Recently, the cat left a young weasel on the doorstep. Aside from a puncture wound on the neck, the weasel was intact, with a reddish upper coat and a white underbelly and a long, narrow body and stubby legs. I’d seen a weasel only once before, loping across the road while I waited in the early morning gloom with the kids for the bus to come, and we had to think twice before realizing what it was. I’d heard about weasels since I was a kid but never really expected to see one. Rats? Sure. Rabbits? Yep. But a weasel? In my experience, a weasel was more a derogatory term than a mammal. A weasel was the kid you couldn’t trust, the salesman you couldn’t believe, the politician you knew was talking out of his ass.
But our cat, with the non-menacing name of “Dusty,” had deposited a real weasel on the front porch, and so I was no longer in doubt that weasels—the Least weasel, to be specific (Mustela nivalis)—did exist beyond the realm of insult and connivery. Dusty, in fact, has brought us many creatures over the years: mice, rats, shrews, squirrels, chipmunks, baby rabbits, not-so-baby rabbits, salamanders, newts, frogs, robins, thrushes. Once, he even caught a hummingbird, which wasn’t dead, only stunned, and which lay in my wife’s palm until she took it outside and, after a brief pause in the daylight, it zipped into the shadows of the nearby trees.
Dusty is a hunter on par with Orion or Davy Crockett. Like many cats, he doesn’t always kill. Sometimes he brings live mice into the house and sets them loose because, hey, what else is a cat to do? But he does kill more often than he doesn’t, and he does devour, sometimes from head to toe. If he leaves something behind, it’s usually the odd greenish organ or intestine. This from a cat with soft, camel-colored fur and a “what ya gonna to do about it?” disposition.
Mentor to Dusty was Milo, a 22-pound tabby. Milo lived 14 years before he disappeared one night, perhaps his heart giving out as he roamed the woods or his overburdened legs too sore to escape a roaming coyote. In his prime, Milo was country strong and seemingly unafraid of anything. He was also the Mike Tyson of cats, with a meek meow that must have been imported from another, daintier feline. Milo, in truth, was the sweetest cat I’ve known, a hefty lap warmer, approachable to any carbon-based life form that might pet or feed him and an adoptive father to not only Dusty but also Dusty’s predecessor, Mango, who lasted six months before disappearing.
That’s the nature of cats in the country. They have plenty of opportunities to catch and kill, but they also have plenty of opportunities to be caught and killed. In his first year, Dusty disappeared for more than a day, and we thought he’d gone the way of Mango, his half-brother. I’d walked the three acres of our property, calling his name but resigned to the fact that Milo would once more be on his own. Finally, after another day passed, I walked out to our chicken coop and decided to call one last time, and I heard a distant, plaintive meow. Over in the woods between our house and the neighbor’s property was Dusty, up high in an alder tree, clinging to a few spindly branches. Something had obviously chased him into the woods. I had to borrow the neighbor’s orchard ladder to reach him, my toes on the top rung and one arm stretched out while the other held onto the tree.
Dusty had another brush with death a year or so later, when a vet treating him for toxoplasmosis (a parasitic disease related to eating mice) accidentally punctured Dusty’s lung while attempting to put a feeding tube into him. The vet rushed Dusty to an emergency pet hospital and paid for his care, which included the removal of a lung lobe. But you wouldn’t know what this cat had been through once his belly-length scar furred over. Before long, Dusty was back to his hunting grounds, toxoplasmosis be damned.
And so now a weasel. What was the meaning of this? Like many cats, Dusty liked to make a show of his conquests: “Look what I did! Hey, look. Come on!”
Here was another trophy that required inspection and approval. And yet, because the weasel was something new to me, I couldn’t help but think of it as some kind of symbolic gift. Like many animals, weasels bear significance to many cultures. For the Athabascan tribe in Alaska, weasel tails have been good luck charms and signs of wealth. To the Blackfoot, they’ve been considered part of the cycle of life and death. In Greece, weasels have been associated with the destruction of clothing, especially bridal dresses; if you find one near your house, it’s bad luck, so having a killer cat around might be a good idea. But not so in China, where killing a weasel brings bad luck.
Dusty couldn’t care less about cultural symbolism, however. Hunting is part of his DNA, despite 10,000 years of feline domestication. And presenting his prey, dead or alive, is most likely his way of showing what he can do. It’s what he did for Milo, and it’s what he does for us. It’s possibly even his way of teaching us how to hunt.
I sometimes wonder if Dusty will retire from hunting, as Milo did once he’d trained Dusty. He sleeps about 20 hours a day. You can usually find him on the bed or in the sock basket. But inevitably something else will show up on the doorstep or in the dining room—half a bird, perhaps, feathers strewn like confetti, or a squirrel’s tail and, of course, those bitter, yet neatly bestowed organs.
Such a capable killer he is. So soft and warm and cute.