This Cricket Insolence Will Not Stand

So, Matilda—the fuzzy dingus pictured above—hates crickets. She hates them.

Occasionally, a cricket shows up in the lower level of the house, making its crickety noise and hopping about like a sproingy thing, as crickets do.

This infuriates Matilda.

She cannot brook their noise, and she absolutely refuses to brook their hopping about, particularly in such an unpredictable manner.

But what Matilda will not do is kill the cricket. Instead, she will stand near the cricket and yowl at the top of her lungs until I come and remove the cricket from her view, whether by relocation or murder.

(I always try for relocation, but some crickets regrettably refuse to cooperate.)

The other day, I was in the bathroom on the lower level, when a cricket went hopping by, with Matilda in hot pursuit. There's a corner right outside the bathroom door, and Matilda came tearing around it after the cricket. She slid right into the far well and kept going, like she was in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

I burst out laughing, because this is typically ridiculous Matilda behavior.

She then apparently cornered the cricket, and began her irate yowling. When I failed to immediately appear to remove the interloper from her territory, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

A moment later, she strolled into the bathroom and dropped the cricket at my feet, then put her paw on top of it to hold it in place. She looked up at me with an expression of focused indignance, and gave the longest, most plaintive meeeeeeooooowwwwww I've ever heard.

"Okay," I responded through laughter. "I will take care of the cricket."

She gazed at me with narrow eyes. Waiting for me to make good on my word. She wasn't about to leave that cricket until she was absolutely certain I would dispatch it from her view.

Nothing, but nothing, raises Matilda's ire like crickets, you see.

I reached down toward her and only when my hand was within millimeters of her paw did she harrumph away, leaving me to flush the cricket down the toilet.