more millie

As is always the case when I go to visit my parents, my time has been fairly evenly split between drinking their beer reserves dry and watching their anxious cat, Millie, frolic by the river bank. Ordinarily, locating the elusive moggy is not too much of a problem, as she likes to be near my mum, even if that means ten or twenty feet away.

Mum and Dad have been away this weekend, however, and as cat-sitter and primary care-giver, I've been more preoccupied than ever with the cat and still more unable to catch up with the little blighter. It's only when I climb to the third floor of the house and peer out of the window that I can normally catch a glimpse of her.

Usually, she is in the small patch of grass beyond the final garden in the block. She takes up a completely stationary position, focussing her unwavering attention on a small patch of grass, or perhaps a shrub. It is in this shrub, I believe, that she has decided that a shrew or wandering moorhen has taken up residence. So she stands stock-still, waiting for it to emerge. Never mind that the shrub is near see-through and contains no shrew, nor that she has waited an hour. She will keep waiting regardless, ever attentive, never surrendering hope. Sometimes, after a good while, she will swivel on her axis (she is a cat with a low centre of gravity) and examine a plot of land inches to the left. This will, naturally, be subject to the same inscrutable attention, indefinitely.

I wonder, actually, if she is conducting a survey - some grand project, where she will map the country in minute detail. The kind of project that man is too flighty and contemptible to complete. Only when she has committed every leaf, every blade of grass to her memory, will she set about the widescale act of removing wildlife from the vacinity. Sometimes she really does spot a creature - normally just an insect - and when she does she performs a series of careful, weighty two footed hops. She rarely catches her prey.

Only if I do approach, wanting to understand her peculiarly patient mind, do I discover that she can move fast, after all.