Rama the Gypsy Cat (4 page)

He made a calling noise, and two hens came running to join him at the feast he had just found. The two hens, who appeared plump because of their winter feathers, clucked happily. Behind them, the rooster strutted proudly back and forth, looking pleased with his role of provider. While the hens ate, he seemed to be saying, they need have no fear, for I am here to protect and defend them against whatever comes.

Rama, still weak from his recent battle and injuries, felt strength returning to his aching legs. The sight of the rooster brought a kind of strength that warm milk could not. The blood ran faster in his veins and his claws opened and closed on the frozen earth.

Slowly, quietly, Rama straightened and in one motion leaped from his hiding place beside the steps. He had no desire actually to catch the rooster, but the rooster did not know this and the sight of the gray beast which seemed as large as a mountain lion sent him into a frenzy.

He ran across the yard, flapping his wings as if hoping to rise into the air, far beyond the reach of the gray terror. All the while he called in a strained voice to the hens to save themselves.

In their confusion the hens ran in a circle. They went around the red berries two times and then headed straight for Rama. At the last minute they realized their mistake, swerved to the right, and left Rama with the feel of their wing feathers on his whiskers.

Without moving, Rama watched them run into the brush after the rooster.

“What’s going on out there?” The woman opened the door and looked at Rama. “Cat, you ain’t after them chickens, are you?”

Rama did not look around. He straightened. The sight of the fleeing hens had given him great pleasure, and he felt alive again in a way he had not felt for three days.

“Cat, my sister Frances give me them chickens and you leave them be, hear?”

Rama lifted his paw and licked it carefully. Then he walked to the edge of the clearing and crossed to the woodpile. The sun had warmed the wood, and here Rama stretched out, licking his paws, and then he lay still, watching the slow movement of the river.

At noon Jimmy came down to sit on the logs beside Rama. In his hand was a thick slab of meat wrapped in bread. He broke off a piece of the meat and set it before Rama. Then he began to eat.

Rama smelled the meat and opened his eyes. He rose to a half-crouch and began to eat slowly, looking at the boy from time to time.

“I ain’t going to take your food, Cat,” the boy said with a grin. “I got my own dinner.”

Rama finished his meat and regarded the food the boy was eating. He mewed and waited.

“Seems to me you got your appetite back quick enough.” Jimmy broke off another piece of meat and held it above Rama. Rama reached up with one paw and pulled the boy’s hand within reach. Then he took the meat quickly.

“Well, leave my fingers, will you?” the boy said. He took the remaining piece of meat, halved it, and gave part to Rama, eating the rest himself.

“That’s all, see?” He held out his hands to Rama. Rama looked them over and then began to lick his paws carefully. He washed his face and his bib, and when he had done this to his satisfaction, he lay again on the logs, stretched so that his head rested on his extended front leg.

“Son,” Jimmy’s mother called from the house. “Your pa needs some help.”

“I got to go, Cat,” the boy said. “But I’ll be back. You and me is going to be friends.”

He ran up the slope to the house and Rama settled again on the logs.

I
N THE WEEKS AND
months that followed, Rama settled into his new life well.

It was a different life. Before, when Rama had lived with the gypsy woman, his whole life had centered on her and the wagon. They moved so frequently that he seldom had time to become familiar with his surroundings. Often he had been suspicious of the new places and new smells and dared not leave the camp site.

Now he became a creature of the forest. He roamed as easily through the woods as the fox or the squirrel. He knew places to lie in wait for a bird and he knew places of safety. His favorite spot was in an old elm tree, and often he stayed on the lowest limb, stretched out like a small mountain lion, watching the movements of the forest. And always, if the hunting was bad, if the rabbits were too quick or the birds too wary, there was the cabin. Rama went there every morning, mewed long and loud, and then waited for the door to be opened. If he was hungry, he let the woman know by rubbing against her skirt, and she would give him meat or sometimes the thick cream he had come to relish.

There was warmth in the cabin, too, and usually Rama spent his mornings sleeping before the fire. In the afternoon he would move out into the clearing and lie on the woodpile or in the sweet dry grass at the entrance to the cow’s shed. In the night he went to the woods. It was a most satisfactory life for a cat.

