Last December I flew
to Britain to attend the International Meteorological Conference held in London.
It was to discuss the recent abnormal weather that had taken place in the city
called Catadoupe near Canterbury.
I wanted to visit the
city before attending the conference. So, upon arrival at Paddington Station, I
bought a ticket for Catadoupe. As I had about 30 minutes before the train
started, I dropped in at a station café and ate some snack listening to the
radio weather forecast. It said:
“Torrential downpours
are being predicted in Catadupe this evening. The rainfall intensity is
expected to be 120 heads per hour. The residents are strongly recommended to take
every precaution to prevent injury.”
I wondered why the
radio said, “120 heads” instead of “120 millimeters.” Also I did not understand
about the caution against injury.
When I arrived at
Catadupe around five o’clock, the sky was threatening. While I was walking along
the street to my hotel, I noticed that every pedestrian was carrying an
air-raid hood under his or her arm. A middle-aged kind-looking pedestrian
happened to glance at me and walked quickly to me.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“But I presume you are a stranger here. Do you have a hood?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“I have a spare. Please
use this. The first one will drop at any moment,” she said and walked away in
haste.
I wondered why she
gave it to me and what “the first one” was. When I walked for a few minutes, I
saw, just in front of me, a cat falling from the sky. It landed on the ground
on its paws, meowed, and ran away. I looked up at the dark sky wondering why it
had dropped. I saw nothing unusual.
The next moment,
however, I heard a dog’s barking coming down closer and closer to me in the
air. I looked at the direction of the barking. A dog was falling. It landed on
the ground, barked, and ran away. Then something heavy struck my shoulder,
thud, and dropped on the ground. It was a bulldog. I looked up, and lo and
behold! I saw hundreds of cats and dogs falling from the sky. Immediately I
wore the hood and dashed to the hotel. As I ran, I saw thousands of cats and
dogs falling before my eyes. They were making a loud noise, mewing and barking.
I ran and ran. My head and shoulders were being bumped by the falling small animals.
That’s why “120 heads,” I thought as I was running.
At last I was
surrounded by all kinds of cats and dogs in all directions: large and small,
black and dapple, from calico cats to Siameses, from Dobermans to dachshunds. Some
were jumping around me, others chasing after each other, barking and mewing. I
looked up and saw high in the sky innumerable tiny black spots coming down. As
they fell, they became larger and larger, until around 15 meters above me, they
revealed their sizes and breeds, and whether they were cats or dogs. I had to
shelter from the air raid. I looked around. All the doors and windows of the
houses nearby were tightly closed. No one was walking. There was nowhere to
take refuge. I stood helplessly among the roaring animals.
Suddenly I saw a bus
with headlights on approaching to me. It had a triangular-shaped snow-plow
fixed on the front. As it advanced through the sardined cats and dogs, the
V-shaped blade cleared them away. It stopped just in front of me. I was unknowingly
standing at a bus stop. The door opened. As I stepped in, a huge black cat
tried to sneak in. “This is for me, not you,” I said and shushed it out of the way.
The door was shut. There were five passengers. I sat in the front row.
As the bus was slowly
advancing, I heard the roof of the bus making a tremendous noise. It sounded as
if hundreds of cannon balls in a battlefield were striking the bus: bang, bang,
thud, thud, wump, wump.
As I watched the cats
and dogs from the window, I noticed they were all heading in the same
direction.
“Where are they going?”
I asked the driver.
“To a river. Over
there, you see the bridge,” he said.
I looked forward and
saw an old wooden bridge. Soon the bus approached it and began to cross it. I
looked down at the river. It had no water but was congested with hundreds of
thousands of cats and dogs. They were running downriver. I opened the side
window a little, I heard them crying: meow, meow, arf, arf, bowwow, ruff, ruff.
The bus began to shake
repeatedly. It shook as if it bumped into hard objects.
“Hold on! They are
crashing against the bridge footings,” the driver shouted.
All of a sudden the
bridge began to collapse. The bus fell into the midst of cats and dogs. It broke
into two or three parts, throwing me into the torrent of animals. I was pushed
and jerked and bitten and bounced and scratched by cats and dogs. I fell. Cats
and dogs were trampling me. I was flattened by the tremendous number of paws. Resisting
the torrent, I stood up with all my strength, but soon I was pushed and bounced
and fell. I repeated falling and standing, falling and standing. I was
exhausted. I was panting like a dog. I was wailing like a cat. “Heaven, help me,”
I said in a feeble voice, but realized that the heaven was thickly occupied by
cats and dogs.
I almost fainted and fell
on the river bed on my back. Cats and dogs ran and jumped over my body
relentlessly. My eyesight was blurred. I looked at the sky. Clouds were beginning
to clear away. The noise of the animals began to subside. Fewer and fewer of
them stampeded across my body. Soon the sun began to shine brightly. Out of a
blue sky, all the cats and dogs evaporated.
The next day I
attended the meteorological conference in a wheel chair and reported my
first-hand experience in Catadupe. After a month of rehabilitation I flew back
to Japan. Three days later when I was walking along a Tokyo street, hyo or panthers began to fall.
