SWEATSHIRT
Image by Javardh
In my Blog, “The Lesson of the Cat,” I wrote about a cat I called Sweatshirt. Sweatshirt, I’m sad to say, has gone the way of most cats who live in the hills – torn apart and eaten by coyotes. My friend and neighbor TK, who knows animals and the ways of animals, told me he had seen Sweatshirt’s remains on the hill where the coyotes live behind many of the houses on this street. It is a high hill with no houses to claim its magnificent view of the Hollywood sign, the surrounding hills that do have houses on them, Hollywood itself, the sea, and, on a clear day, Catalina Island and Palos Verdes. It is a great place to live if you are a coyote and a great place to dine on rodents and birds and lunch on lizards if you are a cat. It is also a place of slaughter. Especially if you are a cat, the slaughter being yours.
Cats who go there are like people who drive unknowingly into rough neighborhoods. Take a wrong street, and you can be gone. Coyotes are gang members who know their hood better than anyone. A cat in their hood has nowhere to run. It cannot tree – meaning it can’t climb a tree (there are none on the hill, but that is beside the point) because coyotes got it all worked out: two coyotes can prevent a cat from doing what it does best: jump onto a tree trunk and climb up and away from harm. Coyotes are also experts at killing porcupines. Now, we all know what a porcupine is, but just in case you don’t, it’s that fat, little animal with these huge, sharp spikes covering its body who waddles confidently through the hoods of other animals. It can afford to waddle because if a predator decides to kill it so that it can eat that fat, little creature, the porcupine swats it in the face with its tail that is LOADED (like a concealed weapon) with spikes, and then waddles away, leaving the predator behind to howl in pain. The porcupine does not look back. It doesn’t have to. Unless there’s someone around who has a pair of pliers to pull out those spikes (like you have to do with your dog), those spikes will stay stuck in the predator’s nose and mouth and fester so that it cannot drink or eat and so dies of thirst and starvation. That’s the true agony of porcupines.
Coyotes are too smart for that. Being good gang members, they do not take on anybody alone. They work in a pack or at least with two. With porcupines, it takes only two. One coyote snaps at the porcupine’s face while the other one goes behind it and snaps at it, staying just out of range of that tail’s spikes. When the porcupine sweeps its tail at the coyote behind it, the coyote in front dives under its front legs and flips it over with its nose, then both coyotes dive in and rip out its belly. They then yap for the other coyotes to come and join in the feast. Sweatshirt never had a chance on that hill.
I have often heard other Sweatshirts and little animals scream when the coyotes catch them. It’s like in the hood. You hear it coming before it all comes down. First, you hear one coyote yap. Then another, answering. Soon, they’re all yapping, becoming more and more excited, and then in the middle of their frenzy you hear a different voice, a rising cry that sounds like “Oh, no!” It is the cry of terror, of experiencing your death while you are still alive, of being so helpless you can’t fight or flee. I hear in that cry the same terror of hopeless people imprisoned, tortured, and starving.
Thankfully, the moment of terror passes very quickly, but its passing does not seem quick. Most of the time, these moments come at night when I am most vulnerable, about to fall asleep. I grit my teeth and shut my eyes but do not jam my fingers into my ears, for to do so would be to deny the reality of the world that surrounds me, and so I just go rigid until the screaming stops. Sometimes I wonder if the screamer was one I had seen or called to, perhaps even petted. I am thankful that for a week or so I had not heard screaming from the hill and so did not know when Sweatshirt was killed and eaten.
When TK told me about Sweatshirt, I could not think of Sweatshirt’s remains just as pieces of fur lying around. I thought of them as the tattered clothes of someone who had been slaughtered, and in that thought came images we have all seen of the slaughtered in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world we are lucky enough not to live in.
Sweatshirt is gone, and the hill has been sold, and soon a couple will build their dream house there and create their children there, and the coyotes will move on, and so will I – not in the coyotes’ physical sense of leaving but in the mental and emotional paradox of acceptance without remorse.