I am on all fours in a gravel
path in my yard, tapping the ground with one hand, holding a leash
with the other.I am whispering insistently.The summer sun burns my
neck.Seen from the road, through stalks of dead cheatgrass, my butt
would appear to hover, a blue-jeans moon at noon.
“Shack-le-ton.Shack-le-ton!SHACK-le-ton.”
Is
anyone watching? Near my index finger a grasshopper stays
stock-still.But my cat, undaunted explorer, is chittering at a
bird. I stand, lifting him toward the grasshopper.
“Look,” I say- and he pounces.
Suddenly,
Shackleton strains against his harness at the jumping, flying,
clattering grasshopper, and I’m on the tail-end of the
action, running full-speed, arm straight out, because now I’m
only an extension of my saucy orange tabby.
On these
summer grasshopper hunts, I am the pointer, the hunting dog, and I
am the cat whisperer who has mastered intonations of his name
– “Shack-ul-ton”- so that sometimes all I have to
do is bend, point, whisper, and he instantly paws down one of these
yellow-green sci-fi bugs. Then rips its head off. Then later makes
very smelly caa-caa. Kathe will protest when she cleans out the cat
box.
For years, I thought I had an allergy to cats. But
after Shackleton arrived one snowy October afternoon- a stray
kitten who purred in my cupped hands- my first reaction was love
and, after we decided we’d try a harness-and-leash for this
indoor cat, servitude.
Now Shackleton yelps and yelps
when the sun is out, the air mild, the prey plentiful.Carpe diem,
buddy, quit typing, he’s saying.“Awright, let’s
go kill some bugs,” I’ll say as he offers his head,
trilling, to the harness.
Out we go, ranging across an
acre of the four that Kathe and I own, steering clear of the road,
thistle and, in the early days, any passers-by. At the sound of a
truck, I’d carry Shackleton behind the house, so no one could
see me.We live in a neighborhood of ex-ranchers and horse owners,
most of whom have a second car: a backhoe.The last thing I wanted
people to see was me, walking a cat.It just seemed too metrosexual
for semi-rural northern Utah.
Because Kathe and I are
xeriscaping our property, eliminating invasives like Dyer’s
woad and restoring both a dry upland and part of a riparian zone to
native vegetation, folks on Hollow Road often see us digging,
hauling, planting, cutting.This had earned us praise.Would walking
a cat evoke a different reaction?I didn’t want to find out.
Eventually, though, I stopped running.I still
occasionally put myself between the cat and
The-Truck-with-a-Trailer-of-ATVs, but that’s for safety.I
won’t run anymore.If someone stopped to ask, incredulous, why
I was on all-fours pointing at something invisible while my cat was
rolling around in the dirt, I’d discourse on not letting cats
outdoors unsupervised because they kill songbirds.And, I’d
say, fact is, this is ritual for me.And I don’t need a
license to hunt grasshoppers.
So Shackleton and I partake
of the ancient rite of killing. But we also stop and sniff: I
inhale the scents of flowers we’ve planted; who knows what
the cat can smell.Whatever it is (raccoon, stray cat, deer), it
usually gets him mad. And we see things.Chickadees, milk snakes,
moonlight on the red bark of dogwood. I see the hawk that sees
Shackleton who does not see it.
Where the catmint grows,
Shackleton chews, while I make sure he gets nothing of the toxic
chokecherry. He goes so goofy and antsy- the little dude seems
high- that I pluck a catmint leaf to stick by his nose, a
distraction while I carry him indoors.
Sometimes
he’ll wriggle so much I can’t bear to end our
expedition.Sometimes we stop by the water’s edge and watch
the river.Once, I squatted next to him in the dusk. “Look at
that,” I said. “Shackleton, just look at that.”
Mars tipped a nameless mountain like a beacon, and right by our six
feet, the planet glowed in the current.
Not long ago, I
donned my cowboy hat and a work shirt and tucked part of the leash
in my jeans pocket.I twirled my cat’s harness and challenged
people to guess. It was Halloween. No one got it. “I’m
the cat whisperer!” I said gleefully.I smiled, sipped some
wine.
I was voted Worst Costume. I didn’t mind.
Christopher Cokinos is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in
Utah’s Cache Valley, where he writes and also edits Isotope:
A Journal of Literary Nature & Science Writing at Utah State
University.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
