LEGEND.

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I have spoken before about Jukka the stuntcat, named for Jukka Hilden of The Dudesons. He is at that stage of adolescent catdom, from about 18 – 30 months old, when he does not believe he needs any of the affection he craved as a baby. If you pat him now, he purrs loudly while he clasps your forearm in his front claws, rakes and kicks with his back legs, and bites any unprotected flesh.

Lion cubs and young wombats do the same. It is part of the natural incentive for parents to turf their offspring of a certain age out of the nest with a stout steelcapped boot. Cat lovers, and modern parents of GenY and iGen who do not demand their antisocial bairns leave the home, know that this phase will pass and the errant offspring will settle again into domestic bliss; calm will once again descend.

From when he was a tiny little fluffball, I regretted allowing my son to call him Jukka. The Bible is full of reverence for names and their supernatural association with nature and actions. Jukka was theologically well named. I had, past tense, a collection of lusterware built up over a long period, which sat on lovely vintage linen runners on a deco walnut sideboard. Sadly, the sideboard stands at the end of the table, forming a natural part of the runway between the table, the windowsill, the glass front display cabinet, the telly unit,  the lounge chair, the recliner, and the table. Stunt kittens can do that circuit in less than ten seconds, allowing for the skidding of the vintage linen, the smashing of lusterware china, and the deep and permanently damaging claw skids across the top of the walnut sideboard. Amusing variations of the game can be enjoyed by swerving left from the sideboard, and launching a vertical assault on the sheer embroidered curtains. Hours of fun.

He has grown, as I say, and is no longer content with foolish but harmless hijinx. He catches and eats rabbit kittens from the neighbour’s junk pile. He eats them under my bed. The old cats, settling into their dotage now and softening around the middle as we all do, are too well fed to hunt, but warm prey is not so mired in the fog of memory that they do not smell it and want it. Just a little taste.

No. Jukka does not share his kill. He growls and eats every last bit. All of it. Every. Last. Bit. Theoretically impossible.

So he’s reached the age, as all the others did before him, of mandatory incarceration from sundown to sunup. [Wildlife lovers: My cats have always been kept indoors through the witching hours, but my old cat, Ben, has hyperthyroidism and is as senile as your old uncle Harry. He demands the cat window open at all hours and I have relented. He has no teeth.  Also, rabbits are declared pests here and any breeding warren found on a property attracts a fine of $80 000. DPI rabbit board treatment of warrens is cyanide tablets and/or release of live calicivirus (Rabbit haemorragic disease (RHD).]

Not content with this new no-hunting policy, Jukka has researched species which are about in the day time.

At our house, this includes chickens.

When he was still very small, he devoted hours to hunting the bantam hens. It was a good thing, too, because he was small and hens have very sharp beaks. They are the modern descendants of T-Rex, after all. As an adolescent thrillseeker now, he would dearly love to eat the chicks, but he knows the fluffy mouthfuls are protected by very large, ill-tempered Light Sussex mother hens. The result is squarking chaos every now and then as Jukka rushes full tilt through the scattering flock of chooks. There is no gain that I can see from this habit. All he could possibly achieve is to wreak momentary havoc, and to make the hens hate him to the point of attacking him whenever he strolls through the yard. He has willfully created his own gauntlet to run.

He then turned his attention to creatures further down the evolutionary line from defunct mega fauna, eg  whip snakes. We have a billion whip snakes. They thrive in the fern beds and under the leaf litter in the densest parts of the garden. They are quick, but not as quick as Jukka. Now most information sites will warn of the danger to small mammals from their bite, and most notably the localized pain and swelling resulting. Jukka returned to base camp yesterday with a whip snake held at about midpoint, while the snake repeatedly struck and bit onto the side of his face.

Having announced to me that he had caught himself a whip snake, he let the poor wee thing go, only moderately chewed, to disappear under the lip of courtyard concrete. He felt no apparent pain and had no swelling of the cheeks or jowls; in fact, the only notable effect of his brush with lethal Australian wildlife seems to have been that he was affectionate and smoochy for about ten minutes. Proud of himself, it seems.

The upshot of this and other tales of thrilling adventure and devil-may-care derring-do, is that Jukka has been stylistically renamed.

He is still Jukka, of course. But he is no longer Jukka Hilden, stuntcat. He has become Juk Norris, legend.

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