My Cat and I Teamed Up Like Lionesses to Hunt a Moth-and Rediscovered Our Ancient Bond

We were leaving in the morning. Finally. Which meant I needed sleep. One problem though: my room had been claimed by a tyrant, a hostile invader who would stop at nothing to terrorize what was left of my night, playing on the ancient instincts so deeply entwined in my nervous system I couldn't possibly ignore it.

The trouble had begun earlier that day, in the rush to get ready for a long-awaited trip to Crestline with my boyfriend. Sure, it's the middle of nowhere, but that's kind of the point, and besides, if you wanted to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 2026, this was the place. Numerous firework shows over man-made lakes awaited us, as well as a parade with horses and a band called Fifes and Drums (real period instruments!) and ladies throwing foil-wrapped hot dogs, complete with little ketchup and mustard packets, into the crowd, a good portion of which were wearing overalls hand-painted with the American flag.

Levi Frey

So you can see why it was important that I had all my red-white-and-blue clothing clean and ready. Unfortunately, I forgot about the machinery curse that follows me and makes every machine I touch instantly break without explanation. Long story short, the dryer went to appliance heaven that day... or appliance Hades. I claim no true responsibility. It was the curse. When it became apparent that turning it off and on wasn't going to do the trick, I said the final rites and laid my damp clothing out on every available piece of backyard furniture to dry in the sun for the rest of the day.

That was how the intruder got in.

After an unsuccessful evening scouring the shoe store for a single pair of sandals that would fit my wide, short feet, I came home and brought in what was dry to begin packing. At bedtime, as usual, my petite grey tabby Artemis requested passage into my room to spend the night curled up peacefully on my pelvis. (Except for the parts of the night when she would wake up to seek out some tasty plastic, thus earning her banishment from the room). We settled in, light off, suitcase to one side, alarm set for barely seven hours later... and then the troubles began.

It started with an erratic crinkling sound from somewhere towards the floor in front of the bed (or was it to the side? I couldn't tell). The cat's ears instantly perked up, two swiveling triangular radar dishes. With her little body tense and ready to pounce, me being the launch pad, it was hard to relax into sleep. "It's ok," I told her. "It's just the luggage settling. And the huge mess of random clothes and papers I choose to live in rather than spend a few days tidying up."

Filip Silvaljic

But the cat didn't let it go, and the sound kept happening, and soon I realized the sound... was moving. A crinkling, fumbling, ruffling sound, circling the room frantically. Was there something in my room? (Besides me, and the cat, and the aforementioned inanimate mess?) Presently, whatever was making the sound seemed to drop to the floor near the desk to my left.

It was definitely something. I had to deal with it or I'd never sleep; time was ticking. I heaved myself off the bed. Artemis eagerly hopped off with me. When I turned on the weak, buzzy lamp, she cast me a pitying glance: you poor night-blind bipeds and your buzzy lamps. Then we both set to examining the space under the desk: she on one side of the leg where the sound had stopped, and me on the other side. I quickly satisfied myself that there was nothing there – it must have been my imagination. The sound was just random crinkling as objects settled throughout the room.

I explained as much to Artemis, but she just looked at me again with that uncomprehending pity. She wouldn't leave the spot under the desk alone, and it made me tense to have her messing about while I was trying to sleep – I didn't want her to change her target from the imaginary source of the noise to one of the many ziplocs lying around to be organized for the trip in the morning. Ignoring her meows of indignant protest, I removed her from the room and tried again to fall asleep.

Every so often there was another crinkle. I mused on how annoying it was that my prehistoric nerve endings, designed to prickle at the possibility of a scorpion in the straw or a smilodon stepping on sticks at the edge of the camp at night, wouldn't quiet down in the face of some innocuous nocturnal crinkling, even when I told those nerve endings I desperately needed to power down for the night, because period instruments and firework shows and traffic if we left too late in the morning.

