Early most mornings, I take a walk in my micro-hood. (Micro-hood: what I call my small bit of the larger neighborhood.) I walk to the nearby convenient store to buy a newspaper; if I am out of coffee, I buy the 99-cent cup. The sinuous curve of my street takes me beneath a cool canopy of trees, then ends at a busy thoroughfare. On my march through this “green mile,” on every side of me there crouch and crawl my little murderers: cats.
Dogs, unless abused by their owners, are friendly animals. If they see you from the sanctity of their fences, they will bark at you, but if they are on the street with you, they will slobber you. Cats, now: cats kill. Washington Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in the Catskill Mountains and was lucky to have awakened. By rights, he should have become a cat snack. I am a passive “birder,” and in this, my new micro-hood, I have considered putting up a bird feeder. The proliferation of feral felines gives me pause, for I feel that I would be installing a cat buffet.
The cats I pass in the morning are plotting. (I could have written, “Seem to be plotting,” but I know those suckers are plotting.) Cats are not pack animals, so I don’t fear that they will all leap on me at the same time in the way of lions, but they do crouch in the grass of the lawns in front of houses and eyeball me as I approach. Their ears are up, but the tails tell the tale: they switch in the grass behind them. As I get closer, I can see muscles rippling beneath the calico, the orange, the striped or the black pelts. Then, they arch away into deeper grasses, or bolt across the street, tails crooked behind them. If the sun has not fully burned away the night, I can see them beneath cars parked at the curb, paws beneath their bodies. The car is too low to permit a crouch and leap, so I am less wary of those predators. But in general, I know that the little murderers are measuring me for the kill, for they plan to bring me down.
I once came across a dead field mouse; it lay on the sidewalk for fully a day. The mouse, with its tail snaked behind it and its big ears up, seemed to have lain down to rest. There were no visible signs of trauma, but I have no doubt that death was at the claws of one of my little murderers. In the back yard of the house near the scene of the crime there is a carpet of cats; some separate from the group to stalk me as I pass, and might have left the mouse as a trap for my curiosity.
The cats seem to be at home on the porch of that particular home, so I believe that they are being fed. Still, on one return through the green mile I paused to watch a tableau: crouched in the grass beneath a tree, a calico twitched its tail. It was otherwise motionless as it watched a robin on the walk. My passage interrupted that drama, perhaps saving the robin.
I do not begrudge the cats their existence and their claiming of space. I just have no doubt that my walk passes murderers row. The other day, I found a single shoe on the sidewalk, a woman’s red platform. In the grass nearby, I saw the other. I wondered if the murderers had finally brought down bigger prey.