Bats and Cats

In sixth grade, I found baby bat on the wall at the school. He was alive. I decided I was going to keep him forever as my best friend, but I had to give him to Mr. Clark while we went to P.E. to play some dumb sport like baseball. I’m pretty sure it was baseball because none of my competitive instinct was aroused during that particular P.E. session. Instead I was planning how I was going to feed the bat with an eye dropper. Also, I was plotting how I was going to make sure that Kristen knew that it was going to be MY bat and not hers, because I think she was misunderstanding that fact. After what seemed an interminable amount of time (because baseball time is longer that Earth time—it steals years from your life span while you hang out in left field waiting for no one to hit you the ball because none of the kids in my sixth grade class were really devoted to the sport), we went back to our classroom to find—oh horrors! Mr. Clark had formaldehyde-ed my new best friend.  Permanently petrified in the fetal position, my fuzzy baby bat was now suspended in a jar of opaque liquid. I was devastated and furious, and if my mother only knew how close she came to having to tell me that she would not allow me to bottle feed a baby bat. Or if, on the very off-chance she had let me keep it, how close my father would have come to being the one to have to find a way to dispose of its dead body. Neither of them had to fulfill these parental duties because I was denied my pet bat in the name of Science. But in honor of this event, after I read the Harry Potter books a few years later, I decided that I would have a bat instead of an owl, and he would carry messages for me and be different from all the other boring wizards, and he would be called “Marley” because that is a cool name for a bat.

My dream. Note: Marley was not from "Bob" but from
the ghosts of the bad lawyers in Muppet's Christmas Carol.
"We're Marley and Marley, our hearts are painted black!"
which I thought was a catchy tune, and a great name for a bat.

Fast-forward a few years, decades, and I have done my fair share of disposing of bat bodies. Or unfair share of it. And I have left more to Antani who does not deserve that at all, but she is a mother and is less disgusted by horrible things than I am.  Why am I cleaning up bat bodies? Do I have a child with a desire for strange pets that she will inevitably accidentally kill? No. I have a borrowed cat with the malicious instincts of a hunter. He loves catching bats and frogs and lizards outside and bringing them inside to munch on. He also loves letting them go when they are half-masticated but maintaining a small spark of life and hope for a future free of cats. If he lets them go inside, it is harder for them to get away, but it is possible for them to get caught in the furniture and die. This is what I try to avoid. Also, he has a horrible habit of not finishing his food. Apparently, he’s never heard about starving cats in Africa who would LOVE to eat the rest of that lizard leg he left on the floor. Instead I have to sweep it up. 

Once I saw him chewing on a lizard. It was firmly in his mouth. I yelled at him and picked him up to fling him out the door, and just before he was out, he let go of the lizard so that it ran in the house and behind the kitchen counters. I KNOW he did it on purpose to be mean. But that lizard was stuck and he couldn’t get it,  and he stayed in the kitchen yowling in front of the cabinet for hours until I got tired of it and pushed them out so he could catch the lizard. And I threw them both out again.

 

Three of Antani's kids who came over to hang out while she
working. Sefora (in blue) was terrified of me at first until
I gave her lots of candy. Then we became friends.
The others liked me right away, and I STILL gave them candy.
Except for the baby. She will get hers later though.
Aren't they super-cute???

I really hate it when he catches things and brings them inside because I really don’t like to see animals suffering, and I don’t like to clean up bloody carcasses, and I don’t like the gross crunching sound he makes while he is eating animal bones. The other morning, he came inside with a creature. I was not surprised at this, but I was annoyed.

The previous day my door lock had broken, and instead of calling a professional, we decided (myself, Marie-Françoise, and Narcisse) that we would spend the next two evenings hacking into the door ourselves to fix it. Well, they did. I watched and handed them tools after looking up the French word for those tools on my phone dictionary. We all failed. Except me. I know what a tournevis is now. But the door wouldn’t close. I didn’t worry about that. The cat had been behaving nicely recently and not doing much hunting. I didn’t bother to block the cat flap on the door. When I ignored his 4:45am yowling for food, he took matters into his own claws and went and got his own. Fine. Antani was coming that day, and I figured that she could help me deal with it, but he brought the thing right by my bed and was chewing loudly, and it wasn’t even 5am yet, and I still had another hour to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and moved into the living room to sleep on the couch. I was not happy with this arrangement, but I didn’t want to fight because fighting wakes you up, and I still wanted to sleep.

I must have had about 5 minutes of shut-eye when suddenly something landed on my head!!! Screaming and jumping up, I dislodged the cat and the Thing from hair. They moved on into the kitchen where I got this photo:

The cat just sat there and looked at it, and it wasn't moving at all.
So you can see how it is impossible to tell if it is alive or dead.

But, as you can see, this bat seems to have no visible injuries, in spite of the horrible noises the cat had been making while chewing on it in my room. And clearly, it had been recently flying. So I stood there a few moments, taking photos for my nephews and nieces (they were impressed) and trying to decide if it really was dead so that I could sweep it out of the kitchen. After a few minutes of internal debating, I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to find out and risk a bat flying in my face. Bats carry rabies, did you know? And I don’t think my rabies vaccination is up-to-date. So I grabbed the keys, which were fortunately on the table in the living room, and exited that middle door (which had been closed) and ran for Narcisse, who I found in the act of rolling up his bed and getting up. Lovely, nice, wonderful hero that he is, he cheerfully agreed to come see if the bat was alive or dead and get him out of my house (dead or alive). He went in the house, walked towards the bat and found that he was very much alive, as he flew at Narcisse’s face (proving that I made the right decision not to test it myself) and then flew around my house making horrible barking noises that I could hear a little bit over my screaming from behind the screen door where I could watch from safety. Narcisse bravely trapped him over the pile of Naomi’s DVDs that people have returned to her and I haven’t put away yet. He held him by the wings and brought him outside of the house to where I was hiding.

