Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

My Tuesday isn't quite over yet.

For the past several days, Perrine has seemed to want something to hunt. The mice have been laying low, and she has looked extremely eager any time she notices my hand moving under the bedcovers. While it hasn't been her clearest communication, I've been getting a strong "please play a hunting game with me" vibe from her. Fortunately chase-the-rope seems to be a useful distraction, though she seems to want to play a "pounce on something hidden" or "solve a puzzle" game.

(I want the mice gone, but it did occur to me to wonder whether Perrine would be bored once she finally does rid the house of mice. Maybe she's had the same thought and that's the reason for what follows?)

A little while ago I went to the kitchen for a small bedtime snack, and Perrine thundered into the kitchen after me hoping to be fed (because I didn't give her the right food earlier, so that didn't count). But as soon as she got there, she started pointing at the oven. Now she'd been enthusiastic about jumping into the oven before, and still asks me to open it so she can look in, but the routine lately has been open the oven, take a quick peek, see no mice, lose interest immediately.

Not tonight. I opened the oven door and she got ready to leap up to it. I saw the mouse first, and the mouse saw me -- it only had to leap down from the angled sheet metal over the burner and drop down into the broiler tray, which is exactly what it did, starting the maneuver before Perrine could see it, but damn Perrine is fast! I expected her to follow the mouse down and scurry around in the bottom of the oven trying to snare it before it got to the back where there's a mouse-sized exit, but that's not how it played out. Perrine dove in, stuck her head down, and popped right back up again holding the mouse.

Of course she then started running out of the kitchen, and I followed hoping to either convince her to drop her prey someplace it couldn't easily escape from while she played with it, or keep it from getting too far if she dropped it in the basement. She beat me to the basement, dropped the mouse, caught it again, repeated that two or three more times ...

And less than two minutes after she'd caught the thing, she'd let it get away from her. It ran behind the washing machine.

She eventually did flush it out of there, but I had to play shortstop and spotter. But she wasn't finished playing, so she dropped it again and lost it under a scrap of something I haven't identified. Perrine was looking the wrong direction when it came out from there, so I tried chittering at her (well, at the mouse, for Perrine), which she ignored. Finally I yelled, "Mouse! Mouse!" loudly, and she spun around and looked where I was looking, and pounced. (Remember the last time I tried saying that and she didn't react in time? This time she responded.) But the mouse got between some large jars under the stairs and seems to have vanished.

Perrine went back to the scrap-of-something, looking hopefully for the mouse there. Then she went leaping after every almost-mouse-shaped shadow or piece of lint in that part of the basement, but she eventually returned to the stair. She's still in the basement now; when I left her, her butt was sticking out from between two steps while she inspected the spaces between the jars again, but I suspect the mouse found a crack between two bricks.

I've got a claw-foot bathtub with high sides. Finding a dead or dying mouse in there as a surprise would be icky, but an easily cleaned up type of icky. I've heard of other cats dropping mice into bathtubs to play with them. But no, Perrine has to run either to the basement -- land of nooks and crannies (more crannies than nooks, but no shortage of either) -- or to my bedroom, and she's nowhere near as good at keeping mice as she is at snagging them in the first place.

Damned cocky kitty. She gets a treat for catching the mouse in the oven, but I'd be much happier if she'd killed it or held onto it long enough for me to get my hands on it and deal with it. In the meantime, I'm not in bed yet.

I must admit, anyhow, that I'm impressed with her speed.