Tigger (12 page)

When summer came we were finally able to use the pool. The whole family moved to the terrace, where Mum had placed the garden furniture. The children splashed about in the water, Mum and Dad sat on the sun loungers reading the paper, Tammy and I lay in the shade, well out of the way of the splashing water, and watched. At the end of the day, Dad lit the barbecue and Mum brought out interesting food to grill. It was, as Mum said frequently, ‘the life'.

Sometimes the children invited friends around for a swim after school. Nowhere near the pool was safe when the boys dive-bombed into the water, but the girls just swam, chatted and made a fuss of us, which was okay.

During the school holidays Mum and the children built a fish pond at the bottom of the garden. They dug a hole, filled it with water and added pretty stones and flowers all around it and some even in it. Then they released little red fish into the pond who darted about in amongst the plants and stones. They were fascinating creatures to watch. The pond became my second favourite place to be (the tin roof still retaining first position). I reckoned once the fish had settled in we could have fun together; a bit of fishing would be just the thing to bring colour into my life.

Spoil sport that she is, Mum told me I wasn't allowed to catch the fish. She made me look into her eyes and promise to leave them alone. I narrowed my eyes until they were mere slits and promised nothing. Tammy, on the other hand, wrapped her tail around Mum's neck, rubbed her cheek against hers and gave her one of her bright-eyed looks of sincere promise that never fail to charm humans. She didn't fool me though; she was just keeping away from the fishpond because she was scared of falling in.

No sooner was Mum out of the way than I went down to the pond for a spot of fishing. I knew, of course, to sit quietly for a while until the fish were used to me. I sat as still as a statue while the sun moved gradually past the tree shading the pond. Before long the fish had accepted me as part of the scenery and swam quite close. When the sun emerged from behind the tree and lit up the water, providing optimal conditions for fishing, I struck. My paw sliced into the water like a knife just by the biggest fish. According to my judgment, which is usually spot-on, I should have caught it easily, but no: my paw encountered no fish. For some reason, the fat fish of my choice had been swimming deeper down than it looked. Moreover, when I retracted my paw it was wet! Dripping wet! I shook it and shook it – scattering the fish in all directions below me – and licked it until it was quite dry again. I decided to try with my other paw, once the fish had calmed down, but – same result!

Fishing turned out to be much less fun and much harder work than I had anticipated. I could see the fish, I could smell the fish, I could even hear their little splashes when they came up to the surface – always in the middle of the pond now and well away from me – but I could not catch them. I had several more attempts from various positions around the pond with all four paws, in vain. When dinner time came, I returned to the house exhausted and disappointed, to make do with my usual bowl of boring, processed fish. I found it tasteless and uninspiring for the first time ever.

I was in a bad mood all evening and could not settle. In order to vent my frustration, I gave Tammy a good bashing, but Emily came in just as I was dragging her across the kitchen floor by the scruff of her neck. Emily told me off, scooped Tammy up and took her away to her room for a pamper session. Tammy-bashing was clearly no longer an option; it would have to be the armchair next. I sank my claws into its back, gave a good tug and was rewarded by the satisfying sound of tearing fabric. What I hadn't realized was that Dad was sitting in the armchair, reading the paper. He shot up, yelled at me and actually gave me a smack! I was speechless! Nobody had
ever
smacked me!

Really upset now, I marched down the corridor to Caroline's room. She would understand. I passed Emily's room on my way and heard her sing to ‘darling Tammy'
.
It was a pretty stupid song.
When I poked my head around Caroline's door, she was on the phone to one of her friends. I had been aware of phones for some time, of course – Mum and Dad used one frequently to speak to people who weren't there. I had never known a phone to be permanently attached to someone's ear, though, as had been happening to Caroline ever since her party. I hoped it wasn't anything to worry about. She was talking in a very loud voice, interspersed with high-pitched peals of laughter, and hardly looked at me as I entered. I settled down next to her on the bed, waiting to be noticed, and she stroked me absent-mindedly while bobbing up and down and talking non-stop into the phone. The person at the other end couldn't be saying very much – unless they were both talking at the same time, of course. It wasn't exactly what I had imagined in terms of sympathy for my situation. A particularly shrill exclamation followed by Caroline throwing herself down next to me catapulted me off the bed. This was intolerable! Did nobody care about me?

