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Gordon the Self-Made Cat
by Peter S. Beagle
(From the author’s upcoming story collection The Line Between)
O nce upon a time to a family of house mice there was born a son named
Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers
and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what
went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest
of his family. He was forever asking why everything had to be the way it
was, and never satisfied with the answer. Why did mice eat cheese? Why
did they live in the dark and only go out when it was dark? Where did mice
come from, anyway? What were people? Why did people smell so funny?
Suppose mice were big and people were tiny? Suppose mice could fly? Most
mice don’t ask many questions, but Gordon never stopped.
One evening, when Gordon was only a few weeks old, his next-to-eldest
sister was sent out to see if anything interesting had been left open in the
pantry. She never returned. Gordon’s father shrugged sadly and spread his
front paws, and said, “The cat.”
“What’s a cat?” Gordon asked.
His mother and father looked at one another and sighed. “They have to
know sometime,” his father said. “Better he learns it at home than on the
streets.”
His mother sniffled a little and said, “But he’s so young,” and his father
answered, “Cats don’t care.” So they told Gordon about cats right then,
expecting him to start crying and saying that there weren’t any such things.
It’s a hard idea to get used to. But Gordon only asked, “Why do cats eat
mice?”
“I guess we taste very good,” his father said.
Gordon said, “But cats don’t have to eat mice. They get plenty of other food
that probably tastes as good. Why should anybody eat anybody if he
doesn’t have to?”
“Gordon,” said his father. “Listen to me. There are two kinds of creatures in
the world. There are animals that hunt, and animals that are hunted. We
mice just happen to be the kind of animal that gets hunted, and it doesn’t
really matter if the cat is hungry or not. It’s the way life is. It’s really a
great honor to be the hunted, if you just look at it the right way.”
“Phooey on that,” said Gordon. “Where do I go to learn to be a cat?”
They thought he was joking, but as soon as Gordon was old enough to go
places by himself, he packed a clean shirt and some peanut butter, and
 
started off for cat school. “I love you very much,” he said to his parents
before he left, “but this business of being hunted for the rest of my life just
because I happened to be born a mouse is not for me.” And off he went, all
by himself.
All cats go to school, you know, whether you ever see them going or not.
Dogs don’t, but cats always have and always will. There are a great many
cat schools, so Gordon found one easily enough, and he walked bravely up
the front steps and knocked at the door. He said that he wanted to speak
to the Principal.
He almost expected to be eaten right there, but the cats—students and
teachers alike—were so astonished that they let him pass through, and one
of the teachers took him to the Principal’s office. Gordon could feel the cats
looking at him, and hear the sounds their noses made as they smelled how
good he was, but he held on tight to the suitcase with his shirt and the
peanut butter, and he never looked back.
The Principal was a fat old tiger cat who chewed on his tail all the time he
was talking to Gordon. “You must be out of your mind,” he said when
Gordon told him he wanted to be a cat. “I’d smack you up this minute, but
it’s bad luck to eat crazies. Get out of here! The day mice go to cat
school...”
“Why not?” said Gordon. “Is it in writing? Where does it say that I can’t go
to school here if I want?”
Well, of course there’s nothing in the rules of cat schools that says mice
can’t enroll. Nobody ever thought of putting it in. The Principal folded his
paws and said, “Gordon, look at it this way—”
“You look at it my way,” said Gordon. “I want to be a cat, and I bet I’d
make a better one than the dopey-looking animals I’ve seen in this school.
Most of them look as if they wouldn’t even make good mice! So let’s make
a deal. You let me come to school here and study for one term, and if at
the end of that time I’m not doing better than any cat in the school—if
even one cat has better grades than I have—then you can eat me and
that’ll be the end of it. Is that fair?”
No cat can resist a challenge like that. But before agreeing, the Principal
insisted on one small change: at the end of the term, if Gordon didn’t have
the very best marks in the school, then the privilege of eating him would go
to the cat that did.
“Ought to encourage some of those louts to work harder,” the Principal said
to himself, as Gordon left his office. “He’s crazy, but he’s right—most of
them wouldn’t even make good mice. I almost hope he does it.”
So Gordon went to cat school. Every day he sat at his special little desk,
surrounded by a hundred kittens and half-grown cats who would have liked
nothing better than to leap on him and play games with him for a while
before they gobbled him. He learned how to wash himself, and what to do
to keep his claws sharp, and how to watch everything in the room while
 
