louiscatorze.com

I’ve just been looking after Blue the Smoke Bengal whilst his mamma was on holiday and, on the last day, the big sod brought me a mouse. I knew he was up to something because I could see him in the garden, with his head in the shrubbery and his tail swishing suspiciously. Then, when he came indoors, I could see the telltale little feet sticking out of his mouth.

Worse yet, Blue was not giving up the mouse and kept darting away when I tried to grab it from him. Every time he set it down and went for his food bowl, I would make a move for it and he would double back and pick it up again.

Eventually, after a comedic chase around the house, I managed to retrieve it and, as I left, I held it up to the Ring doorbell camera to inform Blue’s mamma of what her naughty boy had done.

She later told me that hers was just a normal non-camera doorbell. So the people in the park across the road would have seen me holding up a dead mouse and talking to the door.

Meanwhile, it seems that the fight with Goliath has revved up Louis Catorze, because he now wants to go out at The Front every night. And he requests this by racing to the shutters, sticking his silly head through and whining until someone opens the window.

Cat Daddy often lets him out, and this was fine when we could see what he was up to; in the summer, Catorze used to sit happily on the window sill, surveying his fiefdom and causing no bother. However, now he disappears. We don’t know where he goes or what he does, and there’s no point in going out to check because there is never any sign of him. Any efforts to call him are just met with silence, tumbleweed and crickets.

On a couple of occasions he‘s been gone for hours. I don’t like this at the best of times, but it makes me especially uncomfortable at this time of year. We don’t live in THAT kind of street but, given the choice, I would rather have him out at The Back than at The Front. And perhaps more of a worry than nasty people is the fact that it gets dark early and small black cats are invisible on the road.

So I am officially declaring that The Front is out of bounds until further notice, and we will be keeping Catorze under especially strict surveillance on Hallowe’en. I will have to monitor Cat Daddy, too, due to his penchant for letting Catorze out and then forgetting whether or not he’s come back in. Last weekend, for instance, he’d had a few drinks and he swore blind that he’d seen Catorze at The Back. He hadn’t. Catorze had been out at The Front for two hours, having escaped when Dog Mamma and Dog Daddy left our house after dinner. And I was just about to start trawling the street looking for him, when he tapped on the window requesting to come in again.

Whatever The Mothership seems to be telling them all right now, I don’t like it one bit. Oh God, and there’s a full moon just before Hallowe’en. Keep your enemies close and your cats closer, Mesdames et Messieurs.