Cats in the house. Doreen Tovey

Chapter first
CAN SHE CATCH MICE?
Our first Siamese was called Saji, we bought her because of the mice. To justify such a prosaic reason, I can only refer to the fact that these mice were not even ordinary, but the hangers-on of our tame squirrel named Blondin. Over the years, they had acquired originality and looked no more like ordinary mice than Blondin looked like ordinary squirrels, and, for that matter, no more than Siamese cats resembled anyone else.

During Blonden's life, the mice didn't bother us much, but you know, they traveled around the house: up the stairs, then down, then to the wire aviary in the garden, where Blonden spent the daytime hours since he allowed himself to gnaw a hole in the living room door to get to the apple.

And the mice went about their business, laboriously looking for nuts and bits of bread, which he stored for a rainy day under the rugs and behind the seats of the chairs. The first time I met a mouse on the stairs, mincing with a nut in its teeth, like a dog with a bone, I was a little stunned, but in the end I got used to them.

One mouse got into the habit of playing hide and seek with me in the garden arbor. And over time, she became so domesticated that at the end of the game she got out into an open place with a fervently protruding bread crust from her mouth, sat on her hind legs and looked at me with the eyes of an American millionaire asking the price of Cleopatra's Inla.

And one evening, unable to squeeze through the gap under the back door with a nut in her mouth, she left him lying in the room, slipped out herself, sprawled on the threshold and began to pick him up with her paw.

And I was frightened to death, watching from the kitchen how the walnut desperately rolls under the door by itself. I knew that Blondin had nothing to do with it: he had already gone to the side. On long winter evenings he went to bed early, rushing upstairs to the wardrobe, where he slept on a shelf under Charles's stockings, snoring sweetly but audibly enough. Seeing the thin paw of a vole and realizing that our brownie did not start, I was so relieved that I opened the door and rolled the nut out. Naturally, there was no one there. But when I checked a few minutes later, the nut was gone.

If everything went on as quietly and peacefully, I would probably write this book about mice, and not about Siamese cats. However, in a very damp autumn, Blondin caught a cold and died, and very soon we were in serious trouble. Barely mouse found that the nuts were no longer waiting for them behind the cushions of the chairs, as they immediately began to gnaw holes in the covers. Well, the lack of treats under the carpets made them so furious that they began to pinch off pieces from them. They raided the budgerigar's cage, stealing its food and scaring the poor thing into hysterics - his nerves were never strong and he was constantly losing his tail feathers, and now they were falling like autumn leaves.

The mice climbed into the chest of drawers, where they did not think to look in the days of abundance, and there they maliciously gnawed off all the corners of the neatly folded front tablecloth. When I unrolled it one day, it was full of holes in the shape of stars and crescents, as if borrowed from the Turkish flag. Putting it on the table was out of the question. I could actually hear the stupid mice giggling as they clutched at their bellies, and that same night one (probably voted on) walked over my blanket and then across my face, just to keep me from being too arrogant.

The last straw was the morning when I opened the bread box and saw that inside a tiny vole was practicing high jumps. Apparently, she climbed in there for a bite to eat, was trapped when the lid was closed, well, she completely lost her head. She had done so many of those panic jumps that they had become a habit of hers, and when I shook her out on the floor, she was heading for the back door, jumping like a kangaroo, and then she realized that she had climbed free and flew out the door like a rocket.

It was the end. We have already tried to find a squirrel to replace Blondin, and if we succeeded, the balance between mice and people could be restored. At one time we picked up Blonden as a cub - he lay crippled under a tree, and somehow it never occurred to us that he was not the most common pet. However, now, when we went into one pet store after another and, over the deafening cacophony of yapping puppies, meowing kittens, screaming parrots and gurgling goldfish, asked to see us a simple, most ordinary squirrel, the sellers clearly took us for insane. We were only taken seriously at the Regent's Park Zoo, but in response to our plaintive pleas, they told us that they already had a long list of people who wanted to get a squirrel.

Putting traps even on mice - no way! There was only one way out: to get a cat and hope that after one or two lightning massacres, the mice will take the hint and leave us alone. The trouble was that cats didn't attract us too much. We were afraid that the cat would start hunting birds near the house, and many of them have already become completely tame. “Anyway,” we said, “how can we get a cat with such sweet, funny habits as Blondin’s? You can't expect her to bite through Charles's watch to catch someone who's ticking, or gnaw off corners of library books, or bite buttons off guests' trousers when they come for tea."

We hesitated and did nothing. And then, on a momentous morning, we were introduced to Mimi, a young Siamese beauty who had recently moved in with our neighbors down the road. She was six months old, and she was given to them by a woman who was going abroad and was forced to part with her. Mimi had lived with them for only two weeks and had already made a real revolution in the household of the unimaginative villager, whose dog slept outside on a chain in a drafty kennel, and whose ordinary cats were supposed to catch rats in the barn and sheds, but in order to enter the house - no no!

Mimi slept not just in the house, but in the armchair of Adams, the owner, on his plush vest, which in the evening, undressing for bed, he specially laid out for her. After dark and in the rain, they did not let her out of the house - and the neighbors, with indignation in their voice, said that they had seen with their own eyes how the old man, after dinner, carefully poured the earth into a box - you know why.

And in a village among rugged hills, where men prided themselves on their hardiness - the days when they had fights in the pasture were not yet forgotten, who overcut whom, and now no one would allow himself to roll a baby carriage even uphill - Adams, the oldest, the most seasoned of them, walked along the road, puffing up with pride, a Siamese cat in a scarlet harness made of coarse wool. He apologized for the quality of the harness.

“Mother,” he explained, “when she goes to the city, she will buy a real one, with a bell. In the meantime, I have to make do with this one, because Maimai (this is how he changed her nickname, and only many months later, when I helped him compile a pedigree for her first kittens, it turned out that the first owner named her Mimi in honor of the heroine of Puccini's La Boheme), - because Maimai is hunting for the first time and you need to keep her away from cats.

I stared at her in surprise. I have heard that Siamese women in such periods drive their owners into a frenzy, screaming and squealing for a husband, and this one stands in her way, quiet and chaste, like a nun, although only a thin woolen cord keeps her away from the passionate village cats that are here swarming. I asked:

"Isn't she mute?"

“Where is it,” he answered proudly. “When she wants to eat, no bull can compete with her, or when she needs my chair. And so that the cat - no, no. The breed, one word, will not look at ordinary cats. And the harness is to quickly pick it up in your arms if the cat rushes at it.

Yes, everything in it spoke of the breed - starting from a narrow dark head, beautiful as the head of an Egyptian queen carved from ebony, and ending with the tip of an elegant flexible tail. I thought that I had never seen such a beautiful animal, and when the old man told us how she, like a monkey, climbed up the curtain onto the ledge, sat down there and refused to get down, and another time let's jump around the room from the piano to the mantelpiece, what your racehorse, I realized I was gone. Well, quite Blondin, with the advantage that, according to the old man, Siamese