A Brindle Cat and a Tan Boxer

A Brindle Cat and a Tan Boxer

Way back when in the early 1950s, a yellowish grey, brindle-striped cat lay sunning herself on a low limestone wall just a few feet from me alongside our house in Coconut Grove, Florida. She lay nearly motionless, with a barely perceptible shifting of her head as she watched something in the yard behind our house. Her eyes were focused like laser beams on the subject of her interest moving around behind the property where we lived. Only the very tip of her tail slightly twitched spasmodically now and then.

 

I was a kid back then and watched with interest and a faint hope for the possibility of witnessing some dramatic interaction between two classical animal enemies. I was not to be disappointed that day!



This particular cat was an outdoor cat. She’d wandered up one day a month earlier and the young couple who lived in the apartment behind our house made the mistake of feeding her - just once. It was the husband’s mistake since his wife had kept cats before and knew better. The cat never left after that, apparently feeling secure there. The couple continued to feed her and ruefully realized the cat was now there to stay. But, with a newborn baby in the house, they did not want a strange cat to live inside the house with them, fearing disease. So, the husband provided a simple wooden outdoor shelter for the cat against the front wall of their apartment and they soon adjusted themselves to her presence. Having cat food on their grocery list soon became routine.



No one ever knew where the cat came from. The couple asked around among our neighbors but no one knew anything. They supposed she might have been abandoned by an owner who moved, or the cat had gotten lost perhaps, since she was not a young cat. She was quite gentle and tame, and seemed accustomed to, and comfortable around people. The young wife had always loved cats knew too, that sometimes outdoor cats simply decided to relocate themselves for no reason, being the very independent creatures that they are.



But whatever the cat’s history, now she was ‘their’ cat by chance and the cat’s own choice. She was very friendly and responded sweetly to petting. She came and went as she pleased and the couple gave little thought to her until the day they suddenly and shockingly realized she was very, very pregnant. It was only then that they fully understood the full extent of their mistake in ever feeding the cat in the first place. Now, they were stuck with her and the kittens to come. Regrets notwithstanding, the earnest couple now faced up to their new and unwanted responsibilities. When the kittens came the cat delivered them in the crawl space under our house and it took a couple days for the husband to locate them by the faint sounds of their mewling. He skinned his knees and back to enter the crawl space to gather them up and tenderly bring them out under his wife's and the kittens' mother’s close supervision. He placed them in the same wooden box he had already fixed up for their mother with a couple of old towels for comfort. This being southern Florida, there was no worry about the kittens staying warm and so long as they were out of the rain they should be quite all right. And that’s how things stood on that first Sunday morning after their birth as their mother sunned herself nearby on top of that low limestone wall.



In those halcyon days of relaxed or non-existent leash laws, the object of the cat’s intense interest was a rather large dog, a tan-colored boxer which was running freely about the neighbor’s back yard sniffing here and there. He was a young dog in the prime of his youth, obviously on the track of an interesting smell. The cat suddenly tensed and rolled from her tense supine position to a crouch on her all-fours when the boxer moved from the neighbor’s yard into our own. The dog passed within a couple feet of the cat as she raised herself into the classic ‘alarmed Halloween cat’ crouch with her back arched and her hair standing on end. I think she probably even hissed too, but the dog was oblivious to her on the wall. She was slightly above the dog’s line of sight and he seemed solely intent on signals his nose was sending him. 



The cat continued to turn towards the dog as he moved further into the yard, following his nose which quickly led him to the cat shelter. He abruptly stuck his head inside. Big mistake!



The mother cat now about eight feet away, launched herself at the dog, who hearing her yowl tried to pull his head out of the cat shelter. The cat landed on his back with all claws fully extended locking on with all four feet. I don’t believe the dog ever actually saw the cat, and only sensed that something horrible had landed on his back and had him in its firm grip, and firm grip it was too. The dog finally managed to snatch his head out of the cat shelter and made a panicked dash for the street out front. The mother cat rode him from the backyard all the way to the street in front of our house exactly like a racehorse jockey crouching over his mount. The poor dog screamed his head off the entire way, and at the street the cat stepped nonchalantly and almost daintily off the dog’s back and watched him as he continued to run down the street, still yowling, until he was completely out of sight. Then, she casually went back to check on her kittens.

That cat had serious attitude!



I was a young lad then of around twelve and remember rolling around on the grass laughing myself sick at the sight, which is still just about the most deliciously funny thing I’ve ever seen to this day.  I have been a cat fan ever since. Don’t get me wrong - I like dogs too, but for sheer chutzpa, I don’t think there’s any pet which can beat a cat!



* This is a true story as I remember it. The memory is still just as vivid now as it was some sixty-odd years ago.