I walked back up the corridor – more cooing noises from Emily's room. How could Emily, my favourite human, take sides against me like that? Disheartened, I stopped outside Robin's door. It was ajar and it seemed Story Time was just beginning. Finally a stroke of luck! I joined Robin on his bed and we listened together as Mum read us the story of someone called Robin Hood, whose life, it seemed, was even more beset by trouble than my own. I decided to stay on and hear what happened to him and enjoyed it so much, I remained on Robin's bed for the night. He might not be the quietest of sleepers, but he was definitely the only family member worth spending time with tonight. It had been a gloomy end to my day – little did I know there was worse to come!

I felt better the next morning. Sometime in the night, I had remembered my victory over the squirrel in America. This made me think that perhaps, sooner or later, I would work out an equally cunning plan to conquer fish. Once again, patience and the art of observation would be required, and I knew I had both.

Buoyed by such positive thinking, I made my peace with Tammy once she emerged from Emily's room. This was easy: she had already forgotten what had happened yesterday. We were soon settled in a patch of sunshine, licking each other, and the morning and early afternoon passed pleasantly enough.

After school, Mum, Dad, Caroline and Robin drove off somewhere while Emily went next door to ride her pony, so Tammy and I were in charge of the house. I patrolled the hallway and stairs while Tammy, never much of a guardian, slept on the armchair. It was to be our last few hours of peace for a long, long time.

I knew there was going to be trouble as soon as the car turned into the driveway. Peculiar noises were coming from it – howls, to be precise. But cars don't howl, do they? I stationed myself by the window on the landing and watched as Mum and the children got out. Then Mum went to open the boot. I froze to my spot when I saw what jumped out: a
dog
! And not just any dog, but the biggest version of its kind I had ever seen! It was huge, hairy and extremely lively. No sooner had Mum opened the front door than it came bustling in and was all over the house before anyone could stop it. It spied Tammy on the armchair and ran up to sniff her. Her face when she opened her eyes to a sharp set of teeth and a drooling jaw defied description – I thought she was going to have a heart attack there and then. But full points for speed to her: she was out of that chair and down the corridor in the direction of Emily's room faster than you could blink. The dog was dumbfounded; it looked around, wondering how she had vanished like that. Luckily, by then Caroline had caught up with it and prevented it from tracking Tammy.

My family had by now gathered around the dog and were encouraging me to meet it. Ha! As if! They made it sit down and held on to its collar, and for a moment it looked as though it might stay there for a while. I moved closer – but only to get within bolting distance of the corridor, from where I planned to join Tammy at the earliest opportunity. It presented itself without delay, as the dog wriggled from Mum's grasp and came bounding over to me. I was off! Where the corridor divided, I took a right turn towards Emily's room, dashed in and kicked the door shut behind me. Tammy was already on Emily's bed, pretending to be a soft toy. I joined her and we lay there together as our heartbeats gradually returned to normal.

Tammy had never seen a dog, so it was left to me to enlighten her on its kind and what its arrival meant for us. She was horrified and trembled all over. I licked her ears a bit and told her I would look after her. It was a lie, as I well knew: nothing would stop that dog from tearing her apart if it chose to, but it made her feel better. Before long, she dozed off next to me, leaving me to reflect on this new challenge in my life – the biggest yet, I reckoned.

I spent the next few days in a state of constant vigilance, expecting the dog to turn up at any time, anywhere. My fears were justified: the monster had the run of the garden and a sixth sense of knowing where I was hiding. It would come bumbling along out of nowhere, nostrils flaring, ears twitching, drawing ever closer. Ecstatic whenever it found me, it made little bunny hops and bowed down on its front paws in an invitation to play. No, thanks! I had no interest in the rough-and-tumble games it wanted to play; there was not the slimmest chance that I might win! Its paws were about the size of my head, and its wrestling style, which I had observed when it played with its favourite rope toy, was unsophisticated to put it mildly: brute force over skill. I really didn't fancy myself in the role of the rope toy.

It didn't understand subtle refusals either. When it dropped a slimy tennis ball in front of me – expecting me to throw it, no doubt – my well-practised look of daggers went completely unnoticed; it just howled encouragement at me. I had to leave it standing there and retreat to the safety of the house.

The dog slept in a large kennel just outside the back door, well away from the main expanse of the garden. Once it had been put to bed, it was possible to wander around the night-time garden relatively undisturbed – so long as I didn't make any noise whatsoever, because it had excellent hearing and came to investigate any shriek of a mouse or flutter of a bird.

Our one saving grace was that the dog was allowed into the house only under strict supervision. So while we stayed indoors, we were able to relax up to a point. The bedrooms were definitely out of bounds to it, which is why Tammy and I spent increasing amounts of time asleep on beds. As it was autumn, which meant long stretches of fine, mild and calm weather with the bluest skies imaginable, this was most annoying. It had always been my practice to sleep off my short morning walk in a sunny spot on the lawn at this time of year. That was now impossible. In fact, one day I even found a giant dog turd in the very spot I favoured. The dog had stolen every small pleasure I had ever had. No wonder I slowly but surely turned into an indoor cat and my waistline expanded further as autumn turned to winter.

