It’s not that I didn’t have more important things to do—such as my work, which now included writing articles for the newspaper—but I was held captive by an ecosystem.

Then various things happened that, after they’d taken place a few times, changed my opinion of the cat and made me treat him differently. I began to notice the dog looking scared to push open the door to the back garden, which he used to do vigorously whenever he pleased, or whenever we sent him outside. Now he’d make a timid attempt, barely nudging the door, as if too weak to do anything else, and then stop and look up at me plaintively. I realized the cat was often on the other side, apparently waiting for his chance to attack.

One afternoon when I was petting the cat, he rolled onto his back for the first time and started playing the way cats like to, trapping my hand between his front paws. But then he got up, rubbed himself against my legs a few times, walked around behind me, and gave me a scratch and a sharp nip on the calf. I didn’t like this one bit, and what I liked even less was the way he walked off in supercilious triumph, waving his tail from side to side. Exactly the same thing happened a few days later, and this time his claws went deeper and drew a few drops of blood. I had to put iodine on the wound. And so I resolved to stop playing with that treacherous cat, and these days I eye him with suspicion.

Another time, I saw him waiting patiently by the gap in the fence the dog uses to come back from the empty lot, as if guarding the entrance to a mousehole. When I happened to glance over later, he was in the same place, and the dog was making his way through the gap. I saw with my own eyes how the cat swiped at him with his claws, and I heard the dog’s howl of pain. That was it for the cat, as far as I was concerned. I stopped feeding him, and when he became particularly tiresome, meowing endlessly under the kitchen window, I chased him away with jugfuls of water, or even the hose. I focused on restoring the dog’s confidence in himself and in my affection for him. I tried to make him see that things were different now; I started feeding him in the back garden, for example, and leaving the cat to meow outside the window or the door in vain.