Our cat, the mighty hunter (not a tale for the squeamish)

S here; on Friday afternoon, I took the cat out in the yard for a little excursion. (He’s an indoor cat who goes outside only under close supervision.) We were hanging out near one of the bushes, when suddenly something moved in the garden just inches away from the cat. Instantly alert, he chased a garter snake up to the edge of the house. When the snake tried to slither up behind the siding to get away, the cat neatly caught the snake in his mouth and carried it back out to the lawn to play with his prey further.

I was, of course, leaping around and shrieking at the sight of the cat with a wriggling snake hanging from its jaws.

The cat dropped the snake on the lawn and then batted at it a number of times, trying to get it to wriggle again. But the snake either decided to play dead or really was dead. The cat then looked like he was going to pick it up in his mouth and play with it more that way, but I decided enough was enough, and brought the cat indoors.

Of course, when I told E about it later, she laughed at the image of me being all girly and shrieking in the yard over a snake. Ha. She got her comeuppance this morning, when she had the cat out in the yard, and he made a flying leap into the bushes and caught a bird. Then guess whose turn it was to get all shrieky as the cat tossed his prey into the air over and over again, so he could have the fun of continuing to catch it.

The cat also enjoys chasing after the rabbit who appears to live under our compost pile, but they seem to have a deal: the cat won’t actually chase it into the bushes, so his bun-bun always manages to get away. Thanks goodness. Because I can’t imagine how much shrieking might ensue if we had to dispose of a dead bun-bun. The critter shows up in our yard nearly daily, and we’d be getting rather fond of it if it didn’t eat our flowers quite so often.