The Chiefest Cat in the World

*** Kitty was the chiefest cat in the world; she knew it for sure. After all, her humans had travelled so far from their homes just to find her in a cold, wet hole to give her warmth and food. Also, they were entertaining her, bringing old mushy papers for her to lie on and play with, they were protecting her from black-voiced Monsters, and then they brought her far, far away from sleety home, in a crawling, growling iron box first, then in a large rolling-and-pitching iron piece, in a transparent box. Whenever Kitty complained of boredom, a dedicated human was coming to scratch her tummy. Which meant she was really the boss; no one would come to her humans to scratch their tummies no matter how much complaining they did. Then Kitty was brought to a Clean Land—no Monsters nearby, no Monsters far away. And there were other cats. Kitty was surprised that she was not the only cat in the world (well, she had had Mommy, but that’s a different thing), but in that place with cats, she was put into the top transparent box, which meant she was higher than any other felines! Then her humans made a tour over the Clean Land for her, fed her yummy new treats, and showed her lots of curiosities. And no, that one monster and Long-Braidy’s betrayal didn’t count as curious! *** Kitty thought Long-Braidy loved her. He was stroking her, feeding her, carrying her when the ground was too wet, warming her next to his chest. And then… Then he scooped her in the hands and brought her right to the muzzle of a monster! "Kitty," he said, glad as anything, “meet Snorri, he’s my best dog, I got him as a gift when he was as tiny as you." And it was a real monster! big, like four or more cats lumped in one! And it looked and smelled a little bit like the monsters that had made Kitty’s mom lay back her ears and hide, and then to bring the kittens fast to a new shelter. Monster’s mouth would gobble down half of Kitty in one bite, and the teeth, dear mommy, the teeth... The monster wagged its tail and then licked Kitty. Twice. All her fur was immediately covered in spit. Shocked by the atrocity, Kitty forgot to paw its nose and just shrieked and darted up—that is, onto Long-Braidy’s head. He squeaked (serves him right!). “Why, Kitty?" he pouted. “Don’t be scared, Snorri is a good boy, right?” And he patted the monster as if he loved it not less than Kitty. How could she believe humans after that? Well, the monster was weird. It was fidgeting at the feet of Long-Braidy, barking, but didn’t try to bite him. A real Monster would bite a human at once. And this one didn’t smell as hideously and didn’t make Kitty’s fur stand, and the noise it produced (a lot of noise) was simple and flat, not like the spiky black voices of real Monsters. But still, it was yucky! Kitty started cleaning her precious fur and got so carried away that she didn’t see that Long-Braidy carried her away. She came to senses when he brought her into the air again in stretched arms. And around them, there were hordes of monsters—large, smelly, bleating, woolly monsters... "That’s our sheep!" Long-Braidy said. Kitty screamed and struggled to break free and run away. Where were her other humans? Biggest-One, or Soap-Smelling, or Loud-Woman, anyone would be better than this! What if he wanted to let all those monsters lick Kitty? *** Then Kitty was brought to a place with lots of cats, and her worldview staggered again. An arrogant tomcat in a wide collar, named Sergeant, looked at her down in scorn and explained that she was not the chiefest cat in the world and not even the second best. She was just a newbie furball and should obey him and even his humans if she wanted to get a B grade and some respect, and if she went on putting on airs and chasing her tail, she’d be graded C and would chase mice in a farm or loaf on a window sill for the rest of her boring life. Kitty didn’t get what was so terrible about a farm or a window sill, but she didn’t want to be a third grade, no thanks, so she resolved to get an A grade, or what was above A. If there was no such grade, it should be invented just for her. *** Sergeant the Cat told, some brain was a must, but the very first task at the very first lesson was so stupid. A human instructor asked the cat trainees to find a Monster. And there were no monsters! Sure, something stinky was shuffling under the floor—the smell was a teeny weeny like Monsters’ stench—but there were no black voices inside Kitty’s head, and her fur didn’t stand on ends by itself, nothing of the kind. Kitty couldn’t be fooled by such primitive decoy; she had been serving as a monster alarm since she had been half the size of the Biggest-One’s hand! That’s what she told the Sergeant. He looked at her like at… she didn’t know such animals anyway, and he said that's the real purpose of the lesson: to show the ability to, what it was called, right, to think abstractly. Right, there weren’t any Monsters around, but the trainees needed to show the humans that they were able to detect them. But if Kitty didn’t have the wit to pretend that there was a Monster under the floor, then she did not deserve even grade B. A smart cat is not the one seeing a Monster, all cats do that, but the one capable of communicating with humans, which is harder by orders of magnitude since they are rather stupid. Kitty pondered on it. Indeed, her humans were often dimwitted. Except for the Half-Cat, he was smart but mean. So, she must be twice smarter—for herself and for them. Alright. She jumped to where the stinky false Monster was creeping invisible under the floor, hissed at it, and, to show her attitude to this farce, she scratched the floor to signify it’s all shit. *** Well, she did learn something useful and new: to make humans treat her to yummy bits. For example, if you want your human instructor to dispense a piece of beef to you, approach him silently and tug at his or her pants or boots, then show with your paw where the non-monster is. She wondered how long it would take to teach her own humans to do the trick. *** There was also one very old, blind, retired cat, he was telling curious things about the world when the trainees had rest. Kitty didn’t think the stories were true. Like, many, many cat generations ago, there had been no Monsters at all, nowhere in the whole world, and humans, not hunted by Monsters, hadn’t respected or obeyed their cats and kept them just for fun, like toys. So, the cats should be grateful to the Monsters for their ascension to power, or half of the trainees would have cowered between garbage bins and the other half would have been bored out of their wits in their indoor mats. Therefore, the trainees should not slack off if they want respect and honour from humans. Kitty pondered on it in her resting time. No, even if there had been such times... Even if, cats couldn’t be anything but supreme creatures since humans had been feeding them and providing them with mats for nothing, without the immediate threat of Monsters. And even if some felines had been near garbage bins, they had been doing it on purpose—to train for future wars because those bins (all two pieces Kitty had seen so far) smelled a bit like Monsters. *** In the end, she was only graded B, but her humans didn’t seem to realise it and continued to love her. To celebrate her graduation, they took her to a Wild Forest to impress them with her new skills. And she did! All the way, she was rescuing them from small dangers and warning of large dangers. And when Monsters became too many, large, and scary to handle, Kitty decided she had enough adventures, and her humans turned back to safer lands. Oh yes, and they also picked up one more human in the Forest. To make up for the loss of the Softy-Chatty, there had been one nice, soft, warm human in the very beginning, but then she disappeared, and Kitty was always thinking that a pack of six humans was better than of five. The new human was more like the Half-Cat, though. Half-Cat looked like a human and had a catlike shiny-shadow, and the new one’s shiny-shadow was a large, scary bird. With a wingspan thiiis wide and claws thisss long. But he was good at scratching a cat’s tummy. So, Kitty enlisted him in her court and named him Grumpy-Glum.