As spring came and the snows began to melt, Rama felt a new quickening of life within him. Animals he had not seen before were beginning to come out of their burrows and shelters, and Rama felt this new challenge keenly.

One morning he was especially intrigued because he saw, on the edge of the clearing, the tunnel of a mole. The tunnel lengthened before his eyes, and he pounced twice, but too soon both times, because the mole became suspicious and burrowed underground.

Rama was watchful. He stationed himself on a low branch of a beech tree and was waiting with great patience for the mole’s reappearance. That he would reappear Rama did not doubt, for creatures of the wood were creatures of habit. What they did once, they repeated. So Rama waited.

At noon he saw the boy and his parents walk down the clearing to look at the river.

“It’s rising,” the man said. His eyes were clear and hard as he looked at the swollen brown water.

“Seems like it’s gonna be higher than last year,” the woman said, “though I don’t see how it could be. Remember how it took the calf last year, Pa?”

“I ain’t likely to forget that,” he said.

“Me either,” the boy said in a quiet voice.

“Well, maybe something good’ll come floating down,” the woman said.

“Not likely.”

“Well, that’s how Frances got her start of chickens. A laying hen come floating right down to her doorstep, and if it hadn’t been for that, we wouldn’t have no chickens today.” She looked to the right. “We better get the wood up higher or that’ll go,” she said, seeing that the river was inching closer to the woodpile.

“I’ll move it up after dinner,” Jimmy said quickly. He remembered that his father had told him not to leave it there in the first place.

“After dinner we got them stumps to get.”

“After supper then, Pa.”

They looked at the river again. The woman said, “Seems like the river gets mean when it’s like this. Other times it’s so pretty and peaceful. Now it’s real mean.” She tucked a wisp of hair into the braid wound tightly at the back of her neck. “Well, dinner’s waiting.”

Jimmy turned and ran up the path ahead of them. As he caught sight of Rama, he changed direction and ran to him.

“Hey, Cat,” he said.

Rama opened his mouth and mewed quietly to the boy. This was something Jimmy had trained him to do. He would speak to Rama, wait, and then Rama would mew as if in answer.

“You hungry, Cat?” Jimmy asked now.

“Miaow.”

“You want me to bring you some dinner?”

“Miaow.”

“All right, only you stay away from that river, hear me? ’Cause that river’ll just reach up and grab you. Hear me?”

Silence. Rama looked down at the ground where the mole might be stirring, moving along in its constant search for earthworms.

“You hear me, Cat?”

“Miaow,” Rama answered without enthusiasm. He closed his eyes and lay on the branch as if he were asleep.

“You wait right there. Hear me, Cat?”

Silence.

“Cat, do you hear me or not?”

Silence.

“CAT! YOU HEAR ME?” Jimmy raised his face right up to Rama’s.

“Miaow.”

“That’s better.”

Jimmy went into the cabin, and when he came out, he brought Rama a piece of meat. As soon as Rama saw him approaching, he knew the meat was for him, and he jumped down from the tree and ran to the boy. Then, as Jimmy crossed the yard, he rubbed against the boy’s legs.

Jimmy picked Rama up and set him back in the tree. Then he gave him the meat. “This here’s the last of the deer,” he told the cat. And Rama accepted it, crouching on the limb to eat it more comfortably. “Now, I got to go help Pa with the stumps.”

He left the cat and ran behind the house to where his father was clearing new land. The trees from this land had gone to make the barn in the fall, but now the stumps had to be pulled out so the land could be planted.

It was slow, back-breaking work, and the boy lost himself in the misery of pulling up one stump after another. Each stump clung to the earth as if it intended never to let go, and Jimmy thought of nothing but the number of stumps remaining: twenty-three.

The sky was dark because it had been raining in the north and now the rain was moving in this direction. Rain or not, Jimmy knew that he and his father would continue their work, so he hoped it would hold off till nightfall. Twenty-two stumps left now.

