Tigger (14 page)

While all this was going on – and much of it without the knowledge of our family – Emily's pony arrived. Or rather, it wasn't the pony any longer. Somewhere along the line, probably while I was asleep somewhere, the fat brown pony must have been exchanged for a bigger one of speckled grey colour. It arrived at our gate in a big trailer and was soon installed in its paddock, from where it called unhappily for its friends across the valley.

Emily was in seventh heaven. At dawn each morning she went out into the stable to groom, feed and talk to her horse. Sometimes, when the dogs were busy having their breakfast, I went with her and sat on the fence to watch. After school, she rode out into the countryside for long hours and in all weathers, but still the horse remained lonely and unhappy. It was clear what had to happen: the horse needed a friend, and while we were expanding our menagerie on an almost daily basis, it really was no big deal for my family to get another horse.

Yet again, a trailer arrived at the gate to discharge a chestnut horse of similar size to the grey one. Whether the two of them got on or not is more than I can say. Confined as I was to the house most of the time, I had better things to do in my rare moments of freedom than to run all the way down to the horse paddock. But I did see the new horse leaving our property at a smart canter one day. I was just turning over in the armchair and there it was at the gate, presumably in pursuit of Emily and her horse, who were out on a trail ride. This was surely an indication that the two horses liked each other. The gate had been left open by mistake, so off he galloped up the road. Soon the whole family was out looking for him. They must have combed the length and breadth of the surrounding countryside because they looked weary when they returned hours later, leading the horse. After that, the gate stayed shut at all times, which was a good thing from any perspective.

In due course, we were joined by a flock of white sheep with black faces. I was well past caring by then. They moved into the paddock by the frog pond and turned out to be the least trouble of all the animals we had accumulated. Their peaceful grazing was pleasant to watch on dewy summer mornings, when mists lay in the folds of the valley and all was still and serene. That was before the dogs were let off their leads and charged up to the paddock fence, scattering the sheep in all directions, heedless of Mum's or Dad's yelled commands to leave them alone.

And so, almost before we knew it, we had acquired a small farm, and I was outnumbered about fifteen to one by creatures I never even knew existed. How did that make me feel? Take a guess! By now, had I been foolish enough to venture out during the day, I would have had to check first whether the dogs were on their leads, all gates shut, the horses and sheep safely in their paddocks… It simply wasn't worth the effort.

Our fish had moved with us from their pond at the bottom of the old garden to a new one right by the window of Dad's home office. Emily had spent hours catching them in a net – an ingenious idea that allowed her to trap them without getting her paws wet at all – plopping them into a bucket filled with water and, after transporting them to our new garden, introducing them to their new pond. This was very pretty indeed. A mass of tumbling blue flowers and spiky ferns surrounded this pond in no time, so it looked as though it had been there forever. The fish seemed very happy, and by and by a colony of tiny frogs came to join them. I sharpened my claws on Dad's carpet while watching them through the window. But of course, any real hunting efforts were frustrated by the dogs, whose kennels were nearby.

In any case, before long other visitors started dropping by, more dangerous even than the dogs, to foil my attempts: the first one appeared one sunny afternoon as I was snoozing on the deck, the dogs safely locked into the stable with Emily. A funny little rustling noise woke me up. It came from the ferns by the pond and didn't sound like any of the usual suspects: bird, rabbit or mouse. I crept closer to investigate. Something was moving in amongst the dark green foliage – something long and smooth. It was gliding down towards the pond from a point above the blue flowers, and suddenly the sun lit up a section of its golden-brown body as it coiled around the ferns: a snake! I knew to be careful of all snakes and even anything that looked like a snake, such as the garden hose. Back in America, I had shunned the black snakes who lived in the field next door, even though they were relatively harmless. But this snake, I sensed, was something else; one bite from it would kill.

I retreated soundlessly to the safety of the house and alerted Dad to the intruder. His eyes widened in alarm when he saw it. He reached for the phone to call the snake man, who arrived a while later and crawled about under our house, trying to find our snake and to take it away in a bag he had brought with him, but in vain; it had left as silently as it had come, without anyone noticing. So ended my first encounter, but it was by no means the last.

