Long Cat, Long Pig

I decided instantly that the ear-splitting shriek that accompanied the starting of my car engine early that winter morning was animal not mechanical. Fearing the worst, I backed quickly out of the drive and set off on the road to campus. Along the way I knew of a quiet spot where I could investigate without the accompaniment of prying eyes. Like a forensic pathologist under the open bonnet, I quickly pieced together the cause of death - shredding, and the murder weapon – the fan. It was clear that the landlady’s tabby cat, which always slept on top of my car bonnet, had decided it was cold enough to creep in under the bonnet that night. It had lain along the top of the spark plugs on the warm engine. At the first turn of the key it had received a ten thousand volt shock from the spark plugs which had catapulted it forward into the accelerating fan. It now lay tightly coiled around the fan belt pulleys.

Slowly, and with some reverence, I unwound the cat from the pulleys and untangled it from the fan belt. To my astonishment I found that it was still in one continuous piece, but was now more than six feet long. I dug a hole beside the road with a tyre lever and buried the cat like a python, coil by coil.

I remembered the grizzly saga of the long cat many years later when I inspected the meat stands in Onitsha market sprawled along the banks of the Niger River. Onitsha market, deep in the forest belt, was said to be the largest open air market in Africa. An air of doom and juju-laced, foreboding pervaded the entire market as it did most of the West African forest belt. Meat from every imaginable creature in the forest - and some unimaginable - was on sale on the miles of fly-infested meat stands. The unimaginable, they euphemistically called ‘long pig’.