Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Chris is rudely awoken and plunged into a Disney-esque dream sequence…
Laast week, a strange thing happened in the middle of the night. This wasn’t the usual kind of strange thing that happens in the middle of the night in our house – things like me wandering around half awake muttering partly insane column ideas.
Bodmin, our huge bruiser of an ex-stray tomcat who has such a small, reedy meow that he doesn’t usually bother, woke the entire household meowing his head off.
This was bizarre. Bodmin never meows (probably something to do with all his years alone in the wilderness – when you have no one to meow at, I suppose you don’t meow), but now his meows were loud, very loud… urgent even.
It came as such a shock that it had our other household cats, Spooky and Jojo, running up and down the hall in blind panic, at one point sprinting headfirst into each other, resulting in a handbags-atdawn hissy spat.
Meanwhile Billie the rabbit was standing on her hind legs in her cage to see what all the fuss was about, and even her barely sentient partner-rabbit Ted almost woke up.
Normally, I’d ignore all this, putting it down to an attempt to annoy me out of sheer feline bloody-mindedness, but this was Bodmin. It was like the
Even Bodmin wouldn’t be able to drag a deer through the catflap
boy who cried wolf… in reverse. So what was so amazingly urgent that Bodmin would be going crazy at three in the morning?
Simple, really – there was a deer in the downstairs bedroom. Of course there was.
It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. How on earth did it get there? Even Bodmin wouldn’t be able to drag one of those through the catflap.
The deer stood staring at me and I, flanked by three bewildered cats, stared back. Suddenly, it charged straight at me. I was so startled I stumbled backwards over Bodmin, the deer vaulted over me, a lamp went flying and Spooky and Jojo scrambled out of the catflap shrieking at each other. I pulled myself up, finding myself nose to nose with Bodmin.
“Meow?” he asked.
As I crept through the house, now a fully fledged deerstalker, I looked down at my pointy-eared sidekick.
“What are you doing, Bodmin?” I whispered. “You’re a cat, not a dog, you’re not supposed to help me. And where did you get that deer?”
But Bodmin was staring straight ahead. The deer was in the kitchen.
Thinking about as fast as I ever have, which is still quite slowly, I ran down the hall, threw the front door open and raced back to usher the deer towards it.
At this moment my wife Lorraine appeared and watched in astonishment as a deer galloped down the hall, closely followed by me and a wide-eyed tomcat.
As I shut the door behind the departing wildlife, Lorraine stood shaking her head.
“I’m not even going to ask,” she said, heading back to bed.
Subsequent investigations seem to point to the back door having being left open at bedtime, then later blowing shut. Even so, you wouldn’t normally expect Bambi to come calling…