QUATREPATTES LOOKS INTO THE ABYSS AND SEES QUATREPATTES LOOKING BACK........BUT AM I ALSO QUATREPATTES?
 
Maybe the supreme wildcat athlete, Quatrepattes likes me so much because she thinks that in some strange way I am also Quatrepattes. Whenever she looks into the wideangle lens of the camera which, to her, is part of me, she sees her own reflection in the lens filter.......Thus, we have many of these sessions on Harpo's feeding shelf, where Quatrepattes peers reflectively at me and rolls pussylike for me.

She has no cat friends and only two human ones......One of these, the old doc, isn't around at the moment after a fire in his house in the old part of town; he must be off somewhere till the smoke damage is fixed. Her other friend, of course, took these photos of her, just as he has done on so many Saturdays for five years.....I get closer than ever to her these days, she shows more of her character, and the photos are better than in the earlier years of the project, my study of the wildcats of Ax-les-Thermes......

All the hotel cats seem older as this hot spring threatens us with another heatwave summer......but Quatrepattes is unchanged since the day I met her on the little iron bridge to what was once the hotel kitchens. That now seems another age, a long ago time when other cats roamed the ways and drains of the ancient mountain town, when the hotel ghost still remember who he was in life.....

These days we spend more time together than ever. Last week she spent a whole afternoon jumping from island to island in the River Lauze, showing off, pretending to catch mice, seeing her reflection again when making out she was about to swipe up a trout. She also climbs trees and dares me to follow. And she rolls about on this shelf like Eartha Kitt leading up to a risque purred song.....

Quatrepattes does not, I guess from my observations, actually live in the tumbledown Hotel de la Paix these days. Miss Juliet has at last seen her off. But where does she sleep at night? In some den in the drains, I think, or in a buried room that is her secret, where not even mice have ventured since she found it, where once dishonest hotel staff were locked in confinement until they atoned for pilfering or watching great ladies in their bathtubs.

Remember, cat-opera lovers, these photos are wildlife photos: Quatrepattes is a wild creature, living her wildness in a human habitation, but ignoring all human kind except for her few carers and her alter-ego which is myself. If Quatrepattes was a humanoid she would be me. If I were a feline I would be Quatrepattes. This is a very good basis for a lifelong relationship between two very different creatures......Always, more with each meeting, I am honoured to share time with this wonderful wild personality; as wildly honoured as when I was taken for a walk by a porcupine in the Canadian woods, or led off into blue waters by a sea turtle off Caribbean islands.......In these photos a wildness is looking into the camera; what is it that looks back at her that is not herself?