There were plenty more snakes in and around our property. They had been there long before us and were not going to go away just because we had moved in. A succession of them adopted our garden pond and the frog pond in the paddock as their drinking holes. You could never be sure whether they were about, as they moved perfectly silently. The eastern browns were careful of other species and slithered away as soon as they felt the vibrations of our footsteps, but the tiger snakes were bold and stood their ground. One of them, a regular visitor, lived in the paddock across the road. He was as big as the branches on our pear tree and very dark. His tiger stripes were barely visible, so I mistook him for a branch when I first met him on the driveway. With a sharp hiss he warned me to get out of his way and sent me scuttling up the garden wall. Then he slithered away under the fence without giving me a second glance, confident in the knowledge that everything around here belonged to him.

After that encounter, I decided to take a few extra precautions on my outings and avoided walking through high grass or dense shrubs. Even on the lawns, which were kept short or lost their grass altogether in the long, hot summers, it paid to rotate my ears and listen out for snakes. I met several more, but managed to save myself each time. So did all the other members of my family, including the dogs. This was a miracle, as Mishka liked to pin their tails down with her paw as they tried to slither off.

The amazingly colourful birds who lived on and around our property were noisy and greedy, but less dangerous as long as you stayed out of reach of their sharp beaks. At daybreak, flocks of brilliant white cockatoos with yellow crests and piercing, croaky voices swept across the valley like fluffy clouds and landed wherever food beckoned. They particularly liked the old pear tree outside Emily's bedroom window, which they stripped bare in a matter of hours. I watched from the safety of Emily's desk, powerless to stop them. Even when Mum and Dad covered the tree with a net the following year, the cockatoos still managed to get all the pears that grew on the outside of the tree.

Mum bought a big bird table and positioned it right outside the kitchen window so I could watch the birds as they ate the tasteless seeds and bits of fruit that were put out for them, poor things. A pair of king parrots regularly visited and had excellent appetites. When they had finished every last scrap, they whistled for Mum to put out more – what a cheek! I felt obliged to chase them away a few times. Flocks of smaller lorikeets dressed in pretty rainbow colours took a shine to the stone bird bath in the middle of our front lawn. They sat all around its rim and took turns to splash in the water while the onlookers cheered. Strange creatures – fancy
volunteering
to have a bath! The bird bath was in full view of our armchair, but the presence of the dogs usually prevented us from getting anywhere near it. The dogs themselves were not particularly interested in the birds, which was surprising, since they hunted everything else that moved.

One night, pandemonium broke out at the back door by the dogs' kennels. The whole family was up in seconds and on the scene – of yet another crime, as you may have guessed. A prickly creature had chosen the spot just between the two kennels for its resting place. It was as round as the dogs' play ball and studded all over with long, sharp spikes. It seemed to have no legs, nose or eyes and must be fairly dim-witted to settle in between two large dogs, or else it was feeling suicidal that night. The dogs were attacking it even though they were doing considerable damage to their noses by biting into the spiky ball. Both had several spikes stuck in their noses by the time Mum and Dad pulled them off the intruder and locked them into the house for the remainder of the night.

The strange creature was still sitting in its spot between the dog kennels the following morning and seemed determined to stay there. It had uncurled a bit and now revealed a black, shiny nose and four legs. Interesting. During the brief family council that followed, I learnt that our prickly visitor was called echidna, and that he would have to be removed. Emily went to get thick leather gloves and tried to pick him up; he somehow managed to cling to the ground, using surprisingly strong claws. Dad tried to prise him off the ground using his pick-axe, but he resisted even that. While Dad was still scratching his head, the echidna, who had obviously had enough of us, started digging and slowly disappeared under our house. You had to admire his composure and his amazing claws. Mum's turn for action had arrived: she decided not to mess with the echidna, but instead picked up the phone and called someone who was knowledgeable about the species. The advice she received was to leave him alone until he decided to move by himself.

