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Table of contents
THE CAT
ZUT
THE BLUE DRYAD
DICK BAKER'S CAT
THE BLACK CAT
MADAME JOLICŒUR'S CAT
A FRIENDLY RAT
MONTY'S FRIEND
CALVIN
C'est
l'esprit familier du lieu;Il
juge, il préside, il inspireToutes
choses dans son empire;Peut-être
est-il fée, est-il dieu. Charles
Baudelaire.
THE CAT
The
snow was falling, and the Cat's fur was stiffly pointed with it, but
he was imperturbable. He sat crouched, ready for the death-spring, as
he had sat for hours. It was night—but that made no difference—all
times were as one to the Cat when he was in wait for prey. Then, too,
he was under no constraint of human will, for he was living alone
that winter. Nowhere in the world was any voice calling him; on no
hearth was there a waiting dish. He was quite free except for his own
desires, which tyrannized over him when unsatisfied as now. The Cat
was very hungry—almost famished, in fact. For days the weather had
been very bitter, and all the feebler wild things which were his prey
by inheritance, the born serfs to his family, had kept, for the most
part, in their burrows and nests, and the Cat's long hunt had availed
him nothing. But he waited with the inconceivable patience and
persistency of his race; besides, he was certain. The Cat was a
creature of absolute convictions, and his faith in his deductions
never wavered. The rabbit had gone in there between those low-hung
pine boughs. Now her little doorway had before it a shaggy curtain of
snow, but in there she was. The Cat had seen her enter, so like a
swift grey shadow that even his sharp and practised eyes had glanced
back for the substance following, and then she was gone. So he sat
down and waited, and he waited still in the white night, listening
angrily to the north wind starting in the upper heights of the
mountains with distant screams, then swelling into an awful crescendo
of rage, and swooping down with furious white wings of snow like a
flock of fierce eagles into the valleys and ravines. The Cat was on
the side of a mountain, on a wooded terrace. Above him a few feet
away towered the rock ascent as steep as the wall of a cathedral. The
Cat had never climbed it—trees were the ladders to his heights of
life. He had often looked with wonder at the rock, and miauled
bitterly and resentfully as man does in the face of a forbidding
Providence. At his left was the sheer precipice. Behind him, with a
short stretch of woody growth between, was the frozen perpendicular
wall of a mountain stream. Before him was the way to his home. When
the rabbit came out she was trapped; her little cloven feet could not
scale such unbroken steeps. So the Cat waited. The place in which he
was looked like a maelstrom of the wood. The tangle of trees and
bushes clinging to the mountain-side with a stern clutch of roots,
the prostrate trunks and branches, the vines embracing everything
with strong knots and coils of growth, had a curious effect, as of
things which had whirled for ages in a current of raging water, only
it was not water, but wind, which had disposed everything in circling
lines of yielding to its fiercest points of onset. And now over all
this whirl of wood and rock and dead trunks and branches and vines
descended the snow. It blew down like smoke over the rock-crest
above; it stood in a gyrating column like some death-wraith of
nature, on the level, then it broke over the edge of the precipice,
and the Cat cowered before the fierce backward set of it. It was as
if ice needles pricked his skin through his beautiful thick fur, but
he never faltered and never once cried. He had nothing to gain from
crying, and everything to lose; the rabbit would hear him cry and
know he was waiting.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!