I want to formally announce, before the parish hears it from someone else and gets the details wrong, that hostilities have ceased.
The cat and the chickens. It's over. Two years of cold war and the odd hot incident, and last Tuesday I looked out the kitchen window and Rattlin' was lying in the long grass by Eileen's fence not three feet from the hens, eyes half shut, one paw out, the very picture of a creature with nothing on her conscience. And the hens? Going about their business. Pecking. Muttering. Not a bother on them.
I had to sit down.
Let me back up, because the scale of this needs context.
When Eileen got the hens — this would be the spring before last, six of them, brown ISA Browns, sound enough birds — Rattlin' declared war the same afternoon. I'm not exaggerating. She sat on top of the coal bunker and watched that coop with the level, unblinking stare of a customs official who suspects the whole flock of smuggling. (If you've read about the postman's glove you'll know the stare I mean. It is her one great talent.) For weeks it was just surveillance. Then came the Incidents.
I won't relitigate all of them. But there was the morning she got INTO the run somehow — I still don't know how, the wire was sound, Eileen checked it twice — and there was an explosion of feathers and squawking and a noise out of Eileen I'd not heard since her hip went, and Rattlin' came over the fence at a speed that suggested she'd reconsidered her whole strategy mid-flight. No bird was harmed. Her dignity was. She didn't come down off the dresser the rest of the day.
And there was the standoff. The famous one. A whole Sunday afternoon where the big hen — Eileen calls her Brünnhilde, she's the boss of the flock, fierce article — squared up to Rattlin' through the fence and the two of them just STARED. Did not move. For something close to forty minutes. I went out and mowed half the lawn and came back and they were still at it. Pádraig reckoned it was a territorial thing. Eileen reckoned the hen had "her measure." I reckoned my cat had finally met someone as stubborn as herself and didn't know what to do about it.
That was the situation for two years. A frontier. An uneasy line drawn down the middle of two gardens, patrolled daily, occasionally breached, never resolved.
And now this. Peace. Détente. Whatever the word is for when a cat and six chickens decide, without any treaty I was party to, that the war is not worth fighting.
I've been trying to work out what changed and I genuinely cannot. Eileen has a theory that it's age — that Rattlin's just gotten too settled in herself to bother with the carry-on of war, and there might be something in that, though I'd never say it to the cat's face. Pádraig says the hens "wore her down," which is not how I'd put it but I take his point. My own theory, for what it's worth, is the worst winter we've had in years. The cat flap was busy. Everyone, cat and hen alike, was just trying to get through January, and somewhere in all that cold the line on the map stopped meaning anything. You don't fight a war when you're both only trying to find a warm bit of wall.
But here's the part that gets me. It's not a truce of avoidance. They're not just ignoring each other across a no-man's-land. She goes OVER there now. Of her own free will. She picks her way down the garden, hops up onto Eileen's low wall, and lies in the sun beside the run like she's been invited. And the hens have made their peace right back — Brünnhilde herself walked the length of the fence the other day with Rattlin' lying a foot away and neither of them so much as twitched. It's the most civilised thing I've ever seen out of either party. Eileen's started leaving the kitchen door open so the cat can sit on her step. There's tea involved now. For me, not the cat. Though I wouldn't put it past Eileen.
I keep thinking about it in terms of the song, which is my curse, everything comes back to it eventually. You know how the whole thing builds — the bog, and the tree, and the branch, and the bird, all of it stacking up verse on verse until you've this great ridiculous tower of a song that only works because every piece holds the one before it. There's a feather ON the bird, and the bird IN the nest, and the nest ON the branch, and on and on. Everything in its place. Everything connected, even the flea (the CLIMAX, don't @ me, I've written about this at length). The cat in the garden. The hen in the run. The man at the window with his tea going cold, writing it all down.
For two years I thought the natural order was cat-against-hen. Turns out the natural order, given long enough, is everyone in the same patch of sun.
I'm fierce proud of her. I know that's mad. She did nothing — she literally stopped doing a thing — and I'm prouder of her for that than for half the actual achievements of my life. But there it is. My cat is a diplomat now. A small furry envoy. The war is over and I wasn't even consulted on the terms.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Eileen says one of the hens has started following Rattlin' to the fence and waiting for her in the mornings. She's named that one too. It's "Deirdre." I am choosing to find this lovely and not at all strange, the same way I choose most mornings to not think too hard about a cat who's been at that window longer than seems entirely reasonable. Grand. Lovely. More tea, Eileen.