I'm a REAL cat! Not like those tabbin* you may have read about that live on an imaginary world called Luciheptal. Since I'm in Cat Heaven now, I'll have to dictate this track through my former human.
My first human raised me from the time I was born until I was about four months old. She named me Tucker after her doctor. Not sure I liked to be named after him, but what could I do? If I wanted to be fed, I had to learn to come when she called, "Tucker!" But then she decided that having two cats in the house was just too much. She'd also gotten rid of my brothers and sisters, and then she got rid of me. She kept our mom, though.
Guess I was lucky, as far as getting another human goes. There were four this time. My new humans seemed to like me. Two of them were human kittens, so I think we sort of understood each other. We liked to run around and get into things. This didn't please the two adult humans very much. But I could always run and hide under one of the beds. I operated under the principle of "out of sight, out of mind." Worked pretty well most of the time, too.
One day while hiding under a bed, I discovered some thin material over my head. So I unsheathed my claws and had a go at it. It ripped very easily. Soon I had a hole large enough to stick my head through, up into the bowels of the bed. Aha! There was a nice board that was just wide enough for me to get up on and lie on it. Well, now I'd found the purrfect hiding place. So sometimes I'd disappear from the humans' presence for long stretches of time. I could hear them calling me. Sometimes they even stuck their heads under the bed I was lying up inside of. But of course, since they couldn't see me, they thought I wasn't there. I'd wait until they went to another room, and then just appear in the door to that room, surprising the heck out of them.
Soon after I arrived in my new home, my humans gave me a playmate. She was a puppy, but I didn't know at the time that dogs and cats weren't supposed to like each other. Neither did she, since we were both young and hadn't been brainwashed by our own kind. The pup and I had the greatest time chasing each other. Around and around we'd go, down the hall, into the kitchen, then into the dining room and back down the hall again. Sometimes I'd be the chaser, sometimes the pup'd chase me. The humans all thought it great sport to watch us play.
One day the pup was the chaser. I ran into the living room and straight up the drapes. Since the pup didn't have nice sharp claws like I did, she yapped and jumped, trying to grab my tail. But just then I felt myself falling, then a loud clanging noise and the drapes and I landed on the pup. She yowled, I shrieked and somehow we extricated ourselves from all that mass of imprisoning fabric.
Our humans ran into the room. The adult female was yelling. All in all, it was very noisy for a while. The humans weren't very happy and blamed it all on me. Well, I wasn't very happy, either, so I ran and hid. I don't know where the pup went, but assume she ran and hid, too. I could hear a lot of banging coming from the living room.
I resolved never again to enter that room. It was dangerous. The pup agreed with me. So when our humans went into the living room, we two would go only as far as the door and sit there, hoping they'd come back out soon and play with us. One day the humans picked us up and took us into the living room. They held us and patted us and walked all around the room with us. Somehow they got the idea across to us that they'd protect us from the drapes. So we started venturing into the room again. But neither one of us ever got near the window with the drapes that had attacked us.
The pup grew up to be a dog, while I grew up to be a cat. The dog got to go outside and spent a good deal of time there. But I always had to stay in the house. Something about the humans were afraid I'd kill some birds. I never did find out what birds were. But one day the humans took the dog outside and came back without her. I never saw her again. But I didn't mind too much, as now I had the house all to myself.
One of my most favorite activities was each time a human would start up the stairs, I'd dash ahead, run into the bathroom at the top and leap into the tub. There I'd hide until the human would come into the bathroom. Then I'd leap out of the tub and grab an ankle. I never bit or used my claws, because I was just having fun. The humans enjoyed this little game, too.
I'd been napping in the living room, but woke up when I heard one of the human kits clomping down the stairs. He then started back up, so I ran ahead of him, into the bathroom and leaped into the tub. But horrors of horrors, there was WATER in the tub! I hated WATER! Spewing my loudest yowl, I leaped out of the tub and ran into the hall. All my legs and my tummy fur were soaking wet and I was one very unhappy dude. Furthermore, all the humans came and laughed at me.
The big human female tried to dry me off with a towel. But I jumped out of her arms and ran downstairs. Under the dining table, surrounded by all the chair legs where I felt safer, I spent quite a bit of time licking myself dry. And that was the end of the hiding in the tub game.
* Tabbin Tails |