And so the back door stayed shut for several days; the dogs were grounded indoors. It was a brilliant time for me and Tammy, and I personally thanked the echidna for the service he was doing us. He was not a creature of many words. From the depths of his hole he gruffly informed me he would stay for just as long as it pleased
him
. I left him alone after that and went off to enjoy myself without the threat of dogs hanging over me. I visited the stable, the frog pond and the sheep paddock. The weather was beautiful: it was spring, balmy and breezy, the blossom was out everywhere and it felt like paradise.

Alas – just a short while later the echidna decided to move on. He emerged from his hole one night, gave a couple of sneezes and trundled off in the direction of the stable. I happened to be nearby, waiting for a mouse to emerge from its hiding place, and was very sorry to see him go. His departure spelt freedom for the dogs and the return to imprisonment for Tammy and me.

It turned out to be such a setback that the possibility of joining a nice, peaceful family of humans with a stable lifestyle and no other animals occurred to me for the first time ever. Life simply didn't seem worth living if all I could do was sleep and eat. What held me back was the startling realization that my family needed me more than ever now that they had become the hapless victims of not one, but two rude dogs, and that I actually loved them still, in spite of everything. Flight was definitely out of the question; I could not have looked myself in the mirror had I abandoned them to their fate – even though, it has to be said, they had nobody to blame for it but themselves.

So what was I to do?

Quite unaware of my moral dilemma, my family carried on with their never-ending list of home improvements. When they weren't decorating rooms, they were digging up the dense shrubbery around the house, mending fences, removing rusty old gates or planting trees. They even built their own pool this time – a large oval structure that sat on a flat piece of grass by the big shed. It wasn't as nice as our old pool; I couldn't drink from it as its rim was high above the ground. But they had a lot of fun in there when it was finished, splashing and shouting, so I guess it may have been worth the trouble, provided you liked getting wet.

The dogs loved water and would really have liked to have a swim, too. They stood up at the pool's rim and looked longingly at the swimmers, but it was too high up for them to jump in, so they settled for barking a lot and chasing each other round and round the pool, getting terribly excited. Whenever anyone played with a ball in the pool, Max simply could not contain himself. He hopped around the pool on his hind legs like a kangaroo so as not to miss any of the action, and once he got so carried away he bit one of Robin's friends in the bottom and was banned from that part of the garden for the rest of the day. I was pleased to see this from my perch high up on the fence, well out of reach of the drooling squad.

After the pool, Dad built a timber deck next to the fish pond, the best place to sit on hot summer days: always shady, breezy, cool and elevated from the ground, which made it safe from snakes. A table and chairs soon appeared there for meals outside. Mum and Dad took to sitting there on summer evenings with drinks and nibbles, watching darkness fall over the valley, while Tammy and I watched them from the kitchen window, wishing we could be with them. Unfortunately, the dogs also loved the hour of the yard arm, mainly because of the nibbles that sometimes dropped from a careless hand to find their way into their greedy jowls. So we had no option but to stay inside and suffer in silence. Or so I thought…

While house and garden were taking shape, the dogs were bored and continued behaving badly. I could see that my family's feeble attempts at dog training had largely failed, while the dogs themselves went from strength to strength and did just as they pleased. This could not go on.

For my part, I had had enough of sitting in the house all day or fearing for my life every time I went outside. My reflection in the window told me I was getting ball-shaped; hunting was getting harder all the time. We had been living on our farm for longer than anywhere else I remembered – I could barely recollect life in America or even in our first house in Melbourne. It was an exciting place worthy of exploration, and we seemed to be set to stay. There was no way Tammy and I could remain prisoners here for the rest of our lives. It was time for me to take matters into my own paws.

From my observations I already knew that Mishka was the one who needed to be subdued. Once she obeyed me, Max would simply follow. I also knew her nose was her weak spot, and that in spite of her outward bravado she was a coward at heart. I therefore sharpened my claws and held back on the food for a little while, which I found difficult, but not impossible. When I felt ready, I walked up to Mishka as she was sitting in the sun and said hello. She jumped up immediately, ears forward, tongue lolling, a mischievous grin in her slanting eyes. I knew she was thinking we were going to have a great game involving snarling and violence, with me at the receiving end. She was wrong: I lifted my right front paw, shot out my claws and dealt a swift blow to her nose. She sat down heavily and blinked in surprise. I was pleased with the effect I had achieved and moved a little closer. She looked embarrassed now and shuffled backwards on her bottom. I lifted my left paw and hit her again. A little blood appeared on her nose and she slunk right up against the house wall. Whimpering softly, she lay down in front of me. I was satisfied with her progress and decided to call an end to her first lesson. Tail held high, I left her lying there and strolled off. I had earned myself a snack and a snooze.

