge because I was behind Pippin with a hand in his harness, making sure I hadn't misjudged his level of curiosity. If he was going to suddenly become brave kitty and go for a swim, I wanted to be sure I could nip that idea in the bud. My father, however, was in a position to see what happened on the other side of the canoe where the lake was, and he told me.

Pippin very cautiously and carefully reached one paw over the side of the canoe. He had his paw bent like he was going to walk on the top of the water. He lowered the paw, still slowly and carefully.

The paw reached the surface of the water, but unlike the leaves floating around us, Pippin's paw kept going into the water up to the first paw joint (where it bends when they walk on land). He didn't react like you'd expect, yanking his paw up and shaking it.

No, he just slowly and carefully pulled his paw back out of the water and (I saw this part) looked at the damp paw rather mournfully, as if to say I knew it. I just knew it. Water. Humph. He didn't even wash the paw then, although I did my best to dry it off with a towel (or possibly the edge of my shirt). He washed it later, putting it back into order, but he was so disappointed that he couldn't go walkabout on the water around the canoe that he just left his paw slightly damp for a while.

May 2010: It was a smidge too hot to have taken him
with us, so he spent most of his time under the
umbrella while inside the canoe. Mostly sleeping.

We went canoeing several times after that. Pippin came along for all of the rides. He quite enjoyed them, and when we got back to the house he would tell me about how much he liked it and what he saw and smelled. At least, I'm assuming that's what all the little purls and trills and mrups were about. He certainly seemed happy with his canoe trips!