Not surprisingly, Tammy kept forgetting about the dog. The very morning after its arrival she blithely wandered out into the garden without a care in the world. My warning call came too late; she was already half-way across the lawn when the dog appeared. Its ears shot forward in excitement as it spied her happily catching butterflies and sniffing at flowers, and it leapt over to her, delighted to have found such an easy victim. I could hardly bear to watch. When she finally noticed the dog, she panicked instantly and bolted, which as we all know is the one sure-fire way of getting a dog to chase you. It did. Once again, she owed it to her astonishing agility and acceleration – from zero to supersonic in about half a second, in any direction – that she escaped unharmed and came flying through the cat flap just before the dog crashed into the patio door behind her.

Tammy was quite beside herself. Her chest and flanks were heaving, her eyes bulging, her tail the size of Mum's feather duster. Once again, I had to explain to her about the dog and implore her to be more careful, knowing full well that my warnings fell onto deaf ears. Within minutes, she was contentedly crunching away at her breakfast, her near-death experience just a dim memory, to be erased completely by the time she reached Emily's bed for her mid-morning nap. Clearly, the task of mastering the dog would be mine, and mine alone.

It was hard to believe indeed. At first I thought Emily had gone soft in the head when she told me, but soon the signs were all there: we were packing up and moving again! Why? As far as I could see, we had only just settled in this house, built a pool and a pond, acquired a kitten, a dog and a pony… What more could they possibly want?

In actual fact, it turned out to be the pony's fault. Emily was really getting into riding her pony and spent more and more time next door. She was also taking the pony away at weekends, returning dirty and sweaty at the end of the day, reeking of horse. It seemed our neighbourhood was cramping her style: she wanted more space to ride and a paddock of her own. For some reason, Mum and Dad also thought that would be a good idea. Nobody thought of asking my opinion. As usual, I had to either go with the flow or despair. My only hope was for a place with a very secure dog run, where the drooling monster would be kept locked up.

We had the packing down to a fine art by now. Mum had already given up her job in the city in readiness for the move. She gradually packed up the kitchen and the contents of all the cupboards. Soon the familiar sight of boxes became a feature of every room once more. Tammy and I played games of hide-and-seek in amongst them, which provided some welcome indoor distraction, and we perched on top of them whenever the drooling monster was allowed into the house.

It didn't look as though we were moving far this time, because Mum and Dad had decided we would do most of the moving ourselves. It turned out to be a lot of work. Mum and Dad made endless trips with the car and trailer stacked full of boxes while the children were at school, Tammy slept in the ever more sparsely furnished bedrooms and I patrolled the lines of boxes in the hallway. We were exhausted by the time the removal men came in their big truck to take the furniture away.

Mum put me and Tammy into my travel container, which was quite a squash. She also loaded the dog into the car boot and off we drove. I was cross not to be able to see much, due to being confined in the container, and complained loudly. I would have much preferred having the run of the car, as I usually do. But Mum explained we were going to a very big and wild property, which I should get to know little by little, so she preferred to have me contained when we arrived. Well, we would soon see about that. They could not possibly keep all the doors shut while moving furniture in, could they?

I was, once again, perfectly correct: the back door in the new house was a glass sliding door, which stayed open the whole time things were being carried in. I was out there within minutes of our arrival. The dog – praise to the new garden! – had been locked into just the kind of dog run I had visualized in my dreams, where it howled loudly and continuously. Tammy found a bag of some sort in Emily's new room, into which she crawled without delay in an effort to hide from the world, so I was free to explore the great outdoors all by myself – which is, believe me, the only way to do it.

And it was the great outdoors! I smelled it and felt it as soon as I set foot in it: we had moved to the outback! As it was a late afternoon in winter, night was already falling as I walked past dense shrubbery by the side of the house and across a sloping piece of lawn to the driveway which wrapped itself around our new house. Beyond the vegetation that lined the far side of the drive, I sensed more than I could see wide-open country falling away below: it was hilly country, and we seemed to be quite high up, near the top of a hill. The aroma of big gum trees lay fresh and spicy in the air. I took a deep breath and felt as though I had just come alive again after a very long time. It was a chilly evening, and still; no sound of traffic or humans, just a mournful whistle and rumble far away down the valley, far enough so as not to bother me. The birds were already winding up their evening song, but I could hear owls hooting in the distance, and from further up the driveway came the loud ribbeting of frogs! Remembering how much fun I had had with them in our Perth garden, I followed their calls and ended up at the top of a steeply sloping paddock by a large pond all covered in reeds.

