Paw Prints in the Moonlight by Denis O'Connor Read Free Book Online Page A

kitten in the whole world. Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder and to my eye Toby Jug was wonderful.
    I remember at that time jotting down a few words that would aptly describe Toby Jug’s appearance. He had a round knob of a head with tiny ears and almost the whole of his face was covered with untidy tufts of fur which gave him a wild, absurdly belligerent appearance. His face was covered with a predominantly black mask extending to below his nose where he had a white moustache slightly skewed to the right, along with a white mouth, throat and chest. He also had a black smudge on the right side of his nose which gave him a somewhat quizzical expression. The rest of his body was black except for neat white spats on all four paws that lent him an endearing touch of the dandy. His eyes, which turned green as he matured, were faintly ringed with white, giving him a perpetually startled look.
    His appearance reminded me of some other creature that I couldn’t at first put a name to until I recalled
memories of racoons seen by torchlight as they raided refuse bins during the nights when I had stayed with friends in Rhode Island, USA. There was definitely a slight racoon-look to Toby Jug’s eyes. When I stopped to think about it, there was a further resemblance to racoons in the way he would occasionally sit up and balance on his hind legs and look searchingly around. He also tended to scoop his food up into his mouth with a paw and sometimes he would dip a piece of cooked chicken I had given him into the water bowl before eating it. All of these behaviours were curiously racoon-like but at the time I didn’t make a great deal of it. Later, however, it was to prove significant in consideration of Toby Jug’s ancestry. He was certainly no ordinary cat either in looks or behaviour and in my opinion he was unique!
    Taking a really careful look at him I wondered just how this little cat perceived the world and me. Maybe I was his entire world. I thought that any memory of his mother would be severely limited, especially since he hadn’t been able to open his eyes until he’d been with me awhile. Because I had been the first living and moving thing he’d ever seen, he probably regarded me as family and had imprinted in his brain the sight of me as mother. A famous zoologist called Konrad Lorenz once described how he became the ‘mother’ to some geese and had to teach them to swim and also how to fly by running along flapping his
arms until the geese, imitating him, became airborne. Quite possibly, Toby Jug had no idea he was a cat at all but believed himself to be human. After all, he had never even seen another cat and had very little experience of associating with his own species. What else could he think in the circumstances, if he could think at all? It was all very confusing and I fell asleep in the chair ruminating on it.
    Some hours later I awoke with a stiff neck to find that the fire was almost out and Toby Jug had worked his way up inside my sweater. Popping him into his jug, I blew out the candles and carried both kitten and jug up to my bedroom, which had an electric heater. I climbed into bed and fell nicely asleep, until Toby Jug’s true cat nature began to assert itself once more and I awoke in alarm to find him squeaking and squealing. There he was, in the dim illumination of my bedside lamp, leaping urgently about in his jug, determined to attract my attention. Obviously, he wished to be let out of his jug to join me on the bed; 3 a.m. in the morning is no time to start an argument and so Toby won. Thereafter at bedtime he spurned his jug in favour of sleeping on the bed between the quilt and the top blanket as if it was his God-given right to do so. I expect his excuse would be that he had to keep track of me.
    This was often the pattern of our evenings during the winter months as Toby grew from strength to strength and we became irrevocably attached to