Neither did there seem any need for a collar and lead when, as his legs began to lengthen like spindly brown pipe-cleaners, I started to take him up on the hillside behind the cottage. He was still a baby, crouching when a jay flew over; leaping spectacularly at butterflies, batting cautiously, pretending they were dangerous, at fir cones lying in the grass. Shebalu, full as only a Siamese female can be of the fact that she'd been Longer With Us than He Had, Hadn't She, and Knew This Hillside Better Than He Did, Didn't She? and anyway we Liked Her Better, sat by my side importantly, wearing her collar and lead as though they were an Egyptian queen's insignia, far too superior to play games with little kittens. So it was that I started throwing fir cones to give Saska something to chase after. Nobody was more surprised than I was when he picked them up and brought them back.
I threw them further away. Still he retrieved them – belting down the hillside with the speed of a greyhound and racing straight back up again carrying the cone in his mouth. He would put it down in front of me and watch it intently, ready to chase it again. It was always the exact one I'd thrown for him, too. If there were several lying around when he got to the end of his run, he would sniff round like a police dog till he found the one that had the right scent on it. The only time he was ever foxed was when the cone bounced, on its way down, into the middle of a very large gorse bush. After circling the bush for ages with a worried look on his face, he eventually came back hopefully with a piece of donkey dropping.
While I thought Sass's retrieving act clever and encouraged him in it, there were some people who couldn't believe their eyes. Fred Ferry, Father Adams's perennial sparring partner, was the first outsider to see the performance as he clumped, knapsack over shoulder, along the lane one afternoon. From the way he stopped, watched incredulously for several minutes and then quickened his pace along the lane, I knew the news wouldn't be long in spreading and sure enough Father Adams appeared within seconds.
Father Adams knows us well enough by now not to bother with the usual village ploys when he wants to see what we are doing. No whistling a dog, washing mud off his gum boots in the stream that runs past the cottage or picking blackberries in our hedge for him. He just stands there, arms folded, and stares. He was there on that occasion when we came down at the end of the session and so saw the finale that Fred Ferry, not wanting to be thought lingering, had missed: Sass running ahead of me with his pine cone in his mouth, through the back gate, and putting it carefully down on the lawn.
'Well, if th'old liar weren't right for once,' said Father Adams. 'I 'ouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself.' And off he went to add his bit to the story – about our new cat carrying home things in his mouth like a retriever with a stick.
Alas, before long we had to give up the games on the hillside. It should have been safe. The area was fenced. We grazed Annabel, our donkey, up there. Beyond the fence was thick, untracked pine forest that nobody ever wandered through. It was well away from the bridle path, too, where I now never took the cats. In the old days we walked along the path often, but after the lesson of Seeley... Supposing, said Charles, I was halfway up the track with them and met a dog?
You can't win, of course. When it comes to being born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, man has nothing on Siamese cats. There we were minding our own business up on the hillside one morning, Shebalu pursuing her favourite pastime of biting the heads off daisies, Sass busily occupied stalking beetles, Annabel grazing companionably close at hand to make sure she wasn't left out of anything, when out of the forest and through the top fence charged three large black Labradors.
It was like one of those animated dioramas. Shebalu went up a tree. Annabel took off across the hillside, bucking wildly in defence of her rear. She needn't have worried. Sass, an eye-catching target in his kitten whiteness, fled straight down the hillside towards the cottage, and the dogs, tongues lolloping, went after him.
So did I. So did Charles, running madly across from the orchard. So did the woman, frantically blowing a whistle, who came clambering over the fence in my rear. Charles reached the yard ahead of the Labradors and barred them from coming through the gate. Where was Sass, though – conspicuous by his absence, last seen streaking like a comet down the hill?
Upstairs under our bed, as a matter of fact. I always leave the cottage doors open when I'm out with the cats – from past experience one never knows when they'll need a quick retreat. When we'd located him and satisfied ourselves that he wasn't hurt we went out to talk to the woman. We'd often seen her around before, instructing the dogs to sit in the roadway, walking on up the hill herself, then calling or whistling them to come on. Giving them obedience training, obviously, but what on earth she'd been doing in the woods...
Training them as gun dogs, according to her. She and her husband did a lot of it. The business out on the road was to get them to stay where they were put. The next step was to take them where there were likely to be distractions and teach them to still stay put till they were told. To this end she'd taken them into the forest, instructed them to 'sit' when a rabbit hopped out on to the path ahead—and the trio, deciding she couldn't possibly have meant it, had immediately shot off in pursuit. The rabbit must have given them the slip behind a tree and, pelting on, they'd spotted Sass.
'They wouldn't have hurt him,' the woman assured us with airy confidence. 'By instinct they retrieve without harming their quarry.' I don't know about that. I had a vision of Sass being carted back to her in one of those big black mouths and went weak at the knees. So it was that though she never brought the dogs to the Valley again – her confidence being obviously not as strong as she made out – for a long time I didn't take Sass up on the hill again, either. I never knew what might come out of the forest.
Instead I threw things for him to chase on the lawn – pine cones, pieces of stick and, as the summer advanced, small fallen apples from the tree in front of the conservatory. Sass himself devised the refinement to this one. If people's eyes popped to see him running back to me with sticks and fir cones, they positively goggled to see him carrying small apples by their stalks.
Fred Ferry, not ordinarily an animal lover, was entranced. 'Theest couldn't half train he to be useful,' he kept saying. As a poacher's assistant I imagined, knowing Fred, who didn't carry that knapsack for nothing. He was equally intrigued when I told him that Sass drank. Anything from orange juice to whisky.
Most Siamese like sherry, of course. One belonging to a friend of mine downed a whole glassful once. She put it on the floor by the side of her chair while she was having a quiet half-hour with the paper and when, after a while, she picked up the glass and found it empty she thought she must have drunk it without realising she had – until she saw the culprit weaving across the room with his legs crossed, just before he collapsed on the floor. Luckily her husband is a doctor. He said to lay him on the bed and leave him, and sure enough after an hour or two he recovered. If it had been us, we would have had to call the Vet. I can just imagine telling him one of our cats was drunk. That, I can hear him saying, is all he'd been waiting for...