pretending to be asleep. There was a class on Dealing With Dogs, and
another on Getting Down From Trees, which is much harder than climbing
up, and also a particularly scholarly seminar on the various meanings of
“Bad Kitty!” Gordon’s personal favorite was the Visions class, which had to
do with the enchanting things all cats can see that no one else ever
does—the great, gliding ancestors, and faraway castles, and mysterious
forests full of monsters to chase. The Professor of Visions told his
colleagues that he had never had such a brilliant student. “It would be a
crime to eat such a mouse!” he proclaimed everywhere. “An absolute,
shameful, yummy crime.”
The class in Mouse-Hunting was a bit awkward at first, because usually the
teacher asks one of the students to be the mouse, and in Gordon’s case the
Principal felt that would be too risky. But Gordon insisted on being chased
like everyone else, and not only was he never caught (well, almost never;
there was one blue Persian who could turn on a dime), but when he took
his own turn at chasing, he proved to be a natural expert. In fact his
instant mastery of the Flying Pounce caused his teacher and the entire
class to sit up and applaud. Gordon took three bows and an encore.
There was also a class where the cats learned the necessities of getting
along with people: how to lie in laps, how to keep from scratching furniture
even when you feel you have to, what to do when children pick you up, and
how to ask for food or affection in such a sweet manner that people call
other people to look at you. These classes always made Gordon a little sad.
He didn’t suppose that he would ever be a real “people” cat, for who would
want to hold a mouse on his lap, or scratch it behind the ears while it
purred? Still, he paid strict attention in People Class, as he did in all the
others, for all the cats knew that whoever did best in school that term
would be the one who ate him, and they worked harder than they ever had
in their lives. The Principal said that they were becoming the best students
in the school’s history, and he talked openly about making this a regular
thing, one mouse to a term.
When all the marks were in, and all the grades added up, two students led
the rankings: Gordon and the blue Persian. Their scores weren’t even a
whisker’s thickness apart. In the really important classes, like Running and
Pouncing, Climbing, Stalking, and Waiting For The Prey To Forget You’re
Still There; and in matters of feline manners such as Washing, Tail
Etiquette, The Elegant Yawn, Sleeping in Undignified Positions, and Making
Sure You Get Enough Food
Without Looking Greedy (101 and 102)—in all of these Gordon and the blue
Persian were first, and the rest nowhere. Besides that, both could meow in
five different dialects: Persian, Abyssinian, Siamese, Burmese (which
almost no cat who isn’t Burmese ever learns), and basic tiger.
But there can only be one Top Cat to a term; no ties allowed. In order to
decide the matter once and for all between them, the Principal announced
that Gordon and the blue Persian would have to face one another in a
competitive mouse roundup.
The Persian and Gordon got along quite well, all things considered, so they
shook paws—carefully—and the Persian purred, “No hard feelings.”
 
