1. When Luna jumps up on me when I'm seated or lying on my back in bed and insists on being petted and scratched and she peacefully purrs, I don't think of her as a predator.
I no longer have that luxury. This morning, I glanced out to the back yard and I saw Luna crouching, moving slowly forward, and I wondered what was up. Was she playing a cat and mouse game with Copper? Was Grayson in the weeds and was Luna approaching him?
Soon I witnessed neither of these things to be the case.
As Luna crept closer to the weeds and the snowball bush, she suddenly sprang and, at first, I thought she had plucked a butterfly out of the air -- but, no, it was a baby bird.
Luna stunned the bird with a swipe of her paw and then bit into the bird and proudly headed back toward the house with her prey in her mouth. She lost interest in her accomplishment about three quarters of the way back toward the house and dropped the bird and trotted indifferently back to the porch and came in the house.
I intervened only to move the deceased bird off the lawn to protect it when the mowing crew comes next time.
Starting in about June of 1989 my second wife and I lived in the country northeast of Eugene for about a year and a half. We had several cats and watching Luna hunt down the baby bird today took me back to when our cats hunted small rodents and snakes in the acreage that stretched out from the house we rented at the foot of Bunker Hill outside Marcola. Often they brought their prey to us as gifts. I became accustomed to the spectacle of the hunt and to checking the floors of our house for these gifts any time we returned to the house after being gone.
I didn't know, when I adopted Luna and Copper, if either of them would be hunters once they became indoor/outdoor cats.
Now I know.
2. Today, I returned to reading Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Page after page I'm stunned by this book and I'm sure I'm comprehending, at best, about 80 percent of it. It's a wide-ranging, comprehensive, elegantly written study of whales from multiple angles including mythology, anthropology, ecology, commercialism, tourism, biology, and much more. More than anything, to me, this is a book about interconnections, about how the seemingly smallest things we humans do affects whales and how, in turn, what whales do by nature and what they suffer because of human abuse affects not only the ecology of the ocean, but the wider biosphere, including the atmosphere and our climate. On the one hand, I love reading about interdependence between all things because the intricate interconnections are mind boggling to me; but, I also hate reading about interdependence because when humans inflict harm on any member of the animal kingdom or on any part of the ecosphere, that harm ripples out and has negative impacts almost beyond our imagining and definitely beyond our immediate awareness because of interconnections and interdependence.
Therefore, as I read Fathoms, I'm tossed back and forth between marvel and grief, between wonder and deep feelings of futility.
3. Today, Mary C. sent me a message inviting me to return to playing trivia again in Spokane. She and one of our teammates, Dan, from our trivia heyday back in late 2019 through early March 2020 are going to play at Rock City Bar and Grill on July 20th and Mary wondered if Christy, Linda, and I might want to join them. As it turned out, I'm available but Linda and Christy are not available this week. I look forward to returning to Rock City, to sipping on a martini, eating some food, and joining forces with Dan and Mary to see how we do as the trivia questions start rolling out.
I'll miss Kathy.
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