This post began as something completely different, but has been derailed by my badass cat. Yesterday, when I went onto the back porch to get the cat food, a mouse skittered out of the corner, through my legs, and under a small space between the floor and the screen. Milo went ballistic. He refused to come in off the porch and stared—hypervigilant—at that crack through which the mouse had escaped for hours. Every so often, I would coax him back into the house, only to have him meow and paw at the back door. Dude had focus. I finally just left him out there for an extended period, and would occasionally peer out the window to see if he’d wussed out yet, and wanted to come in from the cold. The last time I went to go check on him, he’d stopped staring at the space in the wall. Now he just stood, calmly looking up at the window, waiting to be let in. About 6 inches in front of him was the completely intact, completely dead mouse.

!
Milo has no history of being a mouser. Except for a few exciting, accidental forays into an apartment building hallway, he’s entirely an inside cat. Milo also has some gnarly gum disease and had to have 8 teeth removed last year. He’s still got all four canines, but not much else. Somehow, this toothless, tumpy housecat managed to kill a mouse. His job isn’t finished, though. A few minutes after the first kill, he was back on the prowl, and sure enough, I saw another little gray guy dive through the crack in the wall. Milo has since refused to abandon his post, and even after all night of being locked in the basement (where we keep our menagerie), this morning he shot past me when I let him upstairs and went immediately to the back door to begin his watch. Relentless.