letters from the cat

My name is Luna, and I am the ruler of this house.  I was a rescue kitten, adopted from a shelter three years ago, and when I finally came out from under the sofa, I declared that there was a new sheriff in town, and that sheriff was me!

I rule this house with lots of fur and an iron paw.

There was another cat here when I moved in - his name is Tiger.  But, he scorned my attempts to make nice with him.  I tried to snuggle up to him.  I tried to share his food dish with him, but he was having none of that.

I spend most of my days sitting in the large front window, watching the bees and birds flit by.

On school days, I hear the bus at the end of the street, and I start howling for my human the minute I hear the air brakes.

I am an indoor cat.  I do not like the outdoors.  It is very messy, and my fur gets dirty.

Tiger is an indoor/outdoor cat.

He loves the outdoors, and loves nothing more than to roll in the concrete in the car port.  He gets out there, rolls around in ecstasy, and when he comes in, he is all covered with dust, dirt, and leaves.

But, I am smitten with Tiger.  He is such a tom cat.  I have to tell you what he did for our humans this morning.  Ungrateful wretches, they didn't appreciate it at all.

He brought a live gopher into the house and dropped it at Mom's feet.  Everyone is home for the weekend, and he thought this would be a great opportunity to teach these helpless humans how to hunt for their own food.

But did they appreciate his hard work?  NO!!!

Mom screamed.  The boys closed the kitchen doors so the gopher would stay in the kitchen (taking all of the fun out of a room by room safari-style search through the house) and the girl climbed up on the kitchen table and yelled "Get it!  OH, don't hurt it!  It's under the computer table!  No, it's under the buffet, OH, don't hurt it!"

Mom finally got a broom and while the one boy held the door open, and the other boy held a box between the end of the counter and the wall, Mom swept the gopher out towards the door. 

What a waste!  I was looking forward to some nice, steamed gopher, with a sauce of minced garlic and onions, with a few capers, and here they were, tossing a perfectly decent lunch right back out the door!

You might ask where I was while all of this was going on?  After all, I have claws and could have caught the gopher myself.  Right?  Wrong!  I am a princess, and catching a gopher would have gotten my paws dirty!  I climbed up on the kitchen counter when the gopher was released so that I could better watch the "action".

Once the gopher was back outside, Tiger stared at Mom and the young humans.  He shook himself all over, and turned and went back outside.

I know he was thinking that he had lost a perfectly good lunch in an ill-fated attempt to teach our humans how to hunt.

What are we going to do with these people?