It’s entirely fascinating to watch my “big girls”, as I’ve taken to calling the adult cats. In winter, they mostly stayed in, but now with the warm weather and the abundance of interesting things, they much prefer to stay out pretty much from dawn until dark. The don’t wander far from the house; clearly, this is their territory, and they patrol it carefully. I have occasionally heard vociferous hissing and growls and gone out to see some strange cat departing at a far faster rate than is consistent with feline dignity. When that happens, the resident cat responsible prances over in what can only be characterized as a strut, demanding praise and petting as her due. I’ve even seen Sophia face down a raccoon about three times her size, though that was from the safety of the inside of the glass door. Still, I know she can be heard through the glass, because I can hear her even with my dull human ears. And she was quite impressive, with a growl that would have done credit to a twenty pound tom, fully fluffed up and with paws slashing the air faster than my eye could follow. She was clearly promising mayhem, and that raccoon took her seriously, staging a hasty retreat.
The soybean field about fifteen feet from our side door is their favorite place to prowl. About knee high on me, the plants make a jungle that is perfectly to the scale of the cats. They hunt endlessly, catching inumerable small mammals and birds. And watching them, I can easily see their larger cousins stalking through the grass of an African plain. The proportions are the same; it is only the scale that’s different. I catch glimpses of Tornado’s sleek blackness through the leaves, but Sophia’s grey fur disappears into the shadows in ways I could not have imagined possible. All of her is grey, even her nose and paw-pads, but it is not a solid color, like a crayon. It is shaded, dappled and striped in subtle variations. She’s slow, deliberate, overweight – and none of that matters as she stalks into the leaves and vanishes into what is, to her, a jungle. And like their large cousins, they hunt cooperatively and share what they catch. It’s quite something to watch. Sophia and Tornado may be my “big girls”, but that’s only in relation to baby Cloud. Compared to the truly big cats, they’re miniature predators, tigers at doll-house scale who are just as effective in their own sphere.
That makes it all the more amazing to me that they choose to live with humans, and even more so that they actively seek us out to give and receive affection. Tornado presses up against my leg every night, and rubs her head against my cheek every morning. Sophia talks to me all the time, and curls up on the floor near to wherever I am in the evening; in her own understated way she actively seeks my company, if not my lap. Little Miss Cloud still considers me the source of all safety, scrambling up to my shoulder whenever anything or anyone new presents itself, peering down in prudent curiousity. I read recently that archeological discoveries indicate that cats may well have essentially domesticated themselves, choosing to live near human communities where the food supply was more stable. That would explain why creatures who share so much with their wild kindred choose us as their companions.