The next time I walked up to Mishka, she looked uncomfortable, avoided looking into my eyes and moved a couple of steps back. Max was nearby and watched with interest. But he took his cue from Mishka, as I knew he would, and did not attack me. I still felt I should hit him for good measure and dealt him one of my right hooks; he just sat down and looked confused. I could not believe how well my two short training sessions had gone and how easy it had been!

From that day on, I was able to walk around our property undisturbed. I might have been invisible: the dogs pretended not to see me, even when I paraded right in front of them. I took to drinking water from their bowls, and they waited patiently until I had finished before taking their turns. Whenever they came too close for my liking, I gave them a taste of my paw and they shrank away. It was very satisfying.

My superior status now restored, I introduced Tammy to the dogs and made it clear she was under my protection. Max found it very hard to restrain himself and earned another slap from me for the greedy look he was giving her. He backed off immediately then. I encouraged Tammy to try her own paw at hitting the dogs, but she was too timid. I guessed she would find it easier once she grew a bit older.

Life became enjoyable again, and I realized I should have tamed the dogs a long time ago. My family watched the sudden change in the cat-dog hierarchy with amazement and a total lack of understanding. Humans are quite slow in these things. But they did realize that my new status as the dogs' guardian was freeing them up to do more work on the farm and lost no time in starting their final project: the renovation of the stable – the one project I personally felt was quite unnecessary, because there was nothing wrong with it at all.

A digging machine had already levelled a large piece of ground for Emily to ride on, but the stable itself had managed to retain its wonderfully tumble-down and messy look, no matter how much cleaning up she did. Apparently, this was not good enough. A flock of men in white suits came and stripped the whole building right down to its steel structure; it was awful to watch. Then Dad, assisted by the rest of the family, built new walls and windows and created a plain, level dirt floor robbed of its shady nooks, fascinating holes and mysterious piles of debris. It was a dusty job, and I was glad my supervising duties kept me up at the house, since the dogs were not allowed into the stable yard while the fences were down. But I went there every night to check on progress. It was sad to see the old place disappear, even though to begin with the hunting got better and better as the rats and bunnies had nowhere to hide from me once their nests had been destroyed.

The stable ended up very bright and orderly, with an area for the horses, one for storing hay, one for other feed and all the bits and pieces you apparently needed when you had horses, and a big room for Dad and his tools, where he was able to hammer and drill away. I liked the horses' area best, where sturdy timber stalls now enclosed each horse while they ate their dinner. Sitting in my elevated spot on a stall fence in the early evening, I was able to enjoy lovely views of the valley and the hills beyond while the horses quietly munched away below me. Sometimes I helped Emily prepare the horses' feed buckets, as did the dogs. Mishka in particular was keen to be involved and used the opportunity to steal food. She would creep out of the feed room with her cheeks bulging with horse feed and try to get away before Emily saw her. I always alerted her to what was going on, and Mishka was told off. That didn't seem to make any difference long-term, but at least it put a stop to her for the time being.

The stable renovation may have brought certain advantages to Emily: I could see that caring for the horses was easier for her with all the equipment at hand and the horses neatly separated at feed time. Nevertheless, I mourned the loss of the murky charm and heady scents which the old place had provided in abundance. The brightness that filtered through the clean skylights in the new roof had put an end to the mystery of dark corners and the prospect of delicious discoveries. Besides, the mice and rats had all but disappeared from the building once their ancient nests were gone. The spiders also missed their shroud of webs, but they stayed around and started weaving again almost as soon as the new roof was in place. Their webs never achieved quite the same luxurious weight and density as before, but they still made a reasonable living from them.