AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CAT ON A JOURNEY FROM CAPE ...

community and farms, while full of interest, are really very, dirty places because they arefull of machinery. The natural smells are overcome by the odors of fuels and exhaustfumes and there are only moments, say after it has been raining all night, when one isaware of life on a farm. But Hermanus is by the sea and there is a steady breeze thatdisburses the fumes of the cars and brings with it the delicious aroma of fish and crabsand mussels and seaweed, especially at low tide. And there is always the sound of surfbreaking against the cliffs, which is very soothing to a contemplative cat. Sometimes,when the fishing is good, the entire atmosphere intensifies. There is a constant scurryingof people toward the little harbor and a hectic rushing about with bags of fish to becleaned and frozen. Then the aroma will permeate the village and the excitement will becontagious because when the fish come in, everybody benefits. Some of the mostenjoyable moments of my life have been spent cleaning the last bits of meat off the bonesof a snook that had been filleted for the freezer.Settling myself into the life of Hermanus was easier than I had anticipated. It soonbecame abundantly clear to me that this environment was far less hostile than the one Ihad lust left, There were no horses, for example, to step on one while one was in anunguarded moment, which, of course, I never was. Much of the traffic was bicycle andwas easy to dodge, and the cars were driven so slowly that even they presented noproblem.The dogs were ridiculous. At least half of them were owned by little old ladiesand had become little old dogs in their own right. Overweight and pampered, theywaddled about behind their owners and were incapable of more than a yap or two in thedirest of emergencies. I did not even bother to educate them. The remainder were sodisciplined and so restricted that they did not know when to bark or when to wag. Tied upin a fenced-off back yard and told to shut up every time they made noises, they werenonetheless expected to look after the property of their masters. Most of these dogs werenuts, or at least halfway "round the bend," and I did my best to complete the process. Iused to wander into a back yard at night and sit cleaning myself some twelve feet awayfrom a huge mutt on a ten-foot rope. When he was thoroughly hysterical, I would be gonelike a shadow and his boss would come out in a dressing gown, obviously brought from awarm bed by the racket, and beat the hell out of the noisy barker. That system wasespecially effective on wet nights.The cats in the neighborhood presented no problems either. There were a fewstrays who lived in and around the church in the center of town, too far from me toconstitute any kind of a threat, and the ones close by became very friendly after I hadthumped the reigning Tom and taken over his harem. Strays, incidentally, are the ones tolook out for when you move into a new area. That is because they are unpredictable. Acat with an established home of his own knows where he belongs and lets you know ittoo, but a stray is always trying to make a place for himself and is always on thedefensive. Also, because of the way he lives, you never know how effective a fighter heis. He may be keened by tough usage, or toughened by it, and it is hard to tell unless youactually test him out. As a general rule, I'd say that strays present an exaggerated pictureof the cat world: the tough ones will be very tough and the weak ones beneath contempt.But even the tough ones are at a disadvantage because they have to spend so much timefinding food that they have very little left to devote to contemplation, and that causes amoral deficiency that makes them vulnerable to attack from someone like me who knows14