Kitty Kitty Bang Bang
Any tale
involving three 16-year-old nimrods, a car, playing hooky from school, and guns
is destined to become a memorable legend.
The following is no exception.
My cousin
John Mitchell, friend Jim Refi and I got the idea to skip school and go hunting
during the small game season. We had
full intentions of getting an early start, shooting a few squirrels and
returning in time for football practice later that afternoon. [Author’s note:
At that time, there were no rules stating students had to be in attendance for
at least one half of a school day before they could participate in after-school
activities.]
Our
destination was an area near the Cambria/Bedford County line along Route 869
between Beaverdale and Pavia. We entered the woods before daylight with
flashlights, then separated and settled in our chosen spots well before the sun
came up over the horizon in the distance.
I’m not positive how deep in the wilderness we were, but to our
knowledge we were far from any towns or dwellings.
As dawn
broke so did the silence. From Jim’s
shot gun, we plainly heard the blasts and retorting echoes. Bang! Bang! The reverberations seemed to resonate as the sound
caromed off the hillsides.
Almost
immediately, Jim called to us to come over to see what he had shot.
The
indescribable expression on Jim’s face was such that it was tough to
distinguish between euphoria and embarrassment. “I’m not sure what it is,” he
said in a perplexed tone.
As we looked
into the bushes, John and I weren’t sure what he had just shot either. We knew
it was a member of the cat family but that’s about it. The creature was over four feet in length
with another 18 inches in its tail. That alone ruled out that it was a
bobcat. Its markings were strikingly
similar to a bobcat though, and Jim swore it was hissing loudly as it ran full
speed over a rocky outcrop, heading towards him with teeth and claws bared.
Was it a
small panther? We didn’t know.
The feline’s
teeth and eyes seemed eerily demonic – resembling a cat that returned from the
dead at least 8 times in Stephen King’s Pet
Sematary. So, we unloaded our guns and decided to take our kill back to
town and my house to see if anyone could identify our trophy.
The trek to
the car was not easy. We three “great white hunters” took turns draping that
cat over our shoulders like hunters on a safari. We even debated whether we should cross-tie
its legs over a long post and two of us carry it out just as those primitive
natives did on the plains of Africa. We
nixed that idea and when we finished the hour and a half journey, we tossed the
atypical animal in the trunk of Jim’s Volkswagen. It barely fit.
Our
excitement waned somewhat as we tramped out of the woods. The ride home knocked
out more of our exuberance. By the time we got home and hung the cat from my
mom’s clothesline post, most of our excitement was gone. We were not only exhausted physically; we
began to feel silly at just how hard we had worked. And for what reason had we
toiled? We weren’t sure.
As we
admired the length of the beast (its tail touching the ground and front paws
attached to the cross bar of the post), we heard a man’s voice from behind us.
“What have
we here?” It was our Stroehman Bread delivery man, in his blue uniform and cap,
smiling from ear to ear. Then he knocked out the little wind left in our sails
as he inquired curiously, “Did you boys go to someone’s porch and call, ‘here
kitty, here kitty – bang, bang’ and then shoot their cat?”
He felt
compelled to grab himself in the vicinity of his bladder as he questioned us, and
he could barely continue as his smile turned to loud laughter. “I honestly
think you shot someone’s pet cat,” he explained. “No doubt some poor little kid is crying now,
asking his mommy what happened to his beloved pet.”
His final
question was directed at me as he asked, “Did you show this to your dad?”
He left us
in the back yard and went in the house to deliver the bread order. I could hear him howling with hilarity as he
spoke with my mom.
We, the
three exhausted hunters, briefly glanced at each other. Then, without much debate, we carried the
carcass over a steep embankment where we dug a hole large enough for the corpse,
and buried it.
I figured
one grown man laughing at us was enough so I didn’t tell Dad about the massacre
until years later. He got a chuckle out
of the saga never-the-less.
We spoke very
little about our slaying in the years that followed. And to this day, we’re still not sure about
the species’ identification. Maybe it
was a cross between a wild feline and some domestic cat, or a bob cat or
panther carrying a genetic mutation.
Either way, both the tale of the creature and the creature’s tail are permanently
scratched in my mind.
Also, to
this day, I can’t think of, read, or hear the words, “here kitty, kitty”
without reliving that episode. I sure hope
kids living somewhere near the county line didn’t cry themselves to sleep that
night years ago, over our embarrassing “big game trophy” turned to trash.
