LIBBY It's five o'clock on an autumn morning in an ordinary street on the outskirts of town. Still dark. The milkman's van glides around the corner, and its headlights briefly reveal two green eyes on the top of a garden wall. A shadowy shape trots across the road and then away, between the houses. Meet Libby . She's a four-year-old black-and-white cat, and she's checking out the neighborhood before it gets too busy. Libby is quite an anxious cat, and doesn't like surprises, so the hour before dawn is one of her favorite times to go outdoors. She's used to the milkman, though, and isn't bothered that her shining eyes might have given her away. Why did Libby's eyes glow in the light? Yours don't! It's because cats' eyes need to gather as much light as possible, so they can see where they're going at night. When you look at something, a lot of the light that gets into your eyes doesn't get picked up by your brain, and just disappears into your skull. Cats --and foxes, and lots of other animals that go out at night--have a sort of mirror at the back of their eyes (called a "tapetum") that gives their brain a second chance to catch the light. After the light has been reflected, some of it escapes back out through the front of their eyes. Creepy? Not if you're a cat, just part of everyday life--or rather, every-night life. Cats' eyes are special in other ways, too, allowing them to see much better than us when it's dark. They're huge compared to the size of their heads, almost as big as ours. And their pupils (that's the black circle in the middle) can get even bigger than ours do, especially at night, so they can let lots of light in. Libby is round the back of the houses now, crisscrossing from one garden wall to the next on her way home. She remembers that sometimes there's a dog in one of the gardens, so before she jumps off the wall, she listens carefully to check whether he's been let out yet. Without moving her head, she turns each ear to the side, one to the left, the other to the right. Cats' standing-up ears can be pointed in almost any direction, so they can find out where a sound is coming from and how far away it is. Our ears are quite good at doing that, but they'd hear even better if we could wiggle them one at a time (why don't you try?). All Libby can hear now is the squeaking of a bat on its way home, tired after a night catching moths and looking forward to a day's sleep hanging upside-down in the roof of the old church hall. Cats can hear lots of very high-pitched sounds that even children's sensitive ears can only just catch, and grown-ups can't hear at all. There's no sign of the dog, so Libby leaps down off the wall and tiptoes across the wet grass, then squeezes through a gap in the fence on the other side and into her own garden. Or rather her owner's garden. Libby thinks several gardens are "hers." Walls and fences are no barrier for a cat, just interesting places to explore or hide behind. Cats' Coats of Many Colors Libby has a black-and-white coat: mostly black but with a few white patches. Her white socks come from her mother, who looked just like her. A few cats are the other way around, mainly white with a few black patches, which means that both their mum and their dad had white on them. Any cat can have white socks, not just black ones (although black and white does look very smart). Black cats are quite common, but the most common color for pet cats, and all wild cats, is brown tabby. Wild cats, and some pet cats, have narrow stripes of dark and light brown (sometimes known as mackerel tabby), but it's more usual for pet cats to have a brown coat with patches of black, which is called blotched tabby. Tortoiseshell cats have an orange coat with black or brown patches, and are almost always female. The orange parts often come from the dad and the brown from the mum, and instead of being mixed together to make brownish orange they appear randomly all over the cat's coat, rather like a patchwork quilt. LOST AND FOUND Libby lives with a schoolteacher. Everyone at school calls her "Miss Lewis," so that's what she'll be called in this book. Miss Lewis lives with Libby and her adopted daughter, Mavis (Mae for short). Libby won't care what we call either of them--cats aren't big on names. It was Miss Lewis who gave Libby her name. Miss Lewis had thought about getting a cat for a long time, but she always seemed to be too busy, what with teaching and grading and going on trips with her friends and one thing and another (and that was all before Mae came along). Then one day she noticed a skinny cat skulking around at the end of her garden. The next day the cat was there again, and this time she meowed at Miss Lewis. The meow sounded as if it might mean "Feed me!," and Miss Lewis was thinking of having a tin of tuna for her dinner, anyway, so she went indoors, opened the tin, and put some on a saucer. A few minutes later she realized she would have to change her plans for dinner, because the cat had eaten the lot! Once the food was gone, the cat ran off again, but the next day she came back for more food, and the next day, and the next. Soon, Miss Lewis and the cat became friends and started sitting in the garden together, though Miss Lewis wouldn't let her in the house, because she was worried that the cat must have a proper owner somewhere nearby. But the cat kept on coming back, so one day Miss Lewis got out her phone and took a photo of her. That night she printed lots of copies of the photo on a poster that said "Is this your cat?" and the next day she pinned them up all around the neighborhood. But no one replied. The cat was genuinely lost. So Miss Lewis decided she would adopt the cat herself. A pet cat needs a name, and Miss Lewis, being an educated lady, thought that any cat of hers ought to have a proper cat name. When she looked up "cat" on the internet, the first thing she found was that around the world there are more than thirty different kinds of cat. Some are well-known, like the lion and the tiger and the leopard and the cheetah, mainly because they're big and fierce. But there are lots of kinds of smaller cats. Some live at the tops of mountains. Others live in swamps and swim around catching fish. But they all live on their own, and none of them like humans much. There's only one kind of cat that lives with people, and because it was first discovered in a part of North Africa called Libya, it became known as the Libyan cat. About four thousand years ago, a few Libyan cats who lived in Egypt (the country next door) changed their ways. Instead of living alone as their grandparents had done, they worked out how to make friends with people. Gradually, over hundreds of years, these special cats turned themselves into pets. Miss Lewis liked this story so much that she decided to call her new friend Libby, after the country where her ancestors might have lived. Back to the story. It's quite light now, and Libby decides it's time for breakfast. In through the cat flap with a click-clack she goes, past her empty bowl, past a pile of schoolbooks on the floor in the hall, up the stairs and into Miss Lewis's bedroom. She leaps up onto the bed and starts purring, loud enough to wake Miss Lewis up. Cats have two different kinds of purr. One is loud and a bit harsh to listen to. Some people think that underneath the rattle of the purr itself, they can also hear a sound like a baby crying. This is the purr that cats use when they want their owners to do something for them--and NOW, not in a few minutes! The other sort of purr is much softer and means "Stay still, I'm happy here." Kittens make this purr when they want their mums to lie quietly and let them feed, and their mums reply with the same purr to make sure the kittens relax and get plenty to eat. And of course, pet cats purr when they want to snuggle up to their favorite humans. Miss Lewis knows this routine only too well. She knows that if she tries to ignore Libby's urgent purring, it will soon be followed up by a couple of headbutts and then some rough licking of her face. So she gets out of bed, pulls on her dressing gown, and goes downstairs to fill Libby's bowl. She makes herself a cup of tea while Libby eats, and then goes back upstairs to wake Mae. Mae has only lived with Miss Lewis for a couple of years. She was born in India, and she doesn't know who her biological parents were. Her earliest memory is of living on the streets of a big city, and later she lived in an orphanage with lots of other lost children. Then one day Miss Lewis came by, looking for a little girl to come and live with her. Miss Lewis stayed in a hotel near the orphanage, and saw Mae every day, so they could get to know each other really well. A few weeks later, when all the papers had been signed, Mae and Miss Lewis caught a plane back to England. To begin with, England seemed very strange to Mae--and cold!--but in her class at school there were other girls who looked like her, whose parents had been born in India, so she didn't feel out of place for long (but she still doesn't like the English winter!). And of course Libby was there, reminding her of the cats that lived around the orphanage. Excerpted from A First Guide to Cats: Understanding Your Whiskered Friend by John Bradshaw All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
