Cat versus Rat

I’ve had a rat in my house for almost a month now, and we’re officially at war. He has eaten my flour, my sugar, chewed through the handle of a pan, eaten the tomatoes from my garden that are on my windows to ripen in the sun, and eaten granola that that was sent to me- low blow. In retaliation, I bought another large plastic container to store food, started doing dishes the second I finished eating, and transferred all my baking supplies to empty peanut butter jars. Still, he lingered, and that’s when I decided drastic measures needed to be taken.

That night, I went next door and returned with my neighbor’s cat. Now, this cat usually comes around during the day, starved for affection, and annoying follows me everywhere trying to rub up on my legs, usually as I’m walking and carrying something heavy. But at night she always returns to sleep next door. I figured if I locked her in at night when the rat is most active, she’d be able to kill him, eat him, and that would be that. What I didn’t count on was the fact that this may be the most annoying cat that ever lived. She spent the first hour I was trying to sleep jumping up on my in bed and trying to get attention. Then, when I threw her into the living room and shut my bedroom door she cried outside that door for the next hour (she’s persistent, I’ll give her that). At last, I heard her climb up into the roof, and I figured she’d be fine.

I was woken up the next morning at 6 o’clock because my neighbor, Fotu, a charming and loquacious four-year old, had fallen down and cut his chin and his parents, instead of cleaning his face, decided to send them to me. I washed his cut with soap (they didn’t have any), put some antibacterial cream on it, gave him a band-aid, and sent him home. The cat had watched all of this before running off into the kitchen, and I hoped she had gotten a whiff of rat and was going to finish him off.

I decided to go back to bed for another hour, and woke up at my usual time of 7:30 when the kids start showing up for school. I went into the kitchen and started boiling some water for tea when I saw the cat trapped splayed out in the window. The windows on my house, and on most Tongan buildings, are made up of panes of glass fitted vertically into holders. When you open the window the panes are vertical, and when you close then the planes are turned up horizontally. At first glance I thought the cat was dead, but as I walked closer, she started to mew. I have mosquito netting outside my windows, and she was stuck between the net and the glass. I tried to pry the window open, but the bottom of the window was clogged up by the tomatoes that had been sitting there to ripen. The glass itself was covered in cat fur and tomatoes, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an animal looking that pitiful. It was also pretty funny.

I went next door to ask Le’o for help, and finally we were able to pop one of the panes of glass out, freeing the cat. I have never seen an animal run away from something so quickly. I started cleaning up the smashed tomatoes and I realized that, along with the claw marks from the cats, there were bit marks on some of the tomatoes. The rat had been sitting on the window eating tomatoes and the cat had jumped up to try and get him and her weight had been too much, causing her to be trapped in the window and outsmarted by a rat.

I’ve yet to see signs of either rat or cat in my house for the past few days. It’s possible that they are both traumatized, a symptom I’ve seen more here in animals than anywhere else. (Case in point, Kate and Brett’s dog (sort of), Simba, was missing for a few days while we were in ‘Uoleva. Their neighbor found him eventually inside a water tank which, thankfully, was empty. How/why he was in here, no one knows, but now he spends most of his time hiding under furniture inside Kate and Brett’s house. It’s very sad.) With any luck, the rat will stay away until I can convince the cat to come back inside my house.