Sputterpub's Blog

Before history, after the planet was decanted from universal fluid but long before crops, when organization came slowly, Prometheus was in power. Man-maker after all, he’d given the goods away by the time he came to form people.

He gave plants the ability to make food and air. Birds got flight. Fish were endowed with the power to breathe in water. Insects were provided armor; their exoskeletons also limited their size, or they would have taken over immediately.

To bears went patience. Elephants got long memory. Cats were equipped with night vision and balance. Dogs were fashioned as empathic opportunists.

(Whatever wasn’t created, named and characterized, that which remained after Prometheus finished, is called cancer: chaotic immortal life without gift.)

The last creatures made by Prometheus were people. It’s a matter of debate whether humans were fashioned from stellar material, or from bits of earth mixed with ocean which still contained motes of heaven, but it’s generally understood that people were made in the god’s image after the divine gifts had already been dispensed.

So Prometheus looked upon his last creation and he pondered.

He gave people language.

But that wasn’t enough. Speech was mastered too readily by women, and it worked too slowly. The creatures needed more than verbal skills. Prometheus decided to give them the ability to control fire.

Which meant he’d have to steal some formfire. The problem with that plan, the challenge before him, was that the basis for all earthly fire was a bit of the sun that simmered in Jupiter’s den, and security was tight around it.

He recruited aid. In exchange for an assurance of warmth, Cat accompanied him, and showed him the way to the den in the dark. In exchange for the promise of cooked food, Dog came with them. For while they could sneak in, Cat-led under cover of darkness, they had to wait for daylight to leave with their prize. The flame was too visible at night.

As dawn blushed into the eastern sky, Prometheus took a live ember from the perpetual fire, wrapped it in a fennel stalk, and dashed with Cat and Dog back toward people. The alarm was given. The ways were obscured by storms and clouds of divine wrath. Then Dog’s nose found the path for them; it didn’t matter that they were surrounded by dense white mists of rage, for Dog’s nose always saw a vivid world.

That’s how it was, in the beginning. That’s how people got language and fire. That’s why people have cats and dogs. For the warmth of the hearth, cats agreed long ago to be the one wild thing that lives intimately with us. For the savoriness of cooked food, dogs decided to be… well, exactly what we want them to be.

A few days pass. Of course I continue to walk the dog. And usually the dog, who is getting on in age, starts eagerly and runs out of steam in a few blocks. But lately, since meeting the odd arched cat, the dog acts rejuvenated. Pulling on the leash like a four-year-old.

I let her lead the way today. I decide it’s time to find out if there is a destination, with all that pulling. I give the animal its head as they say.

I’ll admit I’m a little surprised when I realize that we’re aiming for the cat’s path. The dog is reversing our usual direction and heading right back to where we met that macho little beast.

With tail sweeping and nose ahead, my elderly pet pulls me uphill. She doesn’t slow until we get to the end of the path where the actual encounter took place. Then, I learn, we are to skirt around – north, west, and south again – like it matters from which direction we approach. Maybe it does.

The dog leads, and I follow. The cat is not to be found, by us, this time. I won’t be surprised if we look again. I won’t be surprised if I never figure out what we’re doing.

Today we don’t see the yellow cat. The dog squats and defecates and I as usual pay attention and pick up the shit in a plastic bag, and we return home.

It strikes me that I observe my dog’s shit more closely than I ever did my kids’. That’s not exactly true; I seriously noted kidshit until the babies were well trained, but that was less than three years each. I’ve been noticing the color, texture, and fragrance of my dog’s leavings for over a dozen years now, and I’ll only stop when she dies.

Talk about an intimate relationship! In some ways, more so than with kids. Except dogs don’t live that long. We figure a pet won’t last more than a decade or two. We miss them when they’re gone, of course, but we never expected otherwise.

Besides, dogs don’t think about death. Cats don’t worry about tomorrow. Only people say goodbye.

I loop the leash around the dog’s neck and wrestle the deadbolt into the warped frame of my front doorway. We head uphill five blocks and through two blocks of park, and then north up two more streets to the first of a few pedestrian paths.

We trot down Short Cut and are about ten feet onto Terrace Walk, when the dog stops and I notice the cat. He’s small and yellow, wearing a collar, fully arched and motionless. I try to move the dog past him, and the cat attacks. Hissing through needle teeth and going for the dog’s face!

