Wildcats In The House

From a longer creative nonfiction piece:

Wild Cats in the House

Isn’t it strange to think that the little eight-pound creature purring in your lap is related to lions and tigers?

My cat, Rhiannon, was a poster-child for domestication.  She was an animal, of course, as all cats are, but she couldn’t really be called a natural creature.  She was bred for looks, and so was the perfect specimen of a Siamese cat.  The only food she ate was dry kitty-kibble—not even the canned stuff—and occasionally the cooked and seasoned food we ate.  She liked corn and peas; who ever heard of a wildcat munching on a corncob or a pea pod?

Cats have this reputation in the public imagination as mousers; this is probably why wild cats were domesticated to begin with—to keep mice out of the granaries.  Rhiannon, however, never saw a mouse in all the four yours of her existence, and was wary of anything bigger than a spider.  Don’t get me wrong, she did hunt, but it was never a matter of life or death for her; if the bugs got away, she still had a bowl of food in the kitchen, and a warm lap to nap on. 

Rhiannon was a housecat.  She slept in our beds at night, and lay in the sun streaming through the windows during the day.  In the winter, she lived in a five-foot space around the heater.  The furthest outside she ever went was onto the top step of our front porch—and then only when the weather was warm and dry—where she would sit perfectly upright, her feet bunched together, and her tail wrapped around her toes.  I always thought she looked like a statue, then.  She was a pureblood, show-quality Siamese, all angular and bony; when she sat very still, she looked like those statues of Bast on display in natural history museums.  And maybe that’s why she made sure so carefully that she was spoiled.

Siamese cats were supposed to be descended in a straight line from two temple cats brought from Siam—now Thailand.  There, they were looked after very carefully, because the souls of the dead were believed to live on in the bodies of these cats before passing on into the afterlife.  The monks in these temples fed them the best food, decked them in jewels (it’s said that the weight of diamond necklaces gave them their long necks), and made sure that they wanted for nothing.  They were treated like royalty.