Regular Cazador

October 7, 2008

I might be beating a dead horse here, but since my cat is my child, and my most constant companion… I’m going to overdo the stories about him.

Xpint has turned into a regular cazador. In the last two weeks he’s come home with three mice and a bird. The worst is that I can’t complain about the carcasses the keep appearing on my kitchen floor because it’s my fault. I turned him onto it.

It started when visiting friend spotted a small mouse running around my yard. Not thrilled by the prospect of a mouse infestation (the house had a problem before when Brian and Aneth lived here), I woke Xpint up from a characteristically deep slumber and pointed it out to him, while chastising him for not taking his job as a cat more seriously. He chased it under the fence, it escaped and I assumed that was the end of it. Xpint looked slightly disappointed at having lost out on his nap and a fun toy.

An hour or half hour later, my friends and I were hanging around enjoying a rare sunny afternoon in the middle of the rainy season, when Xpint ran through the kitchen clutching the poor thing in his mouth. He must have taken my reprimand to heart. The mouse was a tiny, not much more than a baby, and I began to feel really guilty as Xpint tossed it about the backyard. He’d let it out of his grip and impatiently wait for it to attempt to bounce away before pouncing on it again and again. Eventually the mouse caught on and played dead. Xpint, irritated, just threw it about every which way, tossing it around, carting it up the ladder, down the ladder and through my house from the front yard to the back. In the end he got overly enthused and flipped it into a bucket of water. It was when it started to struggle and flounder that we learned the mouse wasn’t actually dead. Xpint, faced with a horrible predicament: get wet and continue playing with the toy, or just watch it drown, compromised by poking it with his paw every once in a while and then recoiling back in horror at the wetness. I ended the charade by fishing the half dead mouse out of the water and chucking it into the cornfield. I’m sure it met its match at the hands of some other animal, who would actually eat it.

Chucking small dead animals into the cornfield is becoming a very common occurrence. Two days later, I found half a mouse on my kitchen floor when I woke up (I’m still terrified thinking about where I will find the other half). Yesterday morning Xpint came careening into the house clenching a struggling bird in his jaws of death. I tossed him into the yard and locked him out of the house in my attempt to keep dead animals out of my kitchen. Convinced the bird was dead and gone, I let Xpint back inside later only to find upon my return from Corrales that he had retrieved the dead bird from the yard and decorated my kitchen floor with its plumage. I spent the evening picking off all the feathers I couldn’t sweep off the rugs. To top it all off, I was lying in bed last night trying to fall asleep, when I heard Xpint playing with a squeaky toy. Since he has no toys that squeak, I turned the light on to investigate, and there he was, bounding all over the kitchen tossing around another half dead mouse.

Xpint is either torturing me or teaching me to get over my squeamishness. Perhaps I should have thought about this outcome before moving in next to a cornfield.