About an hour after dinner Rama thought he saw the mole by the woodpile. The ground was moist and easily tunneled there, and with lightning speed, Rama leaped from the tree and down the path to the woodpile. He jumped to the top log and crouched, his eyes intent on the ground where he had seen the movement.

But now the ground was still. No tunnels, no earth lifted, no sharp nose pushing through the dirt. Rama waited. He thought of the mole, his eyes slitted with intentness.

This intentness had made Rama a good hunter. He felt with a deep certainty that he would catch the mole. So certain was he, that he could almost sense with his claws the actual feel of the mole’s body.

He did not move. Although it was unlikely the mole would come out of the ground before dark, Rama would take no chances. He was willing to wait as long as necessary. Nothing was as important as locating this mole.

As Rama waited, the river was still rising. Heavy winter snows, heavier than usual this year, had melted with the sudden warmth of the air. Now the water from these snows ran down the hills, forming rivulets that cut through the brown earth like knives. The river was swollen with the melted snow, and now the rains to the north were adding to its might.

The brown torrent behind Rama now bore no resemblance to the peaceful gray water that had brought him to the cabin. It was wild, and it was growing with the swiftness of nature untamed.

R
AMA DID NOT FEAR
the rising water. He had become accustomed to the sound of the river and he felt secure on the woodpile, for he had sunned here without incident for almost six months.

Behind him, while he watched for the mole, the river carried a tree around the bend and out of sight, a thick, leafless tree that seemed as helpless as a twig against the water. Other things were carried past, too, for as the river rose, it caught whatever objects had been left on its banks and swept them ruthlessly into its current. A child’s wooden doll, face up, went past; and loose boards, logs, the roof of a chicken coop, then another tree, smaller, that swirled around in the current like a dancer and headed down the river with its dripping roots waving above it.

The water rose higher on the bank behind Rama. Now it touched the bottom log. Almost silently it reached with a ripple beneath the log and began to wash away the soft dirt. Still Rama did not sense his danger. He heard the faint sound beneath the logs. The mole was near, Rama thought; perhaps it was about to come up. His claws opened and closed, opened and closed.

Rama crouched forward, his eyes intent on the ground. He heard the faint sound again, the very sound of the mole as it pushed its way closer beneath the earth. Rama waited. His body was like a trap ready to spring.

The logs were on a slope, their stability depending upon the bottom log which held them in place. Now the water washed beneath that log constantly, wearing away the dirt, pulling the log into the river. The bottom log moved slightly, and then, without any further warning, it slipped into the river. With a terrible, silent speed, the other logs, rolling and sliding, followed it.

Rama, crouched to leap upon the mole, now fell abruptly backward. He was in the air for a second, and then his claws found a log and he tried to regain his footing.

For a moment he was successful. With the skill of a logger he ran forward a few steps. His balance was perfect. But the logs were tricky. They bounced against each other as they fell, and one log caught Rama on his breastbone and carried him swiftly into the cold water.

The shock of it stunned Rama. He went under with the logs, bobbed up several yards downstream, and then began to claw at the water, to fight it as if it were an enemy that could be overcome with his sharp claws.

He struggled to pull himself up on one of the logs beside him and was struck by another from behind. Again he was swept under water. Again he rose and began to struggle. He had no time to think now. It was instinct and an overpowering will to live that made Rama fight the water, made him try again and again to pull himself up on a log.

The task seemed impossible. The logs rolled when he touched them, and the more he clawed, the faster the logs would turn in the water. Still Rama did not give up. He redoubled his efforts, turning wildly from side to side in the water, clutching whatever touched him, and all the while his legs churned in an attempt to keep his head above water.

At last there came a log with an extra limb that jutted off the bottom and steadied it like a keel. Rama clutched at this log and it did not roll. He clung to it, his claws piercing the wood, and then, when the log drifted sideways in an eddy of the current, Rama pulled himself up and crouched in precarious safety.

He was a pathetic sight. His gray fur clung to him like wet cloth, and his legs appeared too thin to support his body. He was motionless on the log, too frightened to move, and he crouched as low as possible, blending in with the wood as completely as if he were part of it.