THE CAT AND THE ‘FIDDLE’

by Bob Francis

I have previously mentioned one of the stories that Richard related about his cats. He was a serious cat lover, had a great admiration for the animals, and, I tend to think, an exaggerated opinion as to their abilities. If you recall, the previous story he related to me was the one where the cat had killed a man who was tormenting her. This is another of his cat stories. One of his favourite yarns was about a very large tabby and he credited this animal with being highly intelligent and intuitive.

He said to me one day 'Did I ever tell you how this cat helped to solve a missing person mystery?'

To which I smilingly replied 'No, but I'm sure you are going to tell me now.'

And he did.

Apparently, a few years back he was wandering through the forested area just below The School and the big cat had joined him for the walk. Somewhere along the way he decided to have a rest and smoke his pipe and the cat sat near him. Suddenly it became agitated and began to circle the area as if searching for something. Then with a loud meow it came and laid something at his feet.

It was the skeletal remains of a human hand.

Richard was a bit startled to see such an object but on closer examination decided that it had been there for quite some time, probably ten to fifteen years, and had lost some of its fingers. All he could see were the palm, thumb and forefinger. He was a bit reluctant to pick it up at first and the cat seemed unduly agitated when he did so. He thought about this for a while and decided that the skeletal remains were so old that they would have no real meaning but as it turned out he was wrong.

When he got back to his cottage he found his old friend Henry, a policeman, waiting for him on the front verandah and he related to him the little adventure he had just experienced.

Henry was quite curious and said to Richard, 'Why don't we go and have a look?'

So they set off to search, and of course, the tabby came along as well. They had no trouble locating where the hand had been found because the cat ran ahead and went straight to the spot where they had been sitting.

Henry picked up the skeletal hand and began to examine it closely. He puzzled over things for a moment and then said no recent murders or missing person bulletins were reported in Mussoorie. The last one would have been perhaps about fifteen years ago, Mussoorie being a peaceful sort of place. However, he did say that this hand had probably been detached from its owner fairly recently because where the joint to the wrist was the bone was fairly clean. The rest of the body must be somewhere up the hill, he said, for the hand to have washed down here. This hand had probably been lying here for many years, for many monsoons of heavy, drenching, rain, landslides and washouts, year after year. The rest of the body could be anywhere on the hill and would be almost impossible to find.

Meantime, the cat headed straight up the hill and they decided to follow. Scrambling along behind the animal that was behaving more like a bloodhound than a proper cat, they struggled to keep pace with it. Then, suddenly, there it was, a skeletal bone, presumably from the same body. At this point Henry called off the search and decided to get some policemen out to help and in the meantime began going through his records at the police station, searching for any clues as to the owner of the hand.

He did not find any records of murders in the area but he did find a few cases of missing people. One of them was a schoolboy who went missing from The School many years ago. There had been suspicions that the boy who had absconded had probably died somewhere in the area; but extensive searches had produced no results. He checked with the Principal who confirmed that according to school records it was some fifteen years since the boy had gone missing. In all that time there had been no sightings of him anywhere and it had been presumed that he had died of some misadventure. Indeed, even though a hand had been found it did not indicate if the hand belonged to the missing schoolboy or perhaps some old Pahari (hillman) who had died long ago. The police posse spent the next few days searching the slopes but no sign of the body could be found and eventually the search was abandoned... apparently by everyone except the cat!

Our Richard, just like any other cat lover, knows that his favourite animals love to roam at night and so he did not mind if they vanished for the night and went about their business. Then he noticed that the big tabby seemed to be hiding something under its sleeping mat in the corner of the room. When he investigated, he found to his surprise that the cat had been bringing back small human bones, possibly from the missing body. It puzzled him because they had searched the area thoroughly and been unable to locate any signs of a body.

Discussing this with Henry they decided that one day they would stay awake and try and follow the tabby when he left, but wandering through thick forest and scrambling up steep paths in the dark proved impossible.

In the police station they began to assemble the bones and gradually a skeleton began to emerge, though there were a large number of bones still missing. But no matter how much they studied the bones, it gave no clue to the identity of the body.

And then came the breakthrough. One day the cat arrived with a bit of fabric and by studying the fabric they concluded that it was part of what may had been the school uniform, certainly as far as the quality of fabric indicated, which would not have been part of the clothing of a local Pahari.

And then a real breakthrough. The cat one day returned with what was obviously part of a coat pocket bearing some sort of embroidery, which indicated that perhaps it might have been part of a crest, thus eliminating the Pahari theory, and it became clear that the pocket was that of a school badge and therefore, by logical argument, the body could be part of the missing schoolboy.

And now a feverish search began for the rest of the skeleton. People were brought in from other police stations to help and dogs were used to try and find the missing body, alas, to no avail. The body was never found.

I am a firm believer in the superiority of dogs but I had to admit that in this case the cat had outperformed the canines. Over a period of time, a few more bones were produced by the cat but they did not further identify the body.

One possibility was that the skeleton was of the missing boy who may have injured himself and been buried under a landslide. This meant that perhaps there was only a small opening into somewhere where the skeleton lay, which the cat had somehow found that enabled the body to be accessed by the cat.

But this was only a theory.

The rest of skeleton was never found.

Richard insists that his cat was an exceptional animal of the species of exceptional animals, the cat family, and that no other mammals have their advanced intelligence.

He could be right.

Many years later I was relating this story to a friend who knew Richard well. When I mentioned the tabby he smiled.

He said that Richard had only ever kept Siamese cats!

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Bob Francis was born in Mussoorie, India, and migrated to Australia in 1967.

He is married, has two adult children, one grand-daughter and one great-grand daughter.

He retired from teaching in 1989. He has done ten years of woodwork, mainly furniture, for family and friends and also ten years of video doing semi professional work.

He is now into writing and has self published a book this year named 'The Charzi Tours', which he has sold to family, friends and over the net. He writes short stories based mainly around the Mussoorie area, intending them for self publication in book later this year. He can be contacted at bishopbob71@hotmail.com