One of my favorite blogs is the blog formerly known as What Jeff Killed. The authors recently renamed it Jeff the Giant Orange Cat, as Jeff, formerly an outdoor cat, has been adopted by his former neighbors and has softened in his retirement. Apparently Jeff still makes a kill now and again.

I came home from a trip recently, arriving late at night, wanting little more than to say hi to the furballs and crawl into bed as it was well past my bedtime. However, I'd inadvertently allowed a large fly into the house. I hadn't even noticed it but I soon noticed strange behavior in the cats. Franklin jumped up on the kitchen counter and started climbing the walls above the counter. Daisy's eyes were darting all over, and she too was climbing as high as she could, tracking something with an intensity I'd never quite seen.

Finally, I, too, had seen The Fly. So here we were, all three of us, at this wee hour of the morning, chasing a single fly around the house. The two of them were utterly and completely convinced of their ability to kill it, despite the fly's ability to remain stubbornly out of their reach by tracking from light fixture to light fixture across the ceiling. Every so often he'd tempt them by creeping down the wall a bit to just within reach of a leaping cat.

I could see that there was really only one of us capable of killing the fly, and if I wanted a good night's rest without destruction of the house, it was going to have to be me. Armed with a rolled up magazine, I finally did manage to swat him into submission.

It was a truly wonderful thing, though, to see the hunting instinct in these two. Oh sure, they'd gone after their toy mice and foil balls and dangly toys, but to see them track this buzzing live creature, and truly believe that, given enough time, they would destroy it, was inspiring to me. If I'd had a bit more patience and a bit more willingness to risk destruction of property, it might have been fun to let them try.