Flashes of Panic

I woke up to the alarm that morning, which was rare considering that the alarm was usually earlier and feline: Nnnnnow? Feed me nnnnnow?

As I was lying there wondering if I could get up, and why Iz hadn’t come in to get me, I heard a crash out in the apartment. I bounced out of bed and headed for the living room. Izzy? Izzy?

A box had been knocked off the cabinets and on the kitchen floor. I looked up, and Izzy was on the top of the cabinets. OK, I thought. I brought down the another box blocking his route down, and encouraged him towards the fridge so he could hop down. He wasn’t interested; he headed for the light and then the shelf over the counter. Something’s funny about that cat.

He’s got something in his mouth.

Oh, no, I think, he got in to the drawer and started eating the string from a string toy, and now he’s down to the toy and he can’t get it loose. He had a history of such problems.

I went around to the front of the counters to see if I could get him down, and then I noticed that whatever he had in his mouth had legs.

Izzy caught a mouse.

Izzy caught a mouse!

Izzy caught a mouse?!?

That’s a very sweet present of you, Iz, now give it here so I can bury it somewhere…

He opened his mouth to mew, and the mouse hit the ground running. It wasn’t dead yet.

Iz hopped down off the shelves and chased it across the counter. He headed it off before it got behind the microwave and forced it back into the open. The mouse made it off the counter and headed into the living room; Izzy flushed it out of cover after cover (bookshelf, bookshelf, armchair, armchair, etc.) It squeaked whenever Izzy got a paw on it—yes, mice do actually squeak.

By this time I was beginning to wake up and figure out what I needed to do. I grabbed a mixing bowl from the kitchen to see if I could contain the little rodent and evict him to a less predatory environment. Then Iz and I started a sort of run-down along the wall of the living room, each of us flushing the mouse out from some sort of cover in hopes that the other would catch him before he made it to cover again.

Eventually he headed out from behind the CDs for the TV, and we lost him. Neither Iz nor I could figure out where he was. I changed to go running and Iz staked out the corner from the windowsill.

Just out of curiosity, before I left, I pulled A’s CD cases away from the wall to see if there was a place he could sneak in the crack there… and there was the mouse, immobile and flat.

I don’t know how he died—if Izzy had mortally wounded him earlier, if I had squashed him inadvertently while trying to flush him from his cover there, or if he just died of fright. I scooped up the little body and disposed of it outside, and got a late start on my run.

Pretty impressive for a cat who doesn’t get to hunt most of the time. And, I’d rather have him discover the mice first.