cat and mouse

Expect to be given your first mouse at around the time your cat's kitten canine teeth are replaced by adult weapons. Until then it has been honing its hunting skills on insects.

Not long after banjo and Sherpa reached this milestone in their development, a couple came to help us in the garden. While we were having lunch they left their wellingtons at the back door and a dead mouse was dropped into one. It was a field mouse with yellowish brown fur on its back, a white belly, large round eyes and prominent ears.

I have opened the door on a wet evening to a cat howling as if in distress, only to find, too late, that it had a mouse in its mouth. I could only close a door to the rest of the house as the cat placed the mouse on the tiled floor and allowed it to run for safety in the low space under the cooker, or the narrow space between the back of the washing machine and the wall. If only the mouse stayed there until the cat lost interest, and then asked to be let out! No, it came out, was temporarily immobilised under a paw, released, reached safety, came out... Usually the mouse was still in hiding by the time we went to bed.

There was a mouse in the kitchen when I was admitted to hospital for an operation. It was only caught when I returned home and some time later came down to the kitchen in the early hours of the morning to find it frolicking. It left a nest in a drawer that contained gloves, cotton tea- cosies and rolls of gauze. To make its nest it gnawed pieces from a scarf and supplemented these with bits of the brown paper in which the gauze was rolled. The result was a sphere, several centimetres in diameter, as soft and warm and light as thistledown.