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A Christmas Story by Loren Eiseley
Not everyone receives the same truth or exists in the same realm of understanding. I have written an account of this episode because it involves a message, and there are those without messages who like to receive them through the medium of others. I myself, before this event occurred, had perhaps been moved by the sad genius of Hardy speaking nostalgically of the time when simple country people believed that the oxen knelt in their stalls on Christmas Eve. Like Hardy, I was tired of my own skin, of sterilized apartment living. I was tired of commercialized "people gifts," I was tired of engraved cards proclaiming a season of good will as though it constituted a temporary armistice in human affairs.
Nevertheless, I went to a Christmas Eve party and it was upon my return from that party that I met the talking cat. Let us have no smiles. I was perfectly sober, so much so that I stood and debated what to do. There are hundreds of lost dogs and abandoned cats in the environs of great cities. Because of helplessness, one steels oneself against many deplorable sights.
As I stood on the grounds of my apartment house, a thin snow was beginning to fall and there was a hint in the chill air of implacable winds and drifts before morning. It was just at that moment that I heard a plaintive cry from under the shrubbery near the door. The cry was that of a cat in distress. I have heard many such cries in the course of my life under circumstances where I had been forced to walk on. What could I do here, I thought grimly, taking another step toward the door. All over the world, there are starving homeless people and animals. Pictures from the past floated through my mind so that I swung my head in distress.
I groped for the keys to the door and it was only then that I realized these pains that afflicted me were the result of the eloquence of the unseen cat under the bush. He was not merely saying he was lost and complaining about it. With a perfectly amazing eloquence, he was going up and down the scale of animal grievance. If I could not completely make out the words, I could comprehend the gist. This invisible cat was informing me of the nature of the world, of his deliberate abandonment, of his innocence of wrong, and of my duties as a human being. Why would I not respond to him?
It was more than I could bear.
"Remember the regulations about pets," protested my wife. "You're getting involved."
"Not yet," I answered, but I came down to the lawn and approached the bush, murmuring some kind of guilty explanation to its still-invisible occupant. Explanations of why I could do nothing, protests against his protests, explaining that I was not really heartless, but that events...
For a moment this dialogue continued. Then the voice in the shrubbery ceased. He won't dare to come out, I thought. My conscience is clear. I've talked to him, I've been decent, but there is no food in my pocket. I have explained... A silence hovered while the creature considered my obstinate protests and looked me over with night-wise eyes. Suddenly, as small grey and white shadow appeared on the snow. The cat had made its decision. It ran directly to me and rolled over on its back in a gesture of trust. I dropped to my knees. The cat, a beautiful young male, rolled from one side to the other while I stroked his stomach. He made some further remarks about being cold and hungry. He also talked about the dependency of cats upon humankind. He retained faith in them. I shuddered but it was not in me to disillusion him. Besides, I was sustaining the burden of humanity at Christmas.
"All right, all right," I said, gathering him up into a ball in my arms while he purred with satisfaction.
"But the superintendent..." protested my wife. "He won't stand for it."
"He will for a little while," I muttered. "He's got to -- we've got to find this cat a home. Look, he talks. I tell you it's like language. He doesn't just meow. He's got emphasis, tone, rhythm. I've never heard a cat behave that way. It's uncanny."
"Well now," said my wife gently. "Maybe the SPCA..."
"No," I said. "He isn't a thoroughbred. He just knows how to talk and they wouldn't discover that right off in an animal shelter. There are too many lost cats. He'd be put to sleep. There wouldn't be anyone to understand him."
"Oh," said my wife, discomfited and uneasy. "But who are you going to get to adopt him? Why don't you consult someone who understands talking cats, as you put it? Why don't you ask our librarian friend who lives in the building? Certainly she must know about talking cats. She once had a kitty."
"A fine idea," I said. "Let's take the cat to her right now."
The animal in my arms murmured something inaudible, but made no protest as we crossed the drive.
"Good evening," I said to our friend at her door. "We have a problem, uh, that is, er, a cat. But you see, it's very unusual. It's a talking cat."
"Is it truly?" said the small gentle woman who loved pets and like us, could have none. She stood on tiptoe and looked at the creature I held. "A talking cat? And what does he say?"
"If you will allow me," I said, "I will put him down and you can see for yourself." I dropped the cat gently to the floor.
"And he is lost, you say? Then the dear love must have an egg and some milk."
"M'warf," said the cat promptly.
"You see," I said. "He understands English too."
"We will call him Night Country," said our friend decisively, "after that book of yours. And you did pick him up in the night."
"Yes," I said, "but the name..." The librarian had a flair for the Gothic.
"I have named more cats than you know," she informed me severely.
"It's a perfectly good name and we must think of how to find him a home. Names help, nice names. It's like selling a book," she appealed to me.
The cat ventured some remote comment that his name was probably Whitey, but no one could be sure. The voice came from underneath the sofa. Night Country was only a pair of eyes receding in the depths of the furniture.
"The egg, oh yes, we have forgotten the egg," cried our friend, her ear carefully attuned to various comments beneath the sofa.
The cat's language is tonal, I thought suddenly. Like Chinese.
Pitch and emphasis and a rich range that egg and milk soon quieted.
"Three eggs for the poor love," added our friend. "Tomorrow he must have distemper shots and a bath. We must find a vet." She looked critically at me. "We must check in the lost columns, we must avoid any charity that might put him to sleep. Meanwhile..." and a touch of conspiracy entered her voice... "he will stay here with me."
"We wouldn't think..." protested my wife.
