Hotspur the Hound
If you lived in my village in the Valley of Lecrín, sooner or later, it would happen to you.
Most folks residing in Béznar have a plot of land or two. We have four plots scattered around the outskirts of our hamlet of three hundred souls (I am referring to the human variety). The plots total about seven marjales. A marjal equals 528.42 square meters. It is a term used only in select regions of the province of Granada—la Vega de Granada, Guadix, Motril, and el Valle de Lecrín.
Manolo is one of the big landowners in Béznar. He has three hectares. That’s roughly 60 marjales, or a little over seven acres. He used to farm orange and lemon groves on his land. The popularity of avocados, however, convinced him to rip out his oranges and lemons. Ten years ago, he turned his land over to his son, José, who planted avocado trees with the help of a cooperative based in Málaga. The cooperative has helped José convert everything in his orchards to automation so he can manage them from his cell phone. I know this because one day he showed me how he does it when I ran into him at the local clinic in Talará. None of our four small plots has any automation. We still have too many orange and lemon trees and no productive avocado trees.
My village sits at the western foundation of Spain’s Sierra Nevada, just outside the national park. So, not only is the village surrounded by groves of lemons, oranges, olives, and avocados (only recently), but the groves themselves are surrounded by the natural woodlands and brushlands that abound in this gentle Mediterranean climate. If you were to hike due east of my home, you could not only continue for more than one hundred kilometers before encountering another village but also, after traversing the first fifteen kilometers, would climb up Spain’s highest peak, Mulhacen, to a height of 3,478 meters above sea level. That’s 11,424 feet in American.
The natural surroundings are a mixed blessing. While Béznar boasts only 300 human souls, the environment supports a lot of other souls as well. For example, lots of Bézneros keep dogs as pets. If you don’t think a dog has a soul, well, you’ve never lived with a dog, have you.
We have stray dogs too. After all, a few unwanted pups are bound to escape human dominion to roam about, skinny and neglected. They don’t seem to last long without our help.
There are other animals here, and I believe they also have souls. Why on earth not?
We have a multitude of bird species. Many of them visit our backyard. If we open the bedroom window in the morning, we hear them singing their hearts out. We can watch some of them bathing in our little fountain. Some, like the sparrows and the mirlas (blackbirds), stick around all year. Others, like the doves, stay for a long while but disappear at certain times. Others still, like the nightingale, the petirrojo (Spanish robin), and the oriole, only visit in the spring or fall. Although they do not venture into our yard, if you walk down to the lake at the right time of their migrations, you sometimes find egrets, cranes, storks, herons, and ducks.
We have plenty of birds. And before I leave the bird souls, I feel obliged to note that the Spanish blackbird sounds nothing like its American cousin, who does not really sing but only squawks. The Spaniard sings a melody every bit as charming as the nightingale’s. We’re lucky the mirla sticks around all year.
In addition to dogs and birds, there are wilder and more elusive souls. The jabalí (wild pigs) roam from high up in the mountains to down in the canyons and through more than one vegetable garden of the Bézneros every year. They live in social groups and are very dangerous to encounter if you go about unarmed. In fact, they’re dangerous even if you are armed. But they are also cunning and don’t care to run into you. In nearly eight years, I have yet to see one though I have seen the havoc they wreck at night on vegetable gardens.
Another local animal even more elusive than the jabalí is the garduño, a large variety of the weasel. I have never seen one of these souls either, but I had to clean up the mess one garduño made of my chicken coop two years ago. He got in and killed all six of our chickens. He didn’t eat any of them. He just killed them and left. He compelled me to reinforce the fence and put in a perimeter foundation of bricks. That seems to have kept him out. The new chickens have been laying eggs ever since.
The village also nurtures other animals like rodents. We have mice and rats. Of course, you don’t need to live next to a national park to have mice and rats though it doesn’t hurt either.
And that brings me to the souls I want to talk about today. You’ll forgive me for taking so long to get here, but I wanted to illustrate for you the diversity of critters my village has to offer before contending with a difficult subject like our cats.
I once supposed that cats were soulless animals. I mean generally speaking they don’t pay much attention to us even when we pet them and feed them. But I suppose now that I confused an independent spirit with an utter lack of one, a mistake anyone could make. Begrudgingly, I will also concede that there appears to exist the exceptional cat that can be a pretty good companion to the right human being or so I have heard.
While we have a multitude of cats here, very few Bézneros keep one as a pet. On our little street alone, there must live a dozen cats. Only one of them lives inside a house. Furthermore, I have it on reliable information that that cat is old, and our neighbors can’t wait for the cat to die.
So, you have guessed by now that the vast majority of cats in Béznar are feral. People justify their existence by claiming that the cats keep the rats in check. Don’t you believe it. I have personally witnessed a single Béznar rat stare down one of our wicked feral cats and cause the cat to turn tail and look for easier prey, namely one or more of our lovely songbirds.
