Basil’s Reign Continues (3). His Barbaric tendencies start to make…
By: Lm Botha
Tags: Personal Essay, Animals, Humorous Life Lessons, Humor, Cats

His Barbaric tendencies start to make themselves known.

Basil with a toy he destroyed — photo by author

This is part 3 of Basil’s story, links to the previous essays are available at the end of this article should you wish to catch up. Previously, we discussed Basil’s cast-iron stomach, we’ll just pick up where we left off.

Geckos are Basil’s crack. I think it’s the geckos’ livers that are toxic but I may very well be wrong, point is, most cats will eat a gecko and then regurgitate it or they only eat the parts that don’t make them feel sick. Not Basil. He eats the whole gecko (barring the head). He was a prolific gecko hunter, and I was always finding the heads of long eaten geckos around the house. Because the area where we stayed was quite rural and we had a lot of shrubs geckos were plentiful.

They were especially plentiful when I turned the veranda light on in the evening which attracted insects which then attracted geckos which, in turn, attracted Basil. He would sit on the veranda and stare longingly at the geckos on the ceiling. It was a waiting game, if he stared long enough one of them would fall to the ground and Basil was on it. Hubby and I theorised that Basil staring at the geckos made them nervous so their feet would start sweating, become slippery and they would lose their grip on the ceiling. I don’t understand why else they would just randomly drop from the ceiling like that.

Basil with a female “Bloukopkoggelmander” — photo by author

The geckos themselves were interesting to observe. We watched them catch and eat insects bigger than themselves, our favourite gecko ‘show’ was ‘Gecko Wars’. Two or more geckos would get aggressive with each other and it was fascinating watching them posture and fight. They also make quite loud sounds when they are being aggressive.

On one occasion I was lounging in a chair on the veranda, reading. Basil came jogging up to me making very pitiful mewling sounds. I could see something in his mouth, but he wasn’t doing his usual prey call. On closer inspection Basil did not have anything in his mouth, in fact, a gecko had caught Basil! The gecko was biting Basil’s bottom lip, just hanging onto it for dear life. Basil could not get it off and I struggled to make it release its grip on him. After a bit of gecko and cat wrestling, it released his lip and I released the gecko back into the garden; I felt that after how hard it fought not to be a cat snack it deserved a second chance at life. Survival of the fittest as Darwin said. Sometimes I wonder if there is a strain of ‘super-gecko’ around our old house, where only the smartest and fastest survived Basil’s decimation of the gecko population. As we live in the city now, Basil’s roaming days are over, the gecko population is safe; there aren’t many geckos to be found in the concrete jungle anyway. We keep a few plastic toy lizards that we sticky-tape to the walls for his amusement, he also loves to chase them, batting them across the room as we slide the plastic lizards over the floor for the poor, gecko deprived cat.

Sleeping extravagantly — photo by author

At this stage, Basil was just about 6 months old. While his antics amused me and I was completely smitten with him, I was also completely exhausted. It was common to hear ‘Basil, no! Basil, WHY?’ being yelled in our house. I must admit, that is still a common exclamation in our house today. At the time we were still learning how much havoc one gangly, little cat could cause.