“Do you want me to give him to the cat?”

“No!” I said, not wanting the cat to win this dispute after chasing his prey into my hair. MY HAIR. “Just let him go.”

“Well, he’s dead,” said Narcisse. “I’ll just throw him away.” (He did not add “far from here” but I could see that he was feeling concerned for me in my fragile state, and I think he did.)

It was 5:20am. All of this happened so fast. And there was no more sleep for Amanda.

Of course everyone enjoyed this story of my suffering. Look at this message I got from a friend in Sudan after I told him what happened to me:

Also, I don’t know how I got this reputation as being fearless. Sure, I don’t worry too much about driving roads where I may be hijacked, but there are plenty of things that I am afraid of beside being attacked by a bat and a cat in my own house. I’m afraid of dying in an airplane crash. I’m afraid of being invited to dinner at someone’s house and having to eat something horrible like bananas. I'm afraid of calling someone on the phone to make an appointment. I’m afraid of bugs that lay eggs in your body and also getting cut by coral that will take root in your bones and grow into a tree (thanks SO MUCH, Anders for making me watch that youtube video). I’m afraid of losing my hair and going bald. I’m afraid of those people who dress up in cartoon character costumes and try to shake your hand at amusement parks. Also, I am nervous about people who dress in costumes to go to movies or those movie conferences. Basically, anyone over the age of 12 who is wearing a costume at a time other than Halloween concerns me.

Anyway, we all laughed and after the professional came to fix my door (it took him 15 minutes), Marie-Françoise said, “You can close the door and sleep well tonight.”

That was the plan, of course. But at 7:30pm, I had not yet shut that door. I had just brewed a pot of cinnamon tea and was sitting down to watch a TV show marketed to young teenagers that I enjoy because I’m a very sophisticated person, when I noticed some commotion in the corner. Felix had more prey! (He also had food in his bowl, I might add, so there was NO REASON for this other than PURE EVIL.)

I couldn’t tell what it was, but in true Felix style, he let it go and it immediately started flying around the room. I could tell it wasn’t a bat, but I thought it was a small bird. I jumped around screaming, but no one was there to help me catch it, and I had to protect my tea. So eventually I smacked it out of the air with Naomi’s yoga mat, screaming obscenities at the cat, who was doing NOTHING to help me re-catch his prey, which was a giant fat moth the size of the mouse that terrorized me in Mundri.

After I had it trapped under the mat, I knew that I did not want to squish it, but I needed to get it out of the house. So I got the little broom and the dust pan. I thought it was mostly dead, but when I lifted off the mat, it tried to escape, so I slammed the dust pan over it, trapping it with a tiny bit of space under the rim. It was fluttering like crazy, so I thought that if I could kill it with insecticide, that could work and then I could sweep it outside. But I couldn’t find any insecticide. I did, however, find a large pink spray can of some strange perfume, which seemed like the same concept: smelly chemicals in a can that be squirted at offending creatures. If you were wondering, it did not work.

Tools of moth disposal, though I don't
really recommend the perfume because
it was pungent and it was not as effective as I'd hoped.

Eventually, I got brave enough (because I was worried that my tea was getting cold), and I squished the moth between the broom and the dust pan and ran it out of the house before it could wriggle free. I then slammed the door shut, thinking that the cat was outside. And Good Riddance.

But he wasn’t. He was hiding from me under the couch, because I had chased him around the house while the moth was trapped under the mat and I was trying to decide what to do with him.

I left the cat alone for the rest of the night, and shut him outside of the bedroom thinking that I could leave him in there to whine in the wee hours of the morning and sleep past 5 the next day.

It was a beautiful dream. But at 4:30am, I heard a noise that woke me up. Now, I, as you know, would wake up if I heard a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong, but this was a rather emphatic thump. Then another thump. Then a thump and a creak. And then a psychotic MEOW. Felix had made it in the door. So I ended up getting up thirty minutes later to push him outside, where he wanted to go anyway (since he still had plenty of food and water in his bowls).

Felix sleeping on the couch with his butt on my water bottle.
Did I throw a bat at him and jump on his head?
No, because that's frowned upon in polite society.

So I got up at 5am. And then at 11am, Emelie brought in the mail, with a package from the lovely and very contrite owner of Felix who feels terrible about her misbehaving baby. I immediately ate all the “strawberry cables,” which were great—Haribo-level gummy candy. I’ll save the cat food hearts for Felix just before I head out on this trip with the Chadian government officials so that he will have fond memories of me while I’m gone, and not stay at home brooding about how I robbed him of his prey and threw a handful of water from his water dish at him when the spray bottle didn’t soak him as fast as I wanted to after the bat incident (I was a little hysterical, but it gave me the super-power of being able to throw a handful of water at the little miscreant).

Thanks, Naomi, aka the only person who cares enough about me to send me packages.
Also, I know I look crazy. I never sleep anymore.