Cats and Bats

"Your bloody cat brought a bat into the house!"

I was bleary eyed, still plenty tired, but I knew what my mother was trying to tell me through my bedroom door.

"My cat" had done something bad, so I wasted no time in waking up to face the challenge of extracting a cute little bat. There it lay, dead, a poor unfortunate victim of a wayward pussy cat, on the floor outside my bedroom. ("A present? For me?! Thanks so much, Willie.")

Training in expired-bat removal was not something I had taken formally, but I knew that in the back room hung the Runkko "Bat Extractor": Two tennis rackets. (Of course I did not use my own lemon-yellow racket.)

The next day my mother explained to all what she had witnessed: "He would run to the top of the stairs with the bat in his mouth. He would then spit it out and bat it with his paw to the bottom of the stairs. Then he would run to the bottom, grab the bat with his teeth, run to the top of the stairs...."

Willie was a nice cat. Great personality.