When I was a child, my family had an orange tabby cat named Mimi. It was a male cat with a chubby, bun-shaped face.
At that time, there were no mice in my house, and he was simply a pet. I liked petting him. As a kid, I didn’t know my own strength sometimes, but he didn’t really mind even if I petted him a bit too hard. He had a nice temperament.
When he was about half a year old, my sister’s house had a mouse problem, and she specifically came to borrow our orange tabby cat to catch the mice.
My sister lived in an old-fashioned dormitory, the kind with a long, shared balcony. There were about ten households on each floor.
After the orange tabby cat went there, he wasn’t kept indoors but stayed on the shared balcony outside my sister’s door. He came back about a week later.
It was said that after the cat arrived at my sister’s house, the mice disappeared the next day. On the third day, not a single mouse could be seen on the same floor. After a week, there were no mice in the whole building.
Anyway, in those few days, whenever people went out, they would see dead mice neatly placed on the ground nearby. My sister was so happy that she bought pig lungs and pig livers for Mimi to eat.
I heard that after Mimi was sent back, there were no mice in that building for a long time.
There’s another detail: This orange tabby cat walked silently at home and liked to hide in corners and swat the legs of people passing by. So my mother put a bell around his neck, hoping to make some noise to avoid scaring people. But within a few days of wearing the bell, the cat mastered the skill of walking without making the bell ring. Every time I was walking at home and he slapped my leg, I would be really surprised.
And when he was lent to my sister’s house to catch mice, he still managed to catch a large number of mice precisely even with the bell on? That was amazing!
After coming back home, this cat became feisty. If I glared at him, his ears would flatten like airplane wings and he would hiss at me to scare me.
After that, our relationship was that if he was willing, he would come to me and let me pet him.
Whether I could pet him depended on his mood.
Nevertheless, he would still unfailingly sneak into my quilt to sleep at night and quietly accompany me during the late nights when I was reading and studying alone.
I felt a bit sad. About a year later, the big orange cat got sick and passed away.
For more than ten years, my family never had another pet.
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