Many moons ago when I was a lowly undergraduate, the school I attended was cursed, or blessed, depending on your point of view, with a large number of feral cats. There were also a few wild critters around, but these wild cats had just about taken over. The laws of biology being what they are, especially for cats, they were getting to be a huge problem. Finally the school asked the students for help (Pfffft! Yeah, right). Then they offered to bribe us with food; meal points for turning in stray cats. That was more like it. College students are always hungry.

A common sight for some time there was one or more students chasing a cat or cats across the campus, night or day. Now cats, being cats, even feral cats, will often come to a soft word or a plaintive "Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty." But not even the most spoiled lap baby will stand still for a stampede of hungry students hollering, "Come here, damn it." Bottle-brush tails were the order of the day for several days.

One evening just after sunset I was enjoying the soft spring air on the front steps of the dorm with a couple of friends, Randy and Johnny Crawford. We used to tease them about being brothers, but Randy was a 6'6" Osage Indian, and Johnny was a 5'6" African-American.

Something scurried across the lawn and under some bushes. Three sets of antennae, made sensitive by the promise of free food, shot up. Johnny broke and ran first, yelling, "He's mine! He's mine! You *%&^$# get back, he's mine!" Randy was right on his heels. "Not if I catch him first, he ain't!" I brought up the rear just in case he got away from them.

The cat lay low. Randy and Johnny started pushing limbs out of the way and shouting, "Here, Kitty, Kitty. Come here, you damn cat!"

The cat lay low. I watched from nearby.

Suddenly Randy shouted, "I got 'im!" Just as Johnny leaped in front of him, Randy screamed in a voice way over high C, "Skunk!!!!" Johnny turned and ran as hard as he could back to the dorm, ricocheting off trees and nearly strangling himself on a forked branch until finally he could run no more. He stopped, panting for breath.

Randy unwrapped his legs from around Johnny's waist and turned loose of his neck, falling in a heap on the ground. He sat there looking up at Johnny, then asked him, "What took you so long?"

Copyright © David Yehudah
May 10, 1999