Eccentric Flower:199912/Cat burglars

At three o'clock in the morning I woke up suddenly. I had no idea why.

When a computer program stops unexpectedly, or a system crashes, there are often files - error logs, core dumps, other accumulations of data which provide some clues to what happened - a "black box" for those trying to deduce the causes of the incident after the fact. Checking the mental equivalent of my black box, I realized that I had heard some sort of noise which was not supposed to take place.

I lay perfectly still, listening, for several minutes.

An upstairs neighbor was just getting home. I could hear him walking around, making the floor squeak, but those were clearly upstairs noises and I wouldn't have awakened for one of those.

The cat was rubbing against the bedroom door, thumping it, wanting to be let in. The cat can always tell when I'm awake, even if I don't make any sound. He dislikes being locked out of the bedroom at night, and has been known to camp outside the door waiting for us to open it in the morning.

More creaking from upstairs. A couple of minor noises from the house. The heating system came on, blew for a while, then went off again. Nothing. Yet for some reason I still couldn't shake the idea that someone was in the house. Should I go out and check? I was behind a bolted door, after all. Was it more dangerous to go out and look around, or was it foolish to stay in here and maybe let a burglar walk off with everything?

Maybe he was in the hall right now, just outside the bedroom door .... Nah. If he were, the cat would probably be walking around him in circles, rubbing against his legs, making those squeaky rumbles that say "Pay attention to me."

The cat miaoued from outside the door. I startled.

The cat never makes noises unless there's a human in sight. Then you can't shut him up. Especially if the human is me. The cat worships me. I don't know why.

I got out of bed. I unlatched the bedroom door and opened it - slowly. The cat ran up to me - Ooh, I'm so glad to see you, why do you lock me out? Yurping and squeaking and making all the weird noises he makes when he's holding a conversation. The cat is very communicative; the problem is we don't speak his language.

Into the living room, the cat in the lead. No burglars.

Into the kitchen. No burglars. No broken windows.

I opened the door to the short stretch of hall leading to the back door that we use as a storage space. The cat rushed in, looked around it, yurped at me. "Doesn't look like it," I said to him. "Come on out." He came out and I shut the door again.

Next the office. Cat ran in, rolled and rubbed himself on the carpet while beseeching me. "Not in here either. Come on. Come on. It's not time to play right now. I'm supposed to be in bed." The cat reluctantly came out.

The spare bedroom was the one which really made me nervous to open. First off, it's the darkest room in the house, and second, it has two doors, which means a burglar could possibly have gone out the office the other way and might be hiding in there right now ...

I opened the door and - for the first time in my rounds - turned on a light. Nothing. The cat dropped himself right in the center of the spare bed and rolled on his side and looked up at me, chattering the whole time. I had to pick him up to get him out this time.

I used the toilet and when I was ready to go back to bed, the cat was blocking the bedroom door - You don't mean you're going back in there already? Can I come in? Pleeeeeease?

I picked up the cat and brought him to the living room sofa, not too close to the sleeping Inu, who does not like being disturbed and would probably sleep through a burglar if there was one. I petted him a few times. I told him I had to go to bed now.

I went to bed. The cat didn't make any more noise at the door.

Here's the punch line.

On my way back into the bedroom, I saw what had caused the original noise, the one that woke me up but I couldn't identify. The hall table, just beside the bedroom door, had a tall, ungainly pyramid of mail stacked at one end. The pyramid had toppled and a lot of mail had fallen onto the floor.

There's only one creature in the house who could have knocked that mail over. Either he jumped onto the table and tried to stand on the stack, or he bumped against the table leg hard enough to upset it.

So. Given that the cat has a history of standing on that table by the bedroom door in an attempt to reach out and jiggle the doorknob (honest!), did the cat already want to get into the bedroom before making the commotion?

Or - given that the cat also has a history of getting startled by something and running to me to provide moral support, did he knock over the pile, scare himself, and then start wanting to get into the bedroom so he could yelp at me about it?

Or did the cat decide to make a startling noise on purpose, in an effort to get me out of bed to see what it was, so he could talk to me?

Of the three possibilities, the last one is the most farfetched, making the highest demands on the cat's intelligence. Unfortunately, based on my association with this cat, I am not prepared to rule it out.

He's not the most intelligent cat in the world - I think I owned that one, several years back - but he generally finds ways to tell us what he wants ... which, when you think about it, is a domesticated cat's primary survival skill.

I had problems getting back to sleep after that. Too much adrenaline, plus the temptation to break into a giggling fit.