"Ah now," said our friend. "I know about cats, and the superintendent rarely comes up here. He will be safe for a few days.
"On Christmas Eve, I later learned, Night Country had slept in his protector's canopy bed with a pink nose resting on her shoulder.
"The dear one warms Christmas," said our friend, looking up from the floor when we returned on Christmas Day. "He reminds me of..." I detected a tear shining in her eyes and came hastily across to rub the cat's ears. She did not finish.
"I want to keep..."
"None of us can," cautioned my wife gently.
"He _can_ speak, you are right, he can," whispered Night Country's defender. "He sits in the window while I have a cup of tea and he talks like home..."
She bowed her head, her eyes hidden. I looked away, knowing she was long widowed.
The week that followed was a nightmare. I carried Night Country to two separate veterinarians because, as my wife quickly diagnosed, the first proved heartless and incompetent.
"Night Country will hate me now," I said bitterly, retrieving him. He staggered from tranquilizers; his pupils were distended until a frightening darkness was all I could see in his eyes. Still, he came back unprotesting into my arms. I smuggled him back to his hideout.
In the days that followed, he lay on a cushion in our good friend's high window and talked about his new home. I detected an unjustified confidence in his voice.
There was nothing in the paper. Everyone we approached -- and we spent hours on the telephone -- already had cats. There was, as I had suspected, a plethora of cats. Also, the number of people we could trust with a talking cat was small.
The time came when someone in our inner circle of acquaintances mentioned the SPCA again.
"No," I said. "Never. They will not understand that Night Country talks. He is just a cat. We have seen already what will happen. A week or so and..."
A strong compulsion took me. I loved this animal from the cold night.
"If it becomes necessary," I spoke my ultimatum to a room where we had lived for a quarter of a century, "if it becomes necessary, we shall move, so help me. We won't desert him."
No one said anything. I realized with embarrassment that my voice was shaking.
The next day the phone rang. Our friend was crying but jubilant.
One of the secretaries in the department would take Night Country. I breathed a long sigh and held my head against the wall. It was all right then. The secretary was a beautiful kindhearted girl, although I remembered, a little uneasily, that she was also one of the younger generation that roams from Paris to Milan in the summers. She had her own world. We purchased a little carrier for Night Country to be taken to his new home. He wailed once heartbreakingly as he was driven off.
"Till the spring then," I whispered to myself. "Till the spring."
Months later, at my request, Night Country was brought to see me at my office. He emerged promptly from the traveling case that I had purchased for him to be taken away in. He was bigger now, but he still rolled over in his little friendly ritual. After this greeting, he investigated each box and bone in my office. He discussed them too, in that strange tonal language that I could no longer follow. Then he sat fascinated on my window ledge and watched a long freight train with brightly painted cars like toys pass on a trestle a block away. His eyes were very wide but he uttered no comment. His new owner had left the room. Night Country was her cat now, though he finally found a little secret shelf among my skulls and peered out inscrutably at me from the night darkness that would always follow him. I would never know if he remembered me.
Not long afterward, the girl who had taken Night Country decided to go to Paris and we had to find another home for him. One of my former students who lived in New Orleans was approached. Yes, she and her husband would make room for him, but they had a dog, a big dog. If things worked out...
They did, as it so happened. "He is living in the dog house with the dog," the startling message came back. "Shep took to him immediately. We have never seen anything like it."
Ah, but I know, I thought, tilting back in my chair. Night Country must have talked to Shep and rolled over. He is walking through the world like a cat out of Eden. A Christmas cat. A cat who talks to each person once, just once. Now he has escaped the snow and is living in the house of a companionable great dog. Nothing, no one, has ever broken his trust, since he made his decision and came crying to me from the bush on Christmas Eve.
Where had I read about an old circus lion in Britain who had escaped from his cage? They had found him on the moors, bedded down with some sheep he had not harmed. It was the Christmas feel of kind, I thought, for the variegated life of the world across the boundaries of form, the thing so lost to most of us, save for the confident talking cat and the lion and the wistful thinking of poets:
for I
love forms beyond my own
and regret the borders between us.
This was not the Christmas of the engraved cards. It was the message of a talking cat I had rescued from the snow. He had spoken just once and I had understood him. I did not have to hear twice. I would never forget. I had wanted him for myself, but he was a message carrier and messengers cannot think of themselves. They must go on. I thought of him sleeping far away in New Orleans between the paws of a shepherd dog. I thought of the old lion who had slept a few weary hours among the sheep before men came to get him. Then I put on my hat and went restlessly out into the late spring rain of Eastertime. I would never see Night Country again. He was a messenger.
In past years when hunting with others, I have failed to call attention to a fox. I have unwrapped a snake from a pheasant and injured neither -- widened the eye of the world, in other words, pushed death momentarily aside, but here, this cat, you see, cost me grief and sustained effort. He is still living, may outlive me, and of course does not remember now, but with him, I finally outfaced the universe.
We both did it. Let it stand for our steps going away, the voluntary act, trust on his part, response on mine. For a moment, we closed the barrier on forms, we talked together. It is not his fault if his brain is by now a drifting haze of unknown faces that did not stay. He commanded me to a duty known between us. Let it stand for the record -- I will hold the memory for him.
They called him Night Country and wondered where he had come from. Well, he was a true cat. No one would ever find out. They could only guess from the nature of the message. As for me, I believe I guessed, but I never told. The message can stand by itself.
Reprinted from "ALL THE STRANGE HOURS; The Excavation of a Life,"
by Loren Eiseley. (c) 1975, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
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