Look What The Cat Dragged In

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good story out of the cat. But little Sniffles did himself (if no one else) proud on Sunday. Helen and I are lounging watching TV and then suddenly there is the sound of louder and different sounding whining from the cat who has come in through the open back door into the kitchen. Helen goes to see what all the whining is about only to emit her own little funny squeak when she gets into the kitchen. As, there in the middle of the floor is a freshly delivered dead mouse. And a puffed-up cat with a smug look on its face as if to say, “look what I’ve done”. 

To be honest we had though his catching days were long gone. It must be over three years since the belly flop incident where he leapt on a mouse but then couldn’t find where it had gone as he had landed on it and it was hidden under his belly. He sat there for five minutes looking around for where the mouse might have escaped to, and not until Charlie came out and started sniffing all around Sniffles did, he get up and move. At which point the mouse scuttled through the fence and into next door.

Sniffles has spent a lot of time laying underneath the tree where the bird feeders are, or further down the garden looking at the tree, but it has seemed to be more in a wistful longing than any reasonable attempt to catch any of the birds. But, now into his teens he must have been fed up of us mocking his catching ability and so we were treated to an episode of look what the cat dragged in. It wasn’t really the mouse per se that caused Helen’s squeak, it was more a surprise to find it there.

Obviously, having killed the said mouse and after bringing it inside to show off his hunting expertise, Sniffles wasn’t interested in eating the thing, only with getting his bowl filled with meals he hadn’t caught. And leaving us to give the recently deceased mouse a paper towel coffin burial in the bin. And content with his renewed prowess Sniffles decided to come and settle down on the sofa for the evening.

Only to go back into food hunting mode when my dinner arrived. From being asleep to having his nose in my plate of food took less than a second. To paraphrase Sol from Snatch, “Don’t worry about Sniffles, he can move when he has to.”