I also mused on how annoying it was that my cat, in the thrall of her own prehistoric instincts and completely insensitive to my plight, felt the need to pace just outside my door, crying to get in. And this was not the pathetic cry of a baby kitty wanting cuddles. This was a war cry, a hymn of the injustice of not being permitted to do battle with whatever she thought was in here with me. Perhaps she believed I was being eaten alive by invisible mice with no one to save me. More likely she believed I was keeping the invisible mice all to myself, hunting them for sport in the dark, and she wasn't invited despite sixteen years of faithfully sleeping on top of my pelvis.

A hurricane of fluttering stole me from my thoughts. I snapped on the light and stood in its buzzy glow, heart pounding, eyes dashing to every corner of the room, as outside the cat protested ever louder. Something was in here. It wasn't just my flotsam and jetsam settling. Some creepy-crawly winged insect must have hitchhiked in on the clothes I'd laid out to dry outside, and now, for its little insect reasons, it would not be still. Normally, I'll sleep among bugs if they leave me alone. I've slept knowing I was sharing my quarters with a peaceful spider. Spiders make decisions with forethought. They move with the frozen grace of a malnourished ballerina performing an adagio number, which allows plenty of time to make alternate plans if one of them appears to be moving in a path that might collide with my own. Besides, I've read that the average person swallows eight spiders a year, so I figure I better let them hang out in my room, or risk becoming less average. Frankly, if I've swallowed that many of their brethren, the least I could do is offer them room and board until they succumb to their fate. Insects are different. They fly around unpredictably and loudly, and somehow the six legs are more freaky to me than a spider's eight – like they couldn't commit to being either a quadruped or an arachnid. It makes them untrustworthy. All this to explain why I needed to find this guy and cast him (or her) out of my room before I could sleep in peace. And as always, the minutes were slipping by.

There it was! Perched imperiously in the space between the top of the drapes and the ceiling. Literally looking down on me, its psychological prey, its captive. A moth, weirdly fluffy as moths are wont to be, pale brown with dotted wings. In another circumstance I might have found the creature intriguing. But now it was just irksome, and vaguely ghostly. I didn't care what its story was. It was in my room and it was threatening to mess up my plans. It had to go.

The couch was too short to sleep on comfortably, but it would have to do. It was also where people normally put their butts, which isn't the most hygienic to sleep on, but I could just throw a sheet over it. The living room was still a place of active conversation and shimmering lamplight from those household members who didn't have to be awake in just over six hours, and if I couldn't sleep with a crinkle, I probably couldn't sleep through a well-lit argument about pineapples, but there was no way I was going back in that room to be at the mercy of that thing. Artemis slinked up to me and shot me a look. Never in sixteen years have I seen you this pathetic, she seemed to say. Beaten by a moth. A moth that will eat your clothes.

Ok, that was it. I'm not an especially prideful person, at least not when it comes to my bug-battling skills, and I'd been prepared to let the moth hang out in my room until I got back from the trip if it so pleased... until it occurred to me that the creature would have to eat something. My closet door doesn't close completely, and a banquet of mostly thrifted dresses would seem to beckon like ambrosia. Those were my dresses. I was not about to surrender them to some six-legged dictator. I took a deep breath, glanced at Artemis, who stared back with a bit too much excitement, and then we both tramped back down the hall to my room. I'd closed the door to keep the moth contained for the night. Now, I swung it open. Perhaps the light from the hallway would attract it, and I could gently encourage it to the front door and let it out that way.

It rested now on the drapes, wings closed, facing stubbornly away from the light in the hallway. I didn't have time to wait for the little gears in its little moth mind to slowly strike twelve. Maybe I could speed up the process by luring it out the door with my phone flashlight. Artemis watched the proceedings intently as I reached for my phone, envisioning a peaceful end to the conflict, a treaty signed, a quiet room...

