ANOTHER VOICE

Do the wild cats of Kerguelen dream of cat-flaps and Whiskas with rabbit?

MATTHEW PARR IS

IKerguelen, Cap Ratmanoff n the imagination of the tame, the call of the wild strikes a chord. We know, or think we know, what it was like to exist in a state of nature. Brought to heel, we still feel the tug. We suppose that other domesticated creatures must too.

Pets, for instance. If Mary's little lamb lifts a woolly head to the distant bleatings from the moor, we sympathise. As the caged canary sings out his heart, we hear in his song some inchoate bird-knowledge of skies beyond the cage. And when Tom's or Tabitha's whiskers twitch to the noises of the night, we smile: the dark, furry uncon- scious beckons. Cat history calls.

So much for the call of the wild. But what about the call of the tame? Can the wild hear it? The possibility springs less readily to mind. Since the Dark Ages at least, man has been coming in from the cold and bringing his pets with him. The wolf has no ancestral hearth to remember, the desert rat hardly pines for his exercise wheel, and budgerigars in Australia do not daydream of bells or mirrors.

Or so we presume. That is why there is something at the same time touching and strange in the behaviour of the wild cats of Kerguelen. I have been following this remarkable tribe on two long journeys into the island, accompanying the man whose special job it is to track these reclusive creatures.

Sub-Antarctic islands were left without resident predatory mammals (without any mammals at all) by the last ice age. But near the end of the century before last some did make a landing here — as sur- vivors of shipwrecks, or with whalers and sealers who called. Though humans left, cats stayed, eating ground-nesting baby birds and the shipwrecked rabbits that were beginning to thrive. In the end, though, this feline colony perished, probably in a formidable winter.

But half a century ago a second wave of cat colonists set paw to shore. These came as companions to the Frenchmen who in the early 1950s established the island's only human settlement, the base at Port-aux- Francais where I have been staying. There were half-a-dozen cats or more, of which the more successful breeders were black, white, or black and white. These roamed, following the scent of rabbits.

The base is at the gentlest end of the island, where the mountains to the west pro- vide shelter from the worst of the Roaring Forties and the vegetation supports count- less rabbits. The cats spread. Pioneer off- spring pushed the feline frontier north and west. Fifty years later (though natural barri- ers such as altitude, rivers, glaciers and vile weather keep the west coast and all the smaller islands cat-free) other coasts and val- leys have become the new territories of the cat settlers' advance. Go west, young Tom, go west. It is odd to watch a beach-cat slip- ping through a crowd of king penguins and sidling past recumbent elephant seals, un- interested. Each shows a complete disregard for the other, each with so different a world, so unconnected a hinterland and history.

The domestic cat here is living in an envi- ronment fairly close to the edge of what its race can survive. Cat fleas, for example, can't live. Each winter's cold and rain take their toll, as the gales and the all-enveloping damp (and maybe the see-sawing rabbit popula- tion, too) punish the cat community. But Felix is more than hanging on in there: he is on the march, and is now a serious danger to many varieties of defenceless nesting birds on Kerguelen. A huge and sustained attempt to eradicate all cats during the 1970s failed completely, though thousands were shot.

Cats 1, Rest of the World 0, and all from half-a-dozen progenitors. You will see at once why this fascinates the Darwinians: Kerguelen is one of the very few places in the world where cats battle against the ele- ments, alone and in a state of nature. Their progress can be studied almost ad infinitum: a perfect little controlled laboratory.

Estimates of cat numbers are speculative, but there are many thousands at least. And they are all — every single one, so far as we know — black and white, or black, or white. A favourite livery is black with white bib and socks and medium-length fur. As cats go, this Kerguelen tribe lacks elegance. Legs are short and muscular, heads flat, necks thick and noses snub. Well-suited to pulling rabbits out of holes backwards, these cats are built somewhat along the lines of their own prey.

As I write, a force 8 gale is imminent (these are routine) and snow is arriving hori- zontally. It is night (nights here now last 15 hours) and we are in a small cabin on what at first sight might be mistaken for prairie, until you notice that the green is partly moss and the moss is partly bog and the whole vast landscape is splashed with little lakes, laced with rivers and trenched with natural canals.

With me is Renaud Kauffer, a postgradu- ate doing feline field work for his professor in France. Another volunteer, Stephan, is helping, too. We arrived here for a week, on a tractor, travelling the 40 kilometres from Port-aux-Francais. We have a gun. Stephan shoots a few rabbits, which are then skinned and used as bait in steel cages set to snap shut when a cat enters and tugs at the rabbit- meat. These are laid at intervals behind a long stretch of beach.

We check the traps every day. When a cat is caught (eight, so far) it is carried in a sack back to the shack at the top of the beach. Renaud weighs and then dopes the cat, measures the head, teeth and legs, and takes a little blood and a snatch of fur for samples. Then a transponder the size of a grain of rice is injected just under the skin so the cat is tagged for identification.

Once the animal has come round, it is left to recuperate, then released in exactly the place where caught. I watched cat num- ber 205, little more than a kitten, who we called Carrie, scamper off among the bur- rows. She looked as if she thought it had all been just a dream.

For surely these Kerguelen cats dream? And, if they do, what do they dream? Have 3,500 years of living with humans, has the legacy of the Pharaohs, the patronage of Caesars and kings, countless hearths and saucers of milk, cat-flaps, cat-baskets and Whiskas with rabbit been wiped from the race-memory and great collective cat uncon- scious in just 50 years, 50 cat-generations?

Have they quite forgotten us? Is there no feline dela vu? I cannot believe it. Surely some trace lingers, some vague and unshaped yearning stirs for the fireside and lap? Looking into young Carrie's eyes, half- open as she slept under anaesthetic, I thought I sensed her dream. Released, she turned for a moment and looked at us. What was she thinking? Now where have I seen such things before?'

Driving past the beach-shack on our tractor, Renaud pointed. The shack was distant but we could just discern a big black cat — a furry blot of Indian ink in a sudden burst of wintry sunshine. She was sitting on the veranda, sunning herself. Why there? Call me anthropomorphist (Renaud does), but I have a theory. For some reason she couldn't quite put her paw on, it just felt right.