‘Twas
the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was
stirring; not even a mouse.
Rats! While I’d been out chasing vampires and zombies, my furry housemates had
hunted all the fun prey. Now my fourteen feline roomies were all asleep, our
human mom Darcy was gone for the weekend leaving us on our own with just a
cat-sitter coming in to feed us, and I felt restless. I was nine months old,
and this was my first Christmas.
It felt like something ought to
happen. It felt like something was going
to happen, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be in my boring house with
my boring friends and relatives.
On the other hand, it was snowing
outside. We were having a white Christmas. Bah, humbug. Bad weather is what it
is, the kind that clots white cold stuff in your paw pads. Unacceptable. I
would wait until the weather humans came to their senses to go out, I had
decided.
That was before I heard the prancing and pawing of each little hoof,
apparently coming from up on my roof. I sat down to think, curling my tail
around my front paws, my calm pose betrayed only by a slight flick at the
creamy end of my plumy appendage. There were
stockings hung by the propane stove with care, but a trip down that chimney
would be disastrous for anybody, since they’d just end up inside the stove and
wouldn’t be able to get out. I considered waking my mother for a further
explanation of the powers of Santa Claws. But then I thought that if anyone would
know what was going on, it would be Rocky. I jumped onto the kitchen counter
and stood against the corner cupboard. I am a very long cat, even without
taking my tail into account. My front feet could just reach the top cabinet,
where Rocky liked to lurk during the day. Inserting my paw beneath the door’s
trim, I pushed. It smelled like vampire cat in there, but not as though the
vampire cat was actually in there. Rocky was out. Well, it was night. He
wouldn’t mind the snow.
Some more scrabbling on the roof,
and I suddenly thought, what if Rocky has
Santa Claws and is feeding on him? He might. He was my friend, but he was
definitely no respecter of age, gender, or mythological belief system.
I bolted out my private entrance.
Only Rocky and I were able to come and go through that new cat flap that had
been installed for me since my last adventure. I had a chip in my neck that
activated it. Rocky had my old collar containing a similar chip, the one I’d
worn before I went to the vet and got tagged.
The cold air hit me with a shock,
and the snow wet my pink paw pads, though the heavy tufts of fur between them
formed natural snowshoes. I was a very convenient breed of cat for this
climate, actually. Maine Coon cats, or their undocumented relatives like me, were
built for cold and wet and according to the Critter Channel, used to be ships’
cats on Viking vessels. I didn’t mind a nice trip around the bay on a nice day,
but this snow stuff wasn’t my cup of—well, snow.
I dashed into the snow without
the benefit of any sort of vehicle, responding to the clatter, and from a safe
distance, gazed back at the roof to see what was the matter. Other than snow.
The feel of the air shifted
behind me, and I glanced back to see five deer step out of the moon shadows
beneath the big apple tree. Nelda, Buck, and some other deer I knew fairly
well—as well as a cat can know a family of deer, anyway—stood behind me,
whuffing steam from their nostrils and looking up toward the noise.
I saw nothing special up there.
Just weathered red tiles, our smokeless chimney, and snow falling on it.
“You guys weren’t just up there,
were you?” I asked Nelda.
“No, silly. How would deer get on
your roof?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “You know—it’s
Christmas and everything, so I just wondered . . .”
“What’s that got to do with
Christmas?” Nelda asked.
“Oh, grandma,” the young doe
Gelda said, “Don’t you know anything? Spam is under the impression that all
deer are like those horned ones who pull that sled across the sky.”
“What sled?”
“The one that’s on half the
lighted windows downtown.”
Nelda shook her head, flipping
off snowflakes melting on her muzzle. “Christmas is very confusing. I’ve been
through several now and it never makes any sense to me at all. Why is there a
sled with captive deer pulling it?”
“It’s simple, Grandma,” Gelda
said. “The sled is magic, and the deer are pulling it through the sky,
following a star that will show them where there is a manger with fresh hay.
There are humans involved too, but that part isn’t clear to me. The lights in
the windows symbolize the star, I believe.”