Charis Deitemeyer

I didn't expect what came next. I'm not one for violence. As irritated as I was with the insect and the whole situation, I recognized that the moth didn't really intend to invade my room and was probably as freaked out as I was, having awakened in a strange environment on the wrong side of the window glass. What I interpreted as imperiousness may have been a defense mechanism, a facial expression learned so as to disguise social anxiety.

That said, perhaps it was the only possible outcome, an inexorable fate, like that of a Greek tragedy. That I should shine the phone flashlight beside the moth. That the moth should not follow in an orderly fashion, but rather be driven mad with desire, and flap around erratically, quickly startling me into dropping the phone. That the cat, drawn to the moth's wild movements as the moth was drawn to the light, should spring into action like I haven't seen her in years, first levitating from the floor to the bed and then diving after the moth into the narrow space between the bed and the wall corner, the sounds of the scuffle ringing out like the roars of a gladiator arena, except this was mostly ruffling and some mild thumping. Finally, that my beautiful cat should emerge from behind the bed, rising like Orpheus from the underworld, an asymmetrical diadem of cobwebs gracing her small grey head. No more crinkling, fluttering, or imperious glances from the drapes.

I gently removed the cobweb diadem and expressed my undying gratitude with several kisses that Artemis surely found embarrassing, but she suffered them nonetheless. I checked under the bed, but there was no sign that a moth had ever been there. My persnickety cat, who won't even eat most treats without intense deliberation, had devoured her quarry. Hopefully it wasn't bad for her (after several weeks now, there's been no sign of any ill effects). In her eyes was a fresh awakeness, not the same alertness as when the moth was alive and awaiting her skilled dispatchment, but a sort of primeval spark, as if she'd remembered some deep-buried part of her identity. We named her Artemis when we were kids, and way too entranced by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series. But she was never much of a hunter, at least not when we tried to get her to play with fuzzy mouse toys or leopard-print ribbons on sticks. Maybe she was only into hunting when the stakes were a little higher.

At last, I sank into sleep. My cat sat proudly on top of my left thigh, in a relaxed posture, rather like the Sphinx of Ancient Egypt, her peridot eyes slowly closing to join and guard me in dreams. I realized how protected I feel with her ferrying me between worlds every night. People tend to think of dogs as loyal defenders, while cats are viewed more as free agents, self-domesticated and barely domestic, uninterested in the feelings and needs of the humans they see as staff, not masters. And indeed, dogs and humans have gone so far as to influence each other's evolution, the partnership is that old. To many classic dog breeds, hunting alongside a human is the most natural activity in the world. And we often overlook how much the canines have affected us, too, in the way we delegate to and communicate with them. But a cat hunting in tandem with a human, the way Artemis looked for the moth with me, and smacked it down with the help of my flashlight drawing it out? That wasn't something I knew existed.

Rather than being the result of generations of breeding for the purpose, if a cat hunts by your side it's a conscious choice. I could flatter myself that Artemis knew I was upset by the moth and wanted to defend me from losing sleep, or I could be overly parsimonious and assume I was merely her accessory or even that she viewed me as an unskilled interloper on her hunting party. But I know what I saw. We were a pair of lionesses for a few minutes that night, and when a monstrous six-legged winged hyena who wouldn't shut up edged into our territory to threaten the peace, we teamed up to do what needed to be done. She was the ringleader and the closer; I was the bumbling young cub still learning the ropes. In the end, our sovereign territory (the bed) was secured. Plus, we obtained a nighttime snack, which thankfully she did not offer to share with me.

While there's a primordial hunting bond between dogs and humans, cats are so much more connected to their roots that much of what they do could just as easily be taking place in the shrublands south of the Sahara thousands of years ago (laser-pointer chases and catnip reveries on the donut bed notwithstanding). When a cat invites a human into some of that antediluvian action, it's a special honor, a moment of mutual understanding between two species who are still learning each other's ways. And while I've known Artemis for sixteen years – or thought I knew her – the fact that she can still surprise me with a different side of herself tells me how wild my housecat really is, in every sense of the word.