Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

“You know what I’m talking about,” the chaplain said. “Come on, now, it’s not going to kill you.”

The cat stared across the table at the mouse and saw the same expression he’d observed the night before in the cafeteria: smirky, defiant-the look of someone convinced that he had already won.

“All right,” the cat said. “I’m a cat and… aw, to hell with all of you.”

The mouse put his little hand over his heart as if to say, “You’re killing me,” and the cat pounded his paw on the tabletop. “I’m a cat, all right. I’m a cat and I’m a… I’m a goddamn alcoholic. You happy now?”

Then everyone said, “Hello, Cat,” and waited, their eyes politely downcast, as their fellow drunk, an official one now, struggled to regain his composure.

“… So that’s how I met my first sponsor,” the cat would later say-this at meetings in damp church basements and low-slung community centers, years after he was released from prison. “That little SOB saved my life, can you beat that? A murderer, an arsonist, and not a day goes by when I don’t think about him.”

It maybe wasn’t the best story in the world, but, as the mouse had told him on more than one occasion, it wasn’t the worst either.

The Grieving Owl

I was flying past a house the other evening, and because the lights were off and there were no curtains on the ground-floor windows, I stopped to take a peek inside-which I do sometimes, just to see how people decorate. This particular place was made of stone, not old, just made to look old, with a reproduction carriage lamp in the front yard and one of those roofs that appear to be slate but are actually made of recycled rubber. From the outside it screamed Wagon Wheel Coffee Table, but it turns out they had some pretty nice furniture, at least in the living room. A lot of painted pine-English, from the looks of it.

From there I peered into what’s called the den. That’s a room where people go to be themselves-or at least some idea of themselves. You see a lot of boats in dens, but in this one the theme was owls. Not real ones-I don’t think I could have handled that-but representations, both flat and three-dimensional: Screech-owl andirons, a candle in the likeness of a white barn owl. Above the mantel was a rather clumsy painting of a snowy owl hovering above a cross-eyed ferret, and on the desk, a small figurine of a great horned owl. Take away its glasses and the mortarboard cocked just so on his head, and it was me. Or perhaps I’m being too egotistical. It wasn’t just me. It was my mother, my brother, my sister and cousins. Everyone, basically, who I’m trying to get away from.

It’s not just that they’re stupid, my family-that, I could forgive. It’s that they’re actively against knowledge-opposed to it the way that cats, say, are opposed to swimming, or turtles have taken a stand against mountain climbing. All they talk about is food, food, food, which can be interesting but usually isn’t.

There are, of course, exceptions. I once had a fascinating conversation with a seagull who was quite the authority on the subject of the French-fried potato. I always thought they were all the same, but not so apparently. To hear her tell it, the taste varies according to what sort of oil is used.

I said, “What sort?” Who knew there was more than one kind of oil! Then there’s the question of texture, with crisp on one end and soggy on the other. The type of potato makes a difference as well, as does its age and exposure to the elements.

Following our talk, I went on a restaurant jag. Every night I’d pick a new one and look through the windows into their kitchens. What I saw, aside from the ovens and so forth, were a lot of mice. This kept me going back to restaurants and led to an encounter, the night before last, in the parking lot of a steak house. There I came upon a rat making his way toward the back door. “Not so fast, friend,” I said.

One of the things an owl learns early is never engage with the prey. It’s good advice if you want to eat and continue to feel good about yourself. Catch the thing and kill it immediately, and you can believe that it wanted to die, that the life it led-this mean little exercise in scratching the earth or collecting seeds from pods-was not a real life but just some pale imitation of it. The drawback is that you learn nothing new.

So this rat, it was as if he were following a script. “I just swallowed some poison,” he claimed. “Eat me, and you’re destined to die as well.”

It’s embarrassing to hear such lies, to think they think you’re dumb enough to believe them.

“Oh please,” I said.

The rat moved to plan B. “I have children, babies, and they’re counting on me to feed them.”

I said to the guy, “Listen. There’s not a male rat in the history of the world who’s given his child so much as a cigarette butt, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. In fact,” I went on, “from what I hear, any baby of yours has a better chance of being eaten by you than fed by you.”

“True enough,” the rat admitted. His body relaxed beneath my talons, and I felt his hope leak onto the asphalt, as surely as if it were blood or urine.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Teach me something new, and I’ll let you go.”

“This is a joke, right?” the rat said.

“No,” I told him. “I mean it. You tell me something, and if I find it interesting, I’ll release you.” This was how I’d learned about dens and English furniture, about roof tiles and vegetable oil and reproduction carriage lamps.

“All right,” said the rat, and he paused, thinking. “Did you know that all this restaurant’s shrimp are frozen?”

“No, I didn’t, but that’s not really good enough,” I told him. “Nothing that goes on in a steak house would surprise me, especially if it’s a chain. You need to think farther afield.”

“Okay,” he said, and he told me about the time he tried to have sex with his mother.

“How is that supposed to help me be a more well-rounded individual?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything important?”

Then he told me that there’s a certain kind of leech that can only live in the anus of a hippopotamus.

“Get out of town,” I said.

“No, honest,” he swore. “I had an uncle who lived at the zoo, and he heard it firsthand from the hippo herself.”

It was one of those things so far-fetched it simply had to be true. “All right,” I said, and I lifted my foot off his back. “You are free to go.”

The rat took off across the parking lot, and just as he reached the restaurant’s back door, my pill of a brother swooped down and carried him away. It seemed he had been following me, just as, a week earlier, I’d been trailed by my older sister, who ate the kitten I had just interrogated, the one who taught me the difference between regular yarn and angora, which is reportedly just that much softer.

“Who’s the smart one now?” my brother hooted as he flew off over the steak house. I might have given chase, but the rat was already dead-done in, surely, by my brother’s talons the second he snatched him up. This has become a game for certain members of my family. Rather than hunt their own prey, they trail behind me and eat whoever it was I’d just been talking to. “It saves me time,” my sister explained after last week’s kitten episode.

With the few hours she saved, I imagine she sat on a branch and blinked, not a thought in her empty head.

After my brother took off with the rat, I flew to a telephone pole on the far end of the parking lot. A leech that lives in the anus of a hippopotamus. Talk about a closed society! What must it be like to live like that, your family within spitting distance your entire life?

My next stop was the city zoo. I’ve heard there are some that house the animals in actual landscapes, fields and jungles and the like. Ours, I discovered, is more old-fashioned, geared toward the viewer rather than the viewed. The panther’s cage is about the size of an eighteen-wheel truck. Our lions have it a little better, but then there are two of them. I don’t know how much territory a hippo might require in the wild, but here at the zoo her pen is on the small side, not even as big as a volleyball court. There’s a pool for her to submerge herself in, and the