“Spam, that is species profiling,
thinking we’d get up on your roof just because it’s Christmas. Just because we
live in this wet climate doesn’t make us rain deer, dear,” Buck said, snorting
at his own pun. He’s hilarious sometimes. Nelda and the other deer I’ve met are
mostly as refined and classy as they look. I love deer. Most cats do, I think.
They smell great and they are the prettiest creatures alive, other than cats.
They have charisma—animal magnetism. It’s a little lost on human gardeners; but
we cats appreciate it, though Rocky says it’s only because if we were a little
larger, or they were a little smaller, we would find them tasty instead of
merely tasteful. Okay, maybe they’re a little hazy on some of the holiday
mythology, but they are terrific critters.
Even Buck is handsome enough, if
you like that sort of thing, and a lot of the does seemed to. But he was on the
rowdy side and too big for me to be anything but wary of all that head tossing
and prancing and showing off his antlers. Fortunately, he had respect for his
mother, and she seemed to have decided to like me.
“You must have heard something
too!” I said. I don’t like being laughed at. “Otherwise, why were you looking
up there?”
“There were strange noises,”
Nelda said. “And strange scents.”
Just then, outlined against the
snow, a masked face peeped up above the ridge of the roof.
“Renfrew?” I asked the coon. Who
else would it be than my friend, sometimes assistant detective, and frequent
moocher? “What are you doing up there?”
The coon opened his mouth to
reply, then threw up his front paws, dropping something that clattered down the
half of the roof facing me before sliding down the back. “Renfrew, wait!” I
called, anxious to see what he was up to.
He didn’t answer me, and I ran to
the house to try to catch up with him, but he had slid off the roof and left a
coon-shaped bare patch in the snow before waddling off toward the woods.
“Renfrew!”
“Merry Christmas!” he called
back. In raccoon, of course, which sounded more like, “Iiiiiiiiiriii
chirrit-termaaaaw.” But mostly, interspecies, we read thoughts for any real
communication—sometimes you just can’t say what you mean with barks, tweets,
growls, or neighs—or other sounds. Meows, of course, and other cat language,
are quite eloquent; but other species don’t seem to be able to master the
accent.
What had that silly coon been up
to that he didn’t even take time to stop and beg some kibble? What had he
dropped? I thought he meant it was supposed to be my Christmas present. It was
caught in the gutter. Double rats! Very inconvenient.
But I didn’t want to miss out on
a gift, so I raced around to the back of the house, where the scrap wood box
was, and leaped up on it, thinking to mount the roof myself.
I jumped onto the steeply pitched
part of the roof and slid much faster than I’d planned to down to the gutter,
to the amusement of my deer audience. The snow had made the roof very slick,
even with all my claws extended. I put a paw into the gutter, but it rattled
and creaked alarmingly, so I pulled my paw back and tippy-toed along the edge
until I spotted the gleam of silver and red.
Most cats would wonder why a
raccoon would have a packet of batteries. I knew raccoons liked anything shiny.
But in Renfrew’s case, he might have wanted them for what they were made for,
to power a phone or a radio or camera or something, at least until he decided
to wash it. Renfrew was very clever with such things, which had come in handy
when we were fighting vampires together.
It was really nice of him to give
them to me, in that case, but other than batting them around the floor, I
didn’t have a lot of use for them. I’d just tell him this was the package I’d
got for him for Christmas and give them back to him. No use wondering where
they originally came from.
Biting down on the edge of the
package, I jumped down from the roof. It’s easier to get down than up. Carrying
the battery packet in my mouth, I trotted to the edge of the driveway. The
slight skim of snow seemed to have discouraged any cars that might normally be
on the road this time of night. Understandable. It was pretty slick. Getting
colder by the minute too. I cast one look back at my nice warm house. I could
go back whenever I wanted to, have a nibble and a drink and settle down in my
favorite office chair for a nap. Off to the right, the deer picked their way
across the snowy brown grass, then paused. One of Nelda’s legs hovered,
suspended bent over the ground. Her head was up, watching the sky, or the
stars, and Gelda and Buck followed her gaze. Then they moved on again, crossing
the front yard of Bubba’s house and on down the block.
