An abbreviated story
My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few lines as exercise, or as a ladle dipped into the Well, my friendly, black, male cat, Shadow, has wandered into the influence of the front door, guttering a deep and slightly swallowed yowl, the one I have come to recognize, in the language of cats, as being a call to his mate (platonic though their mating is, no less Love, ranging to if not attaining the coital: embracing the familial, the time-worn, the touch-comforted and the understood), his call announcing Success in the Hunt, as evidenced by the flesh of a creature smaller and less offensively appointed than himself, and accustomed as a species to being prey, now prey again, a rabbit.
I heard the yowl and thought to myself, but perhaps not, and went to the door to let him in, if he were merely hungry, or uncommonly desiring to spend his night indoors. I opened the door a fraction and found the hunter looking up at me, a small rabbit draped in his jaws: he was like a miniature lion, with the body of a miniature man balanced in his maw, he was the Cat of Death and carrying his fated assignment for the night. The female, Minstrel, had of course heard the call – it was a call to her, after all, and had nothing to do with me, but for my official function as doorman. I looked at her and said Well, he’s out there waiting for you. I suppose you want to go… We speak and we are heard, if not in all the human particulars. Off she went.
I returned to my writing exercise – my practice of stillness, an etude with neither review nor editing, nor direction but for whatever the moment presented. A few words written, and then that sound again: not the guttural sound of Shadow announcing his trophy, but one I have heard other times and in other places: the sound of a young, live rabbit having its life torn from it.
It is not a sound easily ignored.
Maybe it is like the scream of birth, but in place of rejoicing, the ultimate despair: my life is being torn from me.
One imagines that rabbits make no sound, and it is true they do not, except in at least this one, very specific occasion. Then the mistake is evident.
I had tried to separate the cat from his prey, when I first opened the door to find the Shadow of Death, but the creature was limp – I assumed, already dead.
It is not the first time and certainly it will not be the last, that I am presented with the incredible tenacity of life, the will of the body refusing, absolutely refusing, to allow peaceful departure of the spirit; instead, the body, jealous of the Soul’s capacity to travel, to pass through that doorway while the poor dust of living must be left behind, shouts and fights and curses and screams and ultimately fails… just as this rabbit I thought dead screamed again and again… until finally my cats its deliverers ended its struggle.
Do animals have souls?
They had better. If their body is taken from them, and there is nothing that remains, then, my friends, the same will be my allotted end, being a creature of this earth alike to any. If the strange coagulation of atoms that is a body will simply dissipate, be recycled like so many other bodies, and be gone, then all cells and all atoms will obey the same set of spheres.
But no: you see in the simplest creatures the most complex responses: love, certainly; loss, certainly; a Being dancing with the rest of creation. The soul as our expression and connection to the One, experiences this life through the confines of a physical form, cat or rabbit, woman or man. Let them be as alive, then, as I am, for now; as eternal and connected as I would hope to be.