There was a lot going on in and around the pond. Frogs were splashing in the shallow water, singing the familiar ribbeting song I remembered from my days as a kitten. There were other frogs, too, emitting hollow bong-bong calls that sounded like eerie drum beats in the night. All around the pond, ducks were sleeping with their beaks tucked under their wings. I sat down under a big old gum tree and soaked in the peaceful scene. I didn't feel like hunting; it was enough for now to watch, listen, and learn.

I could see there was much to learn in this place, which seemed even wilder and more remote than our home in America. I sensed forests here, too, and fields spreading out in all directions just beyond our garden fence. From behind me through a big hedge came the sound of swishing tails, the stomping of heavy feet and the rhythmic ripping of grass. Horses? No – the smell was different and unfamiliar.

The ground fell away sharply beyond the frog pond. It would be a steep climb back up; better to squeeze under the farm gate and continue my exploration of the level garden by the house. There were two huge cedar trees in the front garden, excellent for climbing. I scaled one of them easily – its branches were low down, quite unlike the trees in America, allowing me to leap up easily further and further until I was high above our new house. A few birds gave chirps of alarm as I passed their sleeping quarters, but they needn't have worried: I was too busy to pay them any attention. The two ancient trees reached right across the picket fence that bordered our property, across the wide grass verge in front of it, from where the delicate scent of early spring flowers drifted up to me, and over a dirt road that led up from the deep darkness of the valley, past our garden and on to the very top of the hill, where its final curve was bathed in moonlight. A huge full moon had just emerged above the crest of the hill. The animals in next door's paddock were sharply outlined against the grass by its silvery light. I took a good look at them from my new vantage point. They were about the same size as horses, but heavier-set with thick necks and short, sturdy legs. One of them in particular was huge and bulky, with an enormous head on its broad shoulders. It uttered a long, plaintive bellow that seemed to come from deep down in its throat and rose up into the still night, to be answered shortly afterwards by a similar call from across the valley.

Further down the paddock, the moonlight revealed a couple of ponds that looked deeper than our frog pond and were free from reeds. More animals were grazing down there – smaller, slender, with little heads and front legs, but large, powerful hind legs and tails. As I watched, one of them leapt off in big, graceful bounds and all the others followed. They bounced up the hill and fanned out into the trees, the sound of their feet landing on the turf providing a slow and steady accompaniment to the bong-bong frogs in the pond. The paddock went quiet, and I realized that apart from the larger animals there were hundreds and hundreds of rabbits about. I could not believe how many there were! The whole hillside seemed to be hopping with them. It was all very entertaining.

I thought the only place remaining to be explored on my descent from the tree was a big shed by the side of the house, but as I walked towards it, I saw another low building further down the hill, which seemed worth a visit. It looked quite derelict – always a promising prospect. All kinds of debris littered the rough dirt floors – rotting bits of wood, rolls of wire, a couple of filthy saucepans – and there were droppings everywhere. Some smelt of bird, but all the rest gave off the unmistakable aroma of rats – my speciality! I would tackle them in the morning. For now, I peed on some tufts of hay in one corner, to let them know I had arrived. It seemed fair to give them a warning.

After the rat house, my last stop was the big shed, which was already full of our things. It was also home to a colony of small birds who had built neat little nests in the rafters. There might be some potential here in spring, at nesting time. I reckoned I would have my work cut out in this new place of endless possibilities.

On emerging from the shed, I saw to my dismay that the dog had somehow managed to get out of its run. It was pawing at the back door and whining. The door was shut now, and the moving truck had gone. How had I missed that? I must have been so absorbed by all the sights and sounds of our new, fascinating home.

A car slowly rounded the corner of our driveway, and out popped a couple of friends carrying bowls of food. The back door opened and we all filed in, including the dog, whom nobody seemed to have noticed. There was much laughter and shouting. The visitors were shown around the house, stumbling over boxes, bumping into things, then Mum set the table in the family room – the only piece of furniture that was currently in its proper place, along with its chairs – and everyone sat down to eat, surrounded by boxes and an assortment of abandoned furniture. I discovered my food and water bowl in the pantry where shelves were already stacked with food. Tammy came to join me and we had our dinner to the sound of lively conversation from the kitchen.

That's how we arrived in our home in the bush, among the gum trees and – as I learnt later – the kangaroos.