Sometimes I chase my cats around the house while calling to them in my monster voice. (Yes, I live alone. Why do you ask?) It amuses us all, or at least, it amuses me and the cats don't mind the attention. The monster voice is all my own invention and I was rather annoyed to hear it issuing from my radio during an interview with Andy Serkis about his role as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. After he described how he based the voice on the sound of his cat hacking up hairballs, I decided that I was willing to share the monster voice. For now.
In any event, I don't think that such monstrous behavior on my part has adversely affected my cats. They aren't any more evil than your average cats. Or so I thought.
My neighbors unimaginatively have a big black Lab that they don't walk enough. The dog takes the air in their tiny backyard, which is really just a fenced in patio of maybe 150 square feet. My office window is on the first floor of my house and looks out into this yard. The dog, Sammy, is very bored. Like any nine-month-old dog would, he entertains himself by running back and forth and ripping up the bushes that formerly grew high enough to cover the bottom half of my office window. Now my cats and I have a great view of the muddy patio, the piles of poop under the window, and Sammy.
I mostly ignore Sammy and now that he's used to seeing someone beyond the window, he mostly ignores me. The cats seemed to be unaware of his presence, at least until their newfound energy, thanks to their diet food, started keeping them awake during the day.
My "good" kitty, Monte Alban, began to take more of an interest in his surroundings and to hang out on my office windowsill, from which he spied Sammy. And something about Sammy galumphing around on the patio really pisses him off.
Really.
Things develop from there. Monte draws Sammy's attention with the angry cat schtick: raised hackles, growling, spitting, smacking at the window, the whole deal. Sammy is bored and has a little aggression to work off anyway, so he barks and flings himself against my office window from the other side. The first few Wild Kingdom incidents, I just chase Monte out of the office and every time Sammy starts barking like that, the neighbors take him back inside. I figure the animals will get tired of this eventually, but they don't. It gets to the point where Monte will be snuggling upstairs with me, but when he hears the neighbors' door open to let the dog out, he hops up, grins at me, and runs down to the office window where the growling, thumping, and woofing commence.
I have enough of this. Iron bars protect the window, but the dog might still break it. Besides, the siding on my house is pretty friable and I don't want a dog scrabbling at it. Monte Alban knocks over the little pot of dead shamrocks in the windowsill and spreads dirt all over. I pull down the blind so they can't see each other. Problem solved, except that my bright sunny office is now a dim cave.
Moreover, the office is only separated from my neighbors' living room by two layers of sheetrock. Thinking that I must be the evil gray cat-thing, Sammy barks at me when he's in his house and hears me walking around on the far side of the wall. He barks at me when he hears me walking past his house outside.
"Thanks, Monte, it was getting too quiet around here," I say.
Monte looks up from where he's resting in my office chair. Think nothing of it. Noblesse oblige.
One evening, when I and Oz are walking out to his car, Sammy sounds especially annoyed with us, annoyed enough to throw himself against the door. Woof, woof! Woof! Argh!
"Good doggy, Sammy," Oz says.
"Woof, woof," I call.
"Yeah, good watchdog."
Sammy is not that easy. The barking and thumping redouble.
In the monster voice, I say what Japanese dogs say instead of "woof": "Wan-wan!"
Dead silence falls behind the neighbors' door.
Oz and I exchange a glance. I say, "Well, that sure worked."
In the doggy voice, Oz says, "Whut in hell's a wan-wan?"
Me and Monte Alban. Between the two of us, we're Gollum. And dogs fear us.
756 words | March 16, 2004 09:35 PM | Felis Major