“None at all,” Gordon answered. “If anyone here got to eat me, I’d much
rather it was you.”
“Very sporting of you,” the Persian said. “I hope so too.”
“But it won’t happen,” Gordon said.
The blue Persian never had a chance. Once he and Gordon were set on their
marks in a populous mouse neighborhood, Gordon ambushed and
outsmarted and cornered all but a handful of the very quickest mice, and
did it in a style so smooth, so effortlessly elegant—so catlike —that the
Persian finally threw up his paws and surrendered. In front of the entire
faculty and student body of the cat school, he announced, “I yield to
Gordon. He’s a better cat than I am, and
I’m not ashamed to admit it. If all mice were like him, we cats would be
vegetarians.” (Persians are very dramatic.)
The cheering was so wild and thunderous that no one objected in the least
when Gordon freed all the mice he had captured. Cats can appreciate a
grand gesture, and everyone had already had lunch.
Gordon had won his bet, and, like the blue Persian, the Principal was cat
enough to accept it graciously. He scheduled a celebration, which the whole
school attended, and at the end of the party he announced that Gordon was
now to be considered as much a cat as any student in the school, if not
more so. He gave Gordon a little card to show that he was a cat in good
standing, and all the students cheered, and Gordon made another speech
that began, “Fellow cats...” As he spoke, he wished very much that his
parents could be there to see what he had accomplished, and just how
different things could be if you just asked questions and weren’t afraid of
new ideas.
Being acknowledged the best cat in the school didn’t make Gordon let up in
his studies. Instead, he worked even harder, and did so well that he
graduated with the special degree of felis maximus , which is Latin for some
cat! He stayed on at the school to teach a seminar in Evasive Maneuvers,
which proved very popular, and a course in the Standing Jump (for a bird
that comes flying over when you weren’t looking).
The story of his new life spread everywhere among all mice, and grew very
quickly into a myth more terrifying than any cat could have been. They
whispered of “Gordon the Terrible,” “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” and,
simply, “The Unspeakable,” and told midnight tales of a gigantic mouse
who lashed his tail and sprang at them with his razor claws out and his
savage yellow eyes blazing; a mouse without pity who hunted them out in
their deepest hiding places,
walking without a sound. They believed unquestioningly that he ate mice
like gingersnaps, and laughingly handed over to his cat friends those he
was too full to devour. There was even a dreadful legend that Gordon had
eaten his own family, and that he frequently took kittens from the school
on field trips in order to teach them personally the secret mouse ways that
no mere cat could ever have known.
 
These stories made Gordon deeply unhappy when he heard them, because
he believed with absolute conviction that what he had achieved was for the
good of all mice everywhere. Whether he trapped a lone mouse or cornered
a dozen trembling in an attic or behind a refrigerator, he would say the
same thing to them: “Look at me. Look at me! I am a mouse like
you—nothing more, nothing less—and yet I walk with cats every day, and I
am not eaten! I am respected, I am admired, I am even powerful among
cats—and every one of you could be like me! Do not believe that we mice
are born only to be hunted, humiliated, tormented, and finally gobbled up.
It is not true! Instead of huddling in the shadows, in constant lifelong
terror, pitiful little balls of fur, we too can be sleek, fierce hunters, fearing
nothing and no one. Run now and spread the word! You must spread the
word!”
Saying that, he would step back and let the mice scatter, hoping each time
that they would finally understand what he was trying to show them. But it
simply never happened. The mice always scurried away, convinced that they
had escaped only by great good fortune, and myths and legends of the
terrible Self-Made Cat were all that spread among them, growing ever more
horrifying, ever more chilling. It didn’t matter that not one mouse had ever
actually seen
Gordon doing any of the frightful things he was supposed to have done.
That’s the way it is with legends.
Now it happened that Gordon was walking down the street one day, on his
way to a faculty meeting, padding along like a leopard, twitching his tail
like a lion, and making the eager little noises in his throat that a tiger
makes when he smells food. Quite suddenly an enormous shadow fell
across his path, so big that he looked up to see if he were going through a
tunnel.
What he saw was a dog. What he actually saw was a leg, for this dog was
huge, too big for even a full-grown cat to have understood his real size
without looking twice. The dog rumbled, “Oh, goody! I love mice. Lots of
phosphorus in mice. Yummy.”
Gordon crouched, tail lashing, and lifted the fur along his spine. “Watch it,
dog,” he said warningly. “Don’t mess with me, I’m telling you.”
“Oh, how cute,” the dog said. “He’s playing he’s a cat. I’m a cat too.
Meow.”
“I am a cat!” Gordon arched his back until it ached, hissing and spitting and
growling in his throat, all more or less at the same time. “I am! You want
to see my card? Look, right here.”
“A crazy,” the dog said wonderingly. “They say it’s bad luck to eat a crazy.
Good thing I’m not superstitious.”
Having given the proper First Warning, exactly as he’d been taught, Gordon
moved quickly to the Second—the lightning-swift slash of the right paw
across the nose. Gordon had to leap straight up to reach the dog’s big wet
 

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