Renfrew doesn’t have a permanent
address, being a raccoon of no fixed abode, as Bubba, the retired police dog
next door would say, but he did have a general territory, though it was not his
exclusively because there were too many raccoons around. He’d tried living
under our house for a while, but said the upstairs neighbors were too noisy.
I didn’t have to look hard for
him though. A trail of packing peanuts and the noise led me to a tree near the
one where we’d first met a couple of months before. Somebody was singing
“Silent Night” with a lot of hissing and buzzing and an overlay of a football
broadcast kicking in once in awhile that made the night anything but silent.
His den was a dump of more
packing peanuts, torn up cardboard boxes, bubble wrap (ooh, fun to pop with
your claws! I wondered if I could sneak a piece out of his stash and take it
home to play with), and newspaper. Nestled among the packing stuff were various
items that the Critter Channel does not usually mention when talking about
raccoon habitat.
Renfrew did not look up. His paw
hands were busy turning the noisy shiny white box over and over, looking for a
way inside.
I dropped the batteries at his
feet with relief. My teeth ached from clutching the plastic. “Here,” I told
him. “Merry Christmas. These are for you.”
He could have said thank you.
Instead he mumbled to himself—raccoons do a lot of mumbling and grumbling, I’ve
learned—and kept fiddling with the box.
This gave me a chance to paw
through the opened packages, sort of checking to see if there was one I might
want to try on for size. A half-torn label was on the largest one, with an
address, a Christmas sticker, and a UPS logo. Suspicion dawned.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked
Renfrew.
“Found it,” he said, finally
looking up with big masked bright eyes full of innocence and wonder.
“Found it where?” I asked.
“Just laying around,” he said.
“There’s all sorts of stuff just laying around right now, Spam. You wouldn’t
believe the things people put in these boxes and leave on their porches. I’ve
noticed a lot more of them lately, so I brought some back to see if there was
anything inside. There’s been food in some of them. Here—” he reached a paw
back and picked up a piece of something dense and colorful. “Do cats like
fruitcake? Didn’t care for it myself.”
“Renfrew, I hate to tell you
this, but they don’t leave those boxes laying around for coons to find. They’re
calling you the UPS bandit!”
“I’ve been called worse,” he
said, dropping the fruitcake and flinging the white box aside in disgust before
tearing into another, unopened package.
“You’re taking peoples’ Christmas
presents!” I told him.
“They put them outside, Spam.
Honest. They didn’t want them.”
“They didn’t put them outside.
The delivery guys brought them to the houses and left them outside for people
to pick up when they came home. Except you got there first. There’s more of
them now because people are ordering Christmas presents delivered.”
I put a claw through the plastic
covering the box with a lady doll in a fancy dress inside. “This is some little
kid’s dolly.”
He gave it a glance then went
back to rooting around among the boxes. “Yes, well, you can’t tell from the
outside, can you? A lot of them haven’t had anything shiny or good to eat, but
lots have too!” He stuck his paw in a box and held up a sleek silver cell
phone. “Look! I have a new phone. It’s all mine.”
I read the label on the torn edge
of the box. “No, it’s not. It belongs to this Bert Smashnik guy.” I patted the
dolly box. “And this is for—Mrs. Angela Atkins. I bet it’s for her little girl.
Her main Christmas present.”
“And your point is?”
I was tempted to extend all of my
points and let him see what they were, but didn’t for two reasons. One is that
he also has sharp claws and teeth, and is maybe a pound or two heavier than me.
The other is that he is my friend and he can be useful. I just had to appeal to
his better nature. If only I could find it.
“Renfrew, you don’t even know how
to use this stuff!” I told him, patting an iPad still in its package inside its
box with the lid ripped off.
“I can feel it and wash it and
make it shine!” he said. “And some of it looks like computers, and I can work
computers better than you!” He flexed his hand-y paws at me.
