It happened in the country. Somewhere peaceful. That there was a kitten. This kitten lived with a family like most families. That is to say, old fashioned.
What really happened on the day kitty came home with a mouse clenched firmly and quite dead, between her jaws?
They praised her. Mother mentioned it to father. The boys made gallant efforts to examine the mouse, but kitten was too fast for them and hid it under the cupboard sink.
Kitten was only two months old, by a long shot not ready for mousecapades.
That is to say, she was too little to manage a mouse. Well, a little, tiny, mouse, maybe. But this was not a little tiny mouse. This was a mouse. Not even a young mouse. The real thing. It was well half her size. Elephantine, speaking in relative terms.
Well how did it happen? How did kitty kill this fullydeveloped, elephantine mouse? It could have been an elephant, you understand, had you been in the paws of kitten.
The mouse wasn’t a fighting dynamo when kitten happened upon it.
It wasn’t fighting at all. To be absolutely honest, the mouse was inactive. Well, dead. Yes. When kitten found it, it was finished: kaput. Ka-put. No pulse. No nothing. Not even respectfully buried, but dead and even smelling a little. Kitten luckily had a bit of a sniffle and was none the wiser.
The mouse was dead, and kitten just managed to drag it up the sixteen steps that were still, for kitten, like sixteen great walls, each a bit higher than the one before. And after a very trying journey up these steps, dragging that very big, very dead, mouse, that kitten stepped through the doorway, fully intending to pass out that she was discovered: in the height of her glory. Mommy didn’t notice that kitten was on the verge of collapse. She only saw that kitten was laden with mouse, a mouse that she had obviously slaughtered in battle.
Kitten was grateful, because she wanted to make a good impression and she was at the stage where she was cute as a button and she could make a very good, very lasting, impression. And that is exactly what she did. And they loved her alot for that elephantine mouse she brought in to smell up the living room.
Matter of fact, they never wondered why she was never again seen in the company of a mouse of any size whatsoever.
But there were numerous times when they recalled that noble sight: a kitten with a gigantic, elephantine mouse, in her mighty jaws.
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