I’m fortunate to have two animals that make very little noise. Murphy might bark every once in a while when something startles him, and Mr. Meow mews every now and then (mostly when he’s hungry), but for the most part they’re very quiet.
So it was with great annoyance that one afternoon when we still lived in Jacksonville I found myself on the phone with a friend and Murphy started creating a ruckus. His bark is deep and loud, like most big dogs, and in this case annoyingly repetitive. Over and over he kept on.
I was in the kitchen, he was in the dining room, which wasn’t used as a dining room because we didn’t have any dining room furniture. Instead, we stored a baby grand piano. (I say “store” because neither my husband nor I play. We only have it because it was the deal of the century -a hundred bucks.)
Anyway, I went to the living room, which is connected to the dining room via the foyer. The windows in both rooms face the front yard. I figured something was out there, a cat or maybe a door-to-door salesman. I didn’t see anything. I told him to be quiet. He whined, then kept barking. Annoyed, I went into the guest bedroom on the other side of the house.
Murphy chased after me, jumped on the bed with me, and every once in a while growled at the door. Weird behavior that I mistakenly chalked up to paranoia. Eventually he cooled down. Until Wayne came home.
We gathered in front of the TV and not one minute later Murphy started in again.
Wayne reacted the same as me: he checked out the windows. Nothing. He told Murphy to cool it, then looked at me for an explanation.
“I don’t know. He’s been doing it for the last fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Poor Murph. He knew what he was trying to tell us, but his humans were having an exceptionally dense day. Whining, stamping his feet, the hairs on his back raised, he pleaded with us to pay attention.
“Cool it, Murph. Nothing’s there,” Wayne said.
Murphy sat, but his attention stayed focused in the direction of the dining room. Five seconds later we heard the thud of the cat jumping down from the piano to the piano bench. (He only weighs thirteen pounds, but we affectionately call him “Two Ton” because he can make more noise than all sixty pounds of Murphy!) This caused Murphy to bolt to the dining room, where he started barking furiously all over again.
“What the … ?” I got up expecting to see Murphy looking out the window. Instead, he was barking at something under the piano. His body blocked my view. All I could see was the cat’s tail swishing on the other side of the piano.
“You crazy dog! Why are you barking at the cat? What did he do this time?” I started to think maybe all this time Murph had been trying to signal me to some of Kitty’s mischief.
Murphy turned to look at me and that’s when I saw what all the fuss had been about. There was a snake under the piano, trapped by Murphy on one side and the cat on the other.
“Oh my gosh! There’s a snake in our house!”
Wayne sprang off the couch and hurdled a chair to seek refuge in the hall (he’s terrified of snakes), screaming, “Kill it! Kill it!”
“No! It’s bad luck to kill a snake in the house!”
“Says who?”
“It just is!”
I don’t know why I believe that, but I do. So I went to the garage, found my old lacrosse stick, and went to scoot the snake out the front door.
“It’s not very big,” Wayne said.
It wasn’t. Maybe a foot long, a quarter of an inch in diameter. I’d seen much bigger snakes in our neighborhood and was thankful one of those that hadn’t found its way into our house.
With one little scoop I had the snake’s back end in the pocket of my lacrosse stick and with a gentle nudge I guided him to the front stoop. Then I shut the door quickly. My husband rushed to my side, and we peered out the door’s window to see what the snake would do. Likewise, Kitty and Murphy chose windows on either side of us, Murphy in the living room and Kitty in the dining room.
At first I thought maybe the snake died. He hadn’t slithered very much in my efforts to get him out. I more or less simply slid him across the floor.
When it continued to just lie there, Wayne went to open the door, thinking a dead snake posed no threat and it’d be okay to remove it like a “real man” would. But the second the latch clicked, the snake moved. Slowly, it turned around to face the door, paused, then lifted its head.
The movement was so slight, but it looked like the snake was cocking his head as if to say, “Hey, why’d you kick me out? Are you going to let me back in now?”
Who would have thought a snake could be cute? But it was, because in that moment it looked so forlorn. Instead of slithering off, happy to once again be outside, here he was turned around like he was hoping we’d invite him back in!
Laughing, Wayne and I turned to face each other. I caught Murphy’s expression over Wayne’s shoulder, and he caught the cat’s over mine. We didn’t know until later that both the cat and dog shared the same expression in their big, hopeful eyes: “Please can we keep him?”
“No!” we both exclaimed at the same time.
Lesson learned (two in fact): one, I’ll never take Murphy’s barking for granted again; and two, the cat is not always in trouble!
Related Blogs: Snakes and Spiders