Moving In stories -- August 26, 2003

This morning Maggie, my cat, ran in from the deck with a small chipmunk in her teeth. I thought she had the alert, addled look of feral happiness, and I assumed the poor wildlife prize was dead.

I stood up to shoo her back toward the deck, and she ran into the den.

I immediately imagined Sara witnessing this and going into paroxysms of Giaian concern, alternating between her deep love for Maggie the cat and her profound aversion to eating baby chipmunks, particularly on our newly acquired hardwood floors.

When I darted after Maggie, she ran headfirst into the file cabinet and dropped the chipmunk. It dropped on all fours, shook off its reveries of chipmunk valhalla, and rocketed toward the uncovered heating vent.

My heart leapt through my coffee-bittered teeth as I vaulted the unpacked moving boxes and slammed the loose grate over the vent hole seconds before Chip found sanctuary there. Chip catapulted toward the desk again, and Maggie was on her impossibly cute but out-of-place tail. I grabbed Maggie, because I could. I stood there holding her, and she breathed like a 33 1/3 lp played at 78 rpm.

It occurred to me that I had once bagged a bat with a simple bag, and perhaps this would work on Chip. I took Maggie with me in search of a grocery bag in the kitchen. What I found had handles, but there was no time to MarthaStewart the improvised gamewarden tool by cutting off the handles...I just tossed Maggie toward the front room and pulled the door of the den closed on me and Chip.

Chip was very much not dead.

Heshe ran to a corner of the room, and, oddly enough, just sat there. Given the varous objects and boxes available to climb or hide behind, I realized I was not dealing with the Einstein of yard vermin here. I walked over to him and popped the bag over his head, easily.

On the count of "three" Chip tumbled to what was going on and started scrambling around inside the sack, but I had him secure, and walked the percolating bag out to the woodpile. I let Chip scamper, unbloodied or even bowed, back to safety.

A few minutes later, as I raced through the last vestige of the New York Times, Maggie came in and rubbed my socked foot and meowed plaintively. As I watched her looking around and crying for her toy, I realized why the chipmunk was still alive.

To Maggie, the tiny pocket plaything represented her own babies, not a furry poptart. She had awakened briefly to the maternal state now absent to her for over 8 years, and was bringing Chip into the house to nurture, not kebab.

The meowl she loosed was not the meowl of a foiled huntress. It was the plaintive haloo of a bereft mom, lost in new surroundings.

Maybe I was projecting a very local human dilemma on to Maggie. But I had seen her hunt, and when she hunted she did not play cat and mouse. She visited instant judgement day on her various prey, in all contexts. No, she was doing an interspecies freelance adoption, and I had stepped in like the good government agent I am, observing the letter of the law of tooth and claw, but ignoring the spirit of the mother.

Perhaps I can learn something from this. We'll see.