I had promised (threatened?) to blog about the day last week, back before my Internet service had been restored, that I flushed a bird down the toilet, so here I go.

Eliot the cat (yes, this is another cat posting) is discovering his hunting skills, although he still hasn't yet learned to kill (which is quite alright with me). A couple weeks ago, I found him in the kitchen playing cat-and-mouse with a live shrew, although I had no idea what a shrew was doing inside of my house. Since then, Eliot's given me a few clues how it came to be in there.

One day last week, after power had been restored but before the cable and Internet service were back on, I heard Eliot come into the house through the trap door, but instead of running to me like he usually does when he comes in (just to see what I'm up to and in case any cat treats happen to be falling off of me), he was meowing loudly in the kitchen, almost like he was calling me. I went in to see what he was up to, and found him playing with a baby bird on the kitchen floor. I went to take it away from him, but he picked it up and ran into the meditation room with it. I grabbed a dust pan and broom and chased after them.

The bird was hurt, but was not obviously bleeding or missing any feathers. Eliot would let it go and it would hop and flail around a little (it seemed to have a broken wing), but then Eliot would pounce upon it again. He didn't appear to be using his claws, which were easily sharp enough to shred the poor bird, but instead was playing a sort of one-sided game - fun for him, I suppose, but a nightmare for the bird.

I shooed the cat away with the broom and picked the bird up with the dustpan (I didn't want to touch it in case the bird had been caught due to weakness from West Nile disease). It was still alive but very small, a baby perhaps. I don't know my birds, but my guess is it was some sort of finch, grey in color but with yellow feathers in its tail. Other than its broken wing, I didn't see any obvious damage, but it just laid helplessly in the pan.

I knew that if I released it, it would not last long. Either another predator would come along and eat it (a raccoon, say, or another neighborhood cat) or else it would just starve to death due to its inability to fly. It seemed that the kindest thing to do was to take it out of its misery - to finish the job that Eliot had started. As a Buddhist, I follow the bodhisattva vow to free all sentient beings. In this case, the being needed freeing from its suffering and humanely killing it seemed the kindest thing to do.

But how to do it? I couldn't find in it myself to take a knife or any blunt instrument to it. After going through a few deliberations, drowning seemed the quickest and most painless way to go, and since I just so happened to be standing by the bathroom door at the moment, the toilet seemed the best way for drowning. It was a small bird, as I said, a baby, no larger than a medium-sized turd, so I figured it would go down easily. I dropped it into the toilet, made a small gassho bow, and pulled the handle to flush it away. It went down easily, but Eliot couldn't understand why I just disposed of a perfectly good plaything.

He made up for my wastefulness on Saturday. I thought the day was going to be a perfectly boring day of preparing for Sunday's Zen new comers session and watching the Celtics-Bulls game on t.v., but Eliot had other ideas. Sometime around the Second Period of the game, I heard a squeaking sound in the kitchen, and since it reminded me of the sounds that came from the shrew, I went to investigate. Eliot was in the kitchen, this time playing with a chipmunk.

Chipmunks are cute and I like chipmunks, but not in my kitchen and not being toyed with by Eliot. I shouted "No!" at Eliot, a word he knows, but he picked the chipmunk up in his mouth, and ran again back to the meditation room. I knew the drill by now, so armed with the broom and dust pan, I set out to save the chipmunk.

However, the chipmunk was more resourceful than the shrew or the bird, and was capable of getting away from Eliot and sequestering himself behind the alter where Eliot couldn't get him. There is a back door in the room, so I opened it and flushed the chipmunk out of his hiding space with the broom and directed him toward the open door. He got outside, and I almost caught Eliot before he got outside too in hot pursuit. But out in the out-of-doors, the chipmunk had more refuges and retreats and was soon able to lose Eliot, who kept staring at the drainpipe at which he had last seen the chipmunk, even while it scurried off into the woods.

So that took care of that (or so I had thought) and I settled back in to watch the rest of the game. But during the Fourth Quarter, I was quite surprised to see a chipmunk bounding from the kitchen and across the den floor to dart beneath the sofa upon which I was sitting. Eliot picked up the trail a minute later (he's obviously not a great tracker) while I was already pulling the sofa away from the wall to flush the chipmunk out. I managed to get him out of the den to behind the living room sofa, and since that sofa is right next to the front door, I opened the door and then pulled the living room sofa away from the wall. Eliot tore in behind the sofa as soon as I moved it and both the hunter and his prey ran out the front door.

Eventually Eliot came back into the house, a little tired but without any new friends. But later that day, I saw him come back in through the trap door again, this time with a chipmunk in his mouth.

This has got to be the stupidest chipmunk ever, or else it was some sort of accomplice in Eliot's little game. More brooms, more running around, more sofas pulled away from walls. I never actually saw the chipmunk go out the open door this time, but after I couldn't find it anywhere else in the house, I could only assume that it had escaped.

Until Eliot showed me otherwise. Hours later, he was crouched down and sniffing at the crack beneath my bedroom closet door. I opened the door and pulled out the dirty clothes bin and, sure enough, there was the chipmunk. Brooms, open doors, sofas, etc.

Evening. Things seemed to have settled down. But then Eliot became agitated again, this time outside of the coat closet door. This time, the chipmunk was behind the duffel bag holding my scuba gear, and this time I was very specific to see that it got out the front door, although once again, Eliot followed the chipmunk. I followed Eliot.

The chipmunk ran beneath my car, Eliot ran after the chipmunk and I ran after Eliot with broom in hand. I don't know what the neighbors must have thought. "There goes that strange bald guy chasing his cat around his car with a broom." The chipmunk, which by the way looked unharmed and still quite healthy, kept dodging the cat behind various tires of my car, first the front, then the back, first inside, then outside, and I kept trying to get the broom if Eliot's face so that the chipmunk could get away. Eventually, this ruse worked and the chipmunk escaped into the yard and I grabbed the cat and brought him inside, and locked the trap door before he could go out and catch the stupid chipmunk a (third?) (fourth?) (fifth?) time and bring it back in yet again.

While I had planned on a quiet day of watching basketball playoffs and dharma study, Eliot apparently had other ideas. I'm convinced that Eliot brought his prey into the house in order to share the "fun" with me. I've seen no evidence that he does this when I'm not home. It was his little gift to me. And if he thought that bringing a chipmunk into the house would be "fun," he was apparently right since every time general hilarity ensued, consisting of me running around with brooms, sofas pulled from walls, and so on and so forth.

In truth, he really did liven up the day, although not quite in the way I would have chosen. And since in the end, the chipmunk got away unharmed and no new comers showed up on Sunday for an unrehearsed extended instruction, no harm was done.

Will this behavior continue? It remains to be seen, because as of today, Eliot's a changed man, er, creature. He spent all day today at the vet, because today was the day scheduled for his neutering. I really had mixed feelings about doing this (it's not the kind of things guys let happen to other guys), but had been convinced by the vet that it was the right thing to do even before Saturday's fun and games. He's under house quarantine for a week while he heals, so it remains to be seen whether he still has the hunter instinct and still considers it "fun" to bring live game into the house in his new, testosterone-free existence. He might just turn now into a fat old eunuch, a lazy house cat who only wants to sleep in the sun.

I'm relieved to note, however, that so far he still seems like his old self - as if nothing happened. Time will tell.