“You can plug stuff in, but you
can’t really make them work,” I told him. “Not out here in the woods. You need
accounts and passwords and all kinds of stuff Darcy and Maddog and Bubba’s
partner have already.”
“I could use the ones at your
house,” he said.
“Right. Of course you can. So why
do you need to take somebody’s Christmas present? I’ve spent my entire life
learning how to use a computer, and there is quite a learning curve. Honestly,
I don’t think your—uh—temperament is suited for that kind of dull geeky stuff.
I’ll tell you what. If you’ll help me return all these things before morning,
I’ll help you make a YouTube video showing how cute you are. You’ll be a star.”
He frowned, grumbled, and looked
around at the litter with a very territorial gleam in his eye. “I don’t think
so, cat. This is mine. I stole it fair and square.”
There was so much there, and I
knew he’d lose interest before tomorrow, by which time it would all probably be
ruined.
“Let me take the doll at least,”
I said. “She’s not shiny, and you don’t really want her, do you? Some poor
little girl is going to be really sad tomorrow, and will probably grow up to
hate Santa Claws thanks to this childhood trauma. She may even belong to a
family that feeds raccoons now, but will become a hunter because she somehow
suspects what became of her Christmas doll.”
He stopped fiddling long enough
to growl at me. “What do you care, cat? Why should you care if humans get what
they want or not? You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. There are cats and dogs
wandering all over town, making nuisances of themselves, whose people abandoned
them and moved away.”
“Oh no! Why didn’t you tell me?
Is it vampires again? Are there more taking other people like the Vampire
Marcel took Darcy?”
“I wish. No, they leave because
they want to, and they abandon little Fluffikins or Fido because they want to.”
“Renfrew, you’ve changed. You
didn’t used to hate humans.”
“I don’t hate them, but I’ve seen
some stuff lately that—well, let’s just say I don’t care if they have a special
happy day where they keep all their toys and I don’t, even though they just
left them on the porch.”
He was justifying his selfishness
by making it all someone else’s fault, just like the bad guys on TV always did.
I knew times were hard for humans. I’d heard Darcy on the phone to her friends
talking about how tough it had been for people to get gifts, or even food for
their families this year. It was on the news too. Some people may think it’s un-catlike
to care about that stuff, but I have always prided myself on being a good kitty. If nothing else, it makes me
stand out from the crowd.
“You’re just being a Scrooge,” I
told him.
He looked up. “What’s that?”
“It’s a mean old man in a story.
He keeps seeing these ghosts, see . . .” I couldn’t quite remember the whole
thing, or which was the right version because since Halloween I’d seen the same
story done about twenty different ways.
“What’s a ghost?”
“Kind of like a vampire only
deader, and without a body. They’re very scary.”
“Why if they don’t have bodies?
That’s silly, being scared of those. Was the Scrooge scared of them?
“No, but they reminded him of
stuff. Like some were—uh—the ghosts of the past. That was—er—animal friends
who’d either died or been left behind come back to tell him to stop being such
a jerk. Then there were the ghosts of Christmas present. I think those were
people who found out coons were stealing the Christmas presents intended for
their families. They all had ghostly guns. And then there’s the ghosts of the
future, and you don’t even want to know what they did.”
“Well, I don’t know any ghosts.
Just one noisy cat who’s mad because he didn’t like his present, and is trying
to give it back. You can have something else if you want it. I’ve got lots.
I’ll even wash it for you to make it shinier.”
“No thanks. I’m taking the doll,
and then I’ll be back and return the rest of the things where you got them,” I
told him. That was a lot easier said than done, however.
24 solo novels including the Nebula-award winning HEALER'S WAR and 16 in
collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, including the two most recent, CATALYST and
CATACOMBS, Tales of the Barque Cats.
Her most recent novel is THE TOUR BUS OF DOOM, set in a town
suspiciously like Port Townsend. It's her third story featuring the heroic Spam the
cat, and is a spoof on the zombie craze. The first book SPAM VS THE VAMPIRE
is the first of the "purranormal" mysteries. Bridging the novels is the novelette,
FATHER CHRISTMAS.
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