Cat and Spider

A reader requested a cat story. We no longer have cats, but my friend Gordon Bell does. This is his story. “I do not kill spiders, including the wolf spider. It eats bad bugs. That changed the night I had two kidney stones competing to see which one could make me scream louder. Tossing and turning, in the midst of that intense pain, life can look pretty bleak,” Bell said.”Finally gave in and took a dosage of ketorolac (aka Toradol). Hate pain killers, but sometimes we make sacrifices.”My room is very dark with black-out curtains. After about forty-five minutes, I slept.”Glitch, a ginger house cat that adopted me, sleeps at various spots on my bed. “I awakened after embracing the loving arms of Morpheus (enabled by the chemical compassion of the pain-killer). Glitch was not on my bed. Shortly, my eyes made out his silhouette on top of my therapy machine – about four feet off the floor and against the wall. He stood on his back legs, with one front leg supporting him on the wall, and the other swatting at something a few feet above him. “Not able to make out the object of his fixation, I grabbed my little red plastic flashlight from my nightstand and illuminated Glitch. My beam went up the wall and caught two small whitish-greenish sparkles: the two large eyes of a wolf spider. They have eight eyes in all, with four small‘uns under the two large eyes and one on each side of the head. From its outline, it measured two or more inches.”The arachnid dropping down about an inch from the wall had caught Glitch’s attention. With each swat of the cat’s paw, the spider worked its way back up the silky strand. Then it came down again, met another feline flail, and retreated upwards.”Since the spider was several feet to my right, I decided to leave well-enough alone. My only concern was Glitch’s silent but potentially lethal swats. I knew the wolf spider was not venomous to humans. It hunts brown recluse spiders. A couple of those little monsters have nipped me resulting in rotting-flesh-holes. “Turning over and facing the left side of the room, I returned to sleep briefly.”I awakened again with Glitch sitting against the back of my head. I could feel him making vertical thrusts.”I could not see what he was focused on. Reaching around him I grabbed the flashlight.”Directly above my head, in a trajectory that would’ve landed on my neck, the wolf-spider was repeating his attempted descents. It had moved from the edge of the room.”As earlier, the cat paw flails would stop the slide down the strand. The spider retreated before trying another short drop.”My love of spiders met its limit. I shifted my bulk to the right, displacing my hero cat. Turned on my bedstand’s lamp I grabbed a turquoise back scratcher (about two and a half feet long) – I swatted at the arthropod. The little hand on the end of the back scratcher hit its target with a splotchy smack. I couldn’t tell where it landed.”I was not willing to return to my slumber without resolution. After a few minutes, I located the spider on the floor, its legs curled up and quivering. I felt enormously guilty and sad. I could’ve grabbed it with a cloth and delivered it outdoors to the front porch where it would’ve resumed its mission of eating bad bugs. Maybe even later it would come back inside to a better location to protect our home,” Bell concluded.We’ll blame the end of the cat’s game to Gordon’s excruciating night of pain. That one time, he chose to permanently end a spider’s swinging descent so both the cat and he would sleep.