Punky Fu

   IN the days before the Cat took his class, O Best Beloved, the Tigre wore a Golden Coat and lived in a place called the Ivory Tower of Academe. ‘Member it wasn’t the Ebony Tower of Academe, or the Salt Pillars of Cherubim, or the Mediocre Wall of China, but the ‘sclusively boring, predictable, unoriginal Ivory Tower of Academe, where uniformity and conformity were not only encouraged, but praised. 

The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Adjunct Faculty and the Administrator and many Students lived there; and they were ‘sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over.  They were about as interesting as a re-heated TV dinner (called a “re-run”) and never failed to not excite you. 

But the Tigre Tigre, burning bright (in the forests of the night), dared to be different and was asked, “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”  To which the Tigre would simply say, “That doesn’t rhyme at all.”

Tigre had grown jaded and uninterested with the world – as there was no person or prey to interest him. So he remained the Golden Coated wild one.  

Said Tigre to his friend Dave (and it was a very hot day), ‘Where has all the game gone?’ And Dave had no good answer.

Then, as fate would have it, one day a Cat entered the Tigre ’s habitat of the aboriginal Fauna. She was no ordinary Cat. In fact, she was like no other in all the land – at once both the most knowing and provocative of all creatures, Cat would toy with the hearts of other animals like they were mice.  And despite that, all the creatures of the land wanted Cat to hunt them. Tigre was immediately intrigued. 

Said Tigre to Dave, “What ever shall I do with this one?” And Dave had no good answer. Then said Tigre more to himself than anyone else, ‘The game belongs to the Cat; and my advice to you, Tigre, is to go into the Cat as soon as you can.’ And had he known, Dave would have said, ‘That is all very fine, but I wish to know whither the aboriginal Fauna has migrated.’  (Dave was like that when he didn’t take his medication; he was a very muddle headed old bear.)

Then said the Cat, ‘If you want to join the game, Tigre, the first move is up to you. Let us not waste time; and my advice to you, Tigre, is to hunt me as soon as you can.’ That puzzled the Tigre, but he set off on an adventure to hunt the Cat. 

The day was inhospitable for Tigre. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ said the Tigre at tea-time, ‘let us wait till it gets dark. This daylight hunting is a perfect scandal.’ So they waited till dark, and the Tigre met the Cat secretly in the starlight that fell all stripy through the branches. When Tigre pounced, surprised he was that Cat pounced back. 

The hunter had become the hunted, as it became apparent that this was Cat’s game all along. They stalked and pounced upon each other. Tigre gnashed his teeth and roared, but Cat, the more agile of the two, sunk her claws deeply into his back with abandon till morning. Such became the way of things as they hunted together, both predators and prey to each other. 

When Tigre heard a moan and a crash and a scramble, Cat would sink her long claws into his back. Tigre would suffer the scratches, too involved in the hunt to change course. So it became that the Cat scratches, so deep and so long, changed the face of Tigre. Now Tigre and Cat were best beloved of each other.  Tigre knew that the scratches went past the surface, so he changed his skin then and there, and the Tigre was more excited than ever. He had found stripes – that now distinguished him from all the other animals.

‘Now you are a beauty!’ said the Cat. ‘You can lie out on the bare ground and look like a heap of Professor, but to anyone who can see, you belong to me.  Think of that and purr, O Best Beloved!’