I know of only one case where it appeared that a cat killed a rat. It happened in my own back yard. I did not see the encounter. But I had to pick up the dead rat and throw it in our garbage can. The signs were unmistakable. A vicious animal with claws and fangs had bitten the rat by the throat and cut through the arteries feeding oxygen to its brain.
I was not especially troubled by this trauma because I am not really fond of rats. I admire their ingenuity, deliberation, and perspicacity, but I don’t want them around. Once I had a roommate in college who had a pet rat. He was an unabashed anarchist with long red hair and a beard. As far as I could tell, he never showered the entire semester. Indeed, to rid ourselves of him, my other roommate Phil, a thoroughly likeable fellow, and I moved off campus for the spring semester to a house in Petaluma. After that, I gave up on college altogether for three years and became a roofer. So, you can see that I don’t do that well around rats.
Now I have a pretty good idea of which neighborhood cat killed the rat in my yard. It is a black and white female. She is both clever and unfriendly. She has been trying to move in for nearly a year. You see, except for birds and the fish in the fountain, our yard is not inhabited by other animals. To a feral cat, this looks like a vacancy beacon the size of an interstate billboard.
Like a lot of feral female cats, because there are plenty of feral male cats around who only think about four things—eating, sleeping, fighting, and the other thing—this black and white cat got pregnant. Like I said, it was bound to happen sooner or later. She produced a litter of five kittens just outside our front door under the little shed housing our hot water heater.
“Miow, miow, miow, miow”…and on and on and on.
If only la Genara were still alive. You would think la Genara would have had more cats than a stray dog has fleas. After all, in her day almost everybody believed she was a bruja, a witch. She was once accosted at her home by the dreaded Guardia Civil for some village accusation about some nonsense or other. But she dispatched them promptly after they knocked on her door.
“Go away and leave me alone or I’ll curse your children and your children’s children!”
The two men in the green uniforms and black tri-cornered hats had heard the rumors. They quickly ascertained her innocence and left quietly without making further inquiries. My mother-in-law witnessed the entire episode and told me about it, so I know it is true.
La Genara has been dead nearly four decades, but her memory lives on. She despised cats. If she were in my circumstances, she would know just what to do. She lived ninety-six years, all of that time in this little village. Because of her long life, she certainly had this experience many times. As soon as she discovered a litter of feral kittens in her yard, well before they ever opened their eyes to the world, she drowned them. As soon as the mother cat went off to hunt for something to eat, she gathered them up and put them out of their misery.
What misery you ask? Most feral kittens, nearly all feral kittens around here, don’t make it to adulthood. Dogs roaming the streets instinctively snatch them up and dispatch them with a decisive chomp. I’ve witnessed this first hand. The kitten was unaware of the danger the dog posed. The dog was happy as a lark. I had to bury the kitten.
Other kittens get distemper, parasites, and even the common cat cold. Any of that or other maladies do them in. The surviving feral cats, who maintain a significant population in Béznar, are tough as they come. But I agree with la Genara. I want no more to do with them than I do with the rats.
But unlike la Genara, I have not been able to bring myself to euthanize the five kittens now roaming cautiously about our yard. No one in our household seems disposed to undertake the task. Indeed, one of my sons even picks them up and pets them. I refrain from discouraging his natural tendency to feel compassion for another soul however detached it may be from our own.
I might have found the courage to dispatch the kittens. I might have found it, but then the recent news made me pause to think about it. Since then, my conscience, or perhaps my lingering desire for public respectability, put the brakes on my considerations of an immediate execution.
Certainly, you’ve all heard about the new memoir by the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, in which she admits shooting her dog, Crickett, in a gravel pit. She sheltered Crickett for fourteen months, and then she shot him. Some reports classify Crickett as a puppy. That’s not fair. A fourteen-month-old dog is an adolescent, not a puppy. In fourteen months, you get to know your dog pretty well. His character (aka his soul) has already developed substantially.
Governor Noem had some grounds for shooting Crickett. In a playful mood, he killed some chickens (see garduño above). He might have been forgiven for that, but, according to the governor, his real crime was being untrainable. Now I have my doubts about this excuse. Unlike humans, all dogs are trainable to some degree. Crickett may never have had the aptitude to be a good hunting dog, but, with a little kindness and patience, any dog can be an adequate pet.
Governor Noem also wrote that she shot her goat and a few of her aging horses.
Since Béznar has gone on so long without la Genara, I wish Governor Noem would come to Béznar and rid me of these kittens. She could shoot the mother cat as well. After all, who can train a cat?
It makes you think. If “untrainability” is the bar for executing a pet, nearly all cats would need a lot more than nine lives!
On the other hand (or paw), from the cat’s perspective, I imagine things look very different.
“Training? Me? You’re kidding, right? … I was born trained. No further instruction required.”