To speak or not to speak - that is the question
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Thep and Manohra cooperate on the "great escape"
THIS EVENING, I realise there’s a problem when Wan-Wan, my tiny poodle, begins barking and whining.
All dogs and cats have vocalisations, sounds they make to communicate with other animals or with humans. Wan’s are specific. One of her vocalisations tells me “a person is at the gate”, in contrast to another vocalisation: “a dog is at the gate” or “a turtle from the second floor has just fallen down the stairs.”
She also has specific whines. One tells me: “Oh, no! There’s a cat fight. Do something about it!” Another whine (with a few yips thrown in) means: “Thep is on top of the gate and he’s jumping down to the patio.”
Thep, the soi cat and one of Wan’s favourite cats, also has specific vocalisations, as in: “I want to come inside” or “I want to go outside.”
The most heart breaking is the call he makes when he first enters the house. He’s still calling his friend Thong, who died last May. “Death” is not in Thep’s vocabulary.
This evening, though, I’ve never heard Wan make such barks and whines before. She’s looking up towards the stairs, not towards the patio, and at first I think she’s simply changed her turtle warning. When I check, I don’t see any turtle in an unfortunate situation on the steps.
Then I hear it: Thep’s distinctive call for his friend Thong.
Thep is definitely in the house, but how?
This cat can come inside from only two doors, the one on the ground floor and another on the third floor. I keep both doors closed because of Manohra, the Wild Child. This cat will follow Thep anywhere, even onto the soi, if I’d let her.
Thep knows how to take care of himself, but Manohra doesn’t. She’d fight any tom cat wandering around. Besides, in my soi live unkind people who like to kick and hit cats.
Thus I know when Thep is in the house or outside – and I certainly didn’t let him inside tonight.
Then the boy comes down the stairs, to be greeted ecstatically by Wan. He’s calm, but I am completely panicked. Is there a hole somewhere that he’s found? If so, has Manohra found it too? Is Manohra now outside and in danger?
I search every floor, and there it is, on the fourth floor.
Actually I already knew it was there, on the screen door leading to the back. This door is always closed, since there’s no roofing to keep an active cat from escaping into other people’s houses.
For the past few weeks, I noticed a small hole at the bottom of the screen. From the direction of the screening, I guessed that Manohra was clawing it from the inside.
Finally, it grew large enough for a cat to squeeze in and out. I sewed it up with plastic screening, which no cat could claw through.
Well, judging from the direction of the screening, which now points in the opposite direction, it looks as if Thep has lent a helping paw from the outside. If you can’t claw through, perhaps you can push it aside.
Manohra happily shows me how she can squeeze through the now much larger hole to the outside. I manage to grab her just as she leaps upwards to the house next door.
The bottom of the screen is now so badly mangled it will have to go to a shop for repair.
The most worrisome aspect is that no one vocalised anything while they were working on the screen. Did the two cats keep quiet because they knew I would try to stop them, or did they realise they were cooperating so well that they didn’t have to communicate with anyone?
