Gabby--The Mighty Hunter

Tonight when I came home Tony was waiting for me in the driveway with a rather somber look on his face. "I think Gabby killed a squirrel," he said. Then he clarified a bit, "Actually, I think it's mangled but still alive." Agh...

The first summer we had our cat Gabby we watched in amusement as she spent a large portion of her time outside chasing flies, gnats, and mosquitos. Once she jumped off our bed in hot pursuit of a fly, nailed the wall that was only one foot away, and slumped down to the floor while the fly continued to buzz around. My how times have changed.

Last summer started with the mysterious appearance of a dead bird by the cucumber plants in the garden. A few weeks after that, I came home for lunch one day to find Gabby batting around a dead quail near the back door. We thought, well, even if she is a hunter, evidently she can only kill flightless birds.

This summer took a new turn as she targeted the robins -- the baby robins no less. There's nothing like watching your cat be chased across the lawn by a baby robin's angry parents. We began feeling guilty and talked about not letting her outside anymore.

This squirrel has taken things to a whole new level. "Well, get a shovel," I told Tony as I closed the car door. He looked puzzled. "To kill it with," I explained. He gave me a sad look. "Mercy killing, Tony," I insisted. "It's not going to be able to feed itself, so it'll either slowly starve to death on our lawn or you can let it out of its misery right now," I said in my my-grandfather-was-a-cattle-rancher tough voice. It was then that I how absurd my buck-up-cowboy attitude was given that I had to intention of killing the mangled squirrel myself. I mean, I'm the girl who broke her father's heart by refusing to go hunting when I was twelve because I just didn't think I could pull the trigger. I've never killed a living thing in my life, except the varmint I accidently ran over while I was in the student driver car during my high school drivers training class. I wasn't going to get the shovel.

In the end, my only role in the whole ordeal was to stop Gabby from batting the squirrel whose back legs she had broken and to shoo her to the other side of the yard. Can I tell you that one of the most pitiful things in the world to watch is a little squirrel inching its way back toward a tree with only its front paws while it drags its broken back legs behind it? Afton and I walked around to the other side of the house and didn't come back until we had heard three distinct whacks. We came back to watch the poor squirrel carried off in the shovel to join the baby robin, the quail, and a couple other birds in the animal cemetery beneath our peach tree....

Gabby with last weekend's prey...The rest of us were doing yard work.