When I was a child, my family raised a tabby cat. It wasn’t adopted since it was a kitten. When I was just born, my grandfather picked up this wild cat from the field. In those days, in the countryside, people would tie a rope around the cat’s neck because they were afraid it would eat poisoned mice and die. But this cat was extremely fierce.
It was so fierce that it could bite through the rope alive. Of course, the result of biting through was that it got a thicker rope. In the countryside, the kang (heated brick bed) was built together with the stove. Toddlers who had just learned to walk would also be tied with a rope on the kang because people were afraid they would fall off the kang or into the hot pot and get burned. So both the cat and I were tied with ropes on the kang. The scene at that time was rather comical.
The adults in the family had to go to the fields to do farm work. I had no playmates, so I only had the cat to accompany me. At the age when I was just beginning to babble, I could only talk to the cat. Whether it could understand me or not, anyway, I talked to it with great pleasure. (One day, a neighbor passed by our door and heard me talking. Seeing the lock on the door, he was curious about who I was talking to. Looking through the crack of the door, he saw that I was talking to the cat at home. It became a joke in the village for a while.)
Now let’s talk about the fierceness of this cat. In those years, because of this cat, other families were plagued by mice, but we didn’t even see a single mouse in our house. Sparrows and wild pigeons never landed in our yard. That’s not all. Have you ever seen a cat that catches rabbits and weasels?
Sometimes when we got up in the morning, we could see rabbit fur and the corpses of weasels in the firewood pile. Do you think this was its peak moment? What’s even more terrifying was the strong vitality of this cat. It ate poisoned mice that had been killed by rat poison no less than five times. Each time, it would howl and roll around in the middle of the night. But the next day, it would be full of energy again.
At the end, the cat stayed at home for five or six years. I also grew up five or six years old. When I went to my uncle’s house, my sister said the cat was howling at home. She untied the cat’s rope, and then the cat ran out. Until now, it has never come back.
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