I used to be a dog person
I was a dog person for a long time. But since living with cats, I have come to feel that having them around takes a real weight off my worries and my tiredness.
To anyone who loves cats this is probably obvious, but I had a strong general image of them: cats are capricious, cats do not form groups. Living with them, that turned out not to be true.
Call their names and they look up and answer; call them and they come. If I leave their line of sight, they follow. When it gets cold they climb into the futon, and even on hot days they settle on my lap. Nobody taught them, yet they use the litter tray, and they do not chew power cables. They do sharpen their claws on a favourite sofa, so the sofa is in ruins.
We met while I was working the field
I met the first cat while working in the field. A brown tabby kitten with one eye closed was sitting perfectly still at the edge of the road.
I took her straight to the vet. She weighed 180 grams, thin enough that her spine knocked against my fingers. It had rained for three days up until the day before I found her. This area has always had many stray cats, so I do not know whether her mother left her or they were separated. Had I found her a day later, I think there is a good chance she would not have lived.
If I had still been living in the city, taking a cat home would not have been an option. Out here I judged there was nothing in the environment to stop me, so I brought her home. She was malnourished, but I reckoned that once she recovered she would not need much looking after. Thanks to treatment at the clinic the closed eye did not go blind, and she can see perfectly well today.
Cats as pest control
In rural life, a cat is a very dependable presence.
My house is an old farmhouse in the hills: damp, and prone to insects. The most common of them is the centipede, familiar to anyone living in the countryside. Around April to June especially, you will often find them walking across the floor indoors. The cats spot them with a high success rate, and sometimes wear them down for me. This genuinely helps.
Beyond centipedes they react to crickets and flying insects too. Incidentally, the lizards out in my garden mostly have no tails left.
That purring sound
The thing I feel I benefit from most is the purr.
Stroking a cat curled up on my lap, purring away, settles me when work has stalled or I need to reset.
I was never good at letting off stress. At some point, though, I noticed that simply stroking them while listening to that sound calms me down — to the point where time feels like it slows. After years of living as though something were chasing me, having my mind rest in this particular way was a first.
It is not all good
There are downsides, of course.
I finish work at three in the morning, turn off the light to sleep, and the cats start sprinting around. They tread on me repeatedly while I lie there. And by the time morning arrives and I am short of sleep, they are sleeping blissfully.
If I am at the computer and ignore them, one will stare at me from behind the monitor. Ignore that too, and they start biting the edge of the screen. I have decided to treat this as a signal to take a break.
Five of them now
I have focused on the first cat here, but others arrived afterwards and I took them in, so I now live with five. All five were strays.
Snow does not pile up much in this area, but it reaches minus ten degrees in midwinter. There are plenty of deer, wild boar and other animals about, and the strays who survived here strike me as tough. Yet once they moved indoors, every one of them turned into a cuddler.
A rustling noise outside at night is frightening — but watching the dark through the screen door together with the cats, the reassurance outweighs the fear.
Once they settled in I started letting them out into the garden. They do not leave the property, and they come back when called. Sometimes they are out there wrestling with a snake, and year by year I see fewer snakes around the garden.
Dark nights and cats
In countryside where the animals outnumber the people, the stars are beautiful precisely because the nights are dark. Living in that, I feel the cats are hardier than we are, and that they play something like the role of guardian spirits.
The elderly couple nearby keep a cat too. They leave the front door ajar so it can come and go, and they told me that one night, while they slept, the cat left a snake by their pillow — and they thought their hearts would stop.