cat fancies bird

Yesterday afternoon, as I was reading on the sofa in the front room, I heard the sounds of some sort of tussle taking place in the hall. But it was a very muffled sound, hardly anything really. You try to put these things out of mind. It's just one of the cats playing with one of my practise golf balls, you try to persuade yourself. You do nothing. Go back to your book. But later, when transiting the hall en route to the kitchen I saw the feathers. There was a trail of them leading up the stairs. It led directly to our bedroom.

I investigated the crime scene with caution, so as to preserve forensic evidence for any future inquiry. Near my wife's side of the bed there was a little patch of damp cat vomitus. A brief look under the bed with one of those "wind-up" torches revealed a veritable sea of feathers scattered everywhere. There was also a large, undefinable object lying very still at the centre point under the mattress. I removed said mattress, slowly, as it is extremely cumbersome, went downstairs to fetch the vacuum and then set about the gruesome task of "clearing the crime scene" First I had to vacuum the feathers, all kinds from the little downy ones to the big, brave flight feathers, and enough to fill a pillow. There was blood to wipe away; it was very light red, almost with a hint of orange. There were guts, crop, gizzard perhaps. I'm not sure. I am not trained in avian anatomy. Let's call it gunge. And it was strewn widely about in the semi darkness under the bed.

And there was the body. A huge, fully grown and well fed pigeon it turned out to be, quiet now in its demise. But, poor thing, it must have put up an epic struggle against impossible odds. An adult cat is a superbly equipped killing machine: speed, agility, acuteness of senses, terrible weaponry.

Actually retrieving its body showed that its girth exceeded the gap between floor and bed, so how it even got under there in the first place...

I bagged and tagged the evidence (in a Tesco bag) and, having tied as tight a knot as possible in the bag handles, I consigned the terrible package to the depths of the bin.