I yank the dog away. The cat’s about eight pounds and the dog weighs eighty, so I’m not worried that the dog will lose; I just don’t want to deal with a wounded animal.

I attempt to move the cat verbally. Try to shoo him to the side. He isn’t having any of that. Starts hissing at me!

It looks like I might not be able to pass. That’s ridiculous. I tell the cat so, and he grudgingly, slowly, like a truculent teen, allows us to edge by. The dog acts anxious, wants to get away from the cat as quickly as possible, thirteen years old and she’s pulling at the leash. Urging me to walk quickly. Dog-trotting.

We stop a hundred feet down the path, to sniff at something in the tall grass by a picket fence. I glance back and am a little weirded out to see that cat sauntering after us, like a cop making sure we’re getting out of town.

I look down the path, toward the street to home. I detect the silhouette of another cat. Its shape crosses the walk furtively, more like what I expect from an urban cat. But I hurry the dog with my voice; I want to get away. Up the path, the yellow sheriff, heading toward us. Down the path, a skittish dark deputy. The image of feral cats forms like a slide projected on my brain. No: that little tom wears a collar. Next slide: a book by Stephen King…

I think we maintain our dignity. I suggest that we get a move on, and the dog doesn’t dispute. The downhill cat disappears and we continue our walk home. But I’ll admit: in its inappropriate but determined way that little yellow cat just chased us down the hill.

“I wonder what the dog’s thinking,” I used to hear. It took ten years and a hundred responses before someone said: “I don’t know, but you can be sure it’s not in words,” and I knew I was beginning to get the answer.

“A dog’s snout is so long that the dog can’t see the food as it eats it.”

“True,” came a simple reply, “but neither can we.” And I realized with a giggle that’s a fact; I lose sight of the morsel as it ducks under my nose.

“How does the dog aim so well?” I once marveled, watching a directed urine stream. It was years before I came to understand that, to a dog, those scents on the lawn by the library look like a fresh-painted bulls-eye target.

(And yes: a dog can lick his or her genitals. We have a whole book of jokes about how jealous we are. But no one seems to notice that dogs can’t handle theirs…)

To a dog, there’s no such thing as a bad smell. Only interesting aromas. The best food is to be peeled up, forcibly, from the asphalt; if it doesn’t work it will come back out.

To a dog, sudden is bad. Gradual is good.

Dogs don’t say goodbye.

The little yellow cat, arched and vehement, acts regardless of relative size. Like a Volkswagen honking at a bus, he doesn’t care about futility. He is moved to object, no matter what. Or maybe he’s just too young to know better; after all, he is small. But there’s something striking about how ugly he becomes, as soon as he begins hissing. Something about his ferocity provokes the idea that he might just be one of many, teeming like maggots or raccoons, crowded like a derelict house full of sore felines, contemplating a coordinated attack, on me.

There are cat people and there are dog people. Oh, some love both species equally, or at least live with both equably, but most folks have a preference. Chevy or Ford? Montgomery Ward or Sears Roebuck? Dog or cat?

In the 1950s, when school children were made to learn to read by sounding out dull stories about kids named Dick and Jane, they met the generic dog Spot and the cat named Fluffy. Spot was a boy dog, messy and rambunctious. Fluffy was a tidy feminine cat, complete with neck bow. Is that why we all assume dogs are male and cats are female? Because of Fluffy and Spot? Or did Fluffy and Spot reflect a cultural bias that already existed?

What colors life for cats is that they’re carnivores. They and ferrets are the only carnivores people have managed to domesticate, and how many people have ferrets?

Cats have ripping teeth and rending claws. They’re built around short digestive systems because meat must move quickly through the predator’s body; the species has problems with hair balls and weakness in the urinary tract. Cats have had to stay light, pliable and able to climb. They are like squirrels and gods; they can look up and they can fall without damage.

People are upright but like dogs we look down. Looking up strains a person’s neck.

To a cat, tidiness is desirable. Self-containment makes a hunter. Good is the chase, the play, the kill, the prize. Comfort is windless warmth. Bad-hideous-banned is anyone’s attempt to force food, medicine or a bath.
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Cats always notice dogs. Cats never say goodbye.