Every cat guardian knows the drill. You are sitting there peacefully, perhaps eating, reading, scrolling or watching TV. From a distance, the yowling starts then grows louder and louder as your favored feline approaches. Within a few feet of you and with the slightest toss of the head, a prized “catch” is deposited on the floor. Is it a gift? Is it for you to practice your own hunting skills? Only the inscrutable donor knows. If you have an indoor cat, you praise and thank them profusely for the gift of a soft fuzzy toy. In contrast, from an indoor/outdoor cat, the gift may be cowering in shock, possibly bleeding and mortally wounded or very much alive and either heading under the nearest couch or flying around the room. Most urgently, it is now your responsibility to deal with this gift.
Nikita Kat has a favorite soft toy mouse that glories in the name of Elvis. Wherever Elvis is in the house, she will locate him and silently take him to the far end of the hallway. The yowling then begins and continues as she brings him triumphantly back down the hallway, across the living room and into the den. Praise ensues. After a few minutes she picks him up again to be carried back to the end of the hallway, repeat. (Yes, her planning and execution skills are quite advanced.) Whenever I see her departing with said mouse, I’ll tell my wife, “Elvis has left the building;” the name stuck.
Elvis is essentially the only toy with which she will play. Sometimes instead of bringing him to us, she will flop down on her side, roll back with Elvis grasped in her paws and vocalize as she lightly chews and plays with him. Feline canines perform their deadly biological function equally well on both real and imitation rodents, thus, with time, Elvis became very much the worse for wear. The weekly washes with the cat towels to de-gunk him hastened the decay. It was time to replace Elvis. A search of the dozen or so boxes containing surplus and rejected cat toys discovered an Elvis Impersonator. A clone of Elvis in his prime. Perfect. With Nikita Kat out of the room, Elvis was replaced by the Impersonator.
Nikita Kat returned, saw the Impersonator and went over to investigate. Collectively we held our breath. A period of intense sniffing and some pawing followed. The Impersonator was summarily rejected. We could not fool her. We tried throwing the Impersonator to her when she was under a chair at the table. It is almost impossible for a cat not to play with a toy around chair legs. Nikita would pounce on the Impersonator, realize who it was, then walk away. After a few days of repeated futile attempts to persuade her to accept the Impersonator, we switched back to the real Elvis, happiness restored.
It was obvious to us that Elvis’s days were severely numbered, then what? Fortunately, I received inspiration from one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett. The following passage is taken from The Fifth Elephant, a dwarf is addressing his king.
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
I took Elvis and securely stitched him onto the back of the Impersonator to create, not a chimera, perhaps Siamese twins, possibly a dimer to the chemically inclined. The rejuvenated Elvis has a compound body with two tails. I ran him through the wash with the hope of harmonizing the scent.
The surgery was a complete success – there were no rejection issues. Nikita Kat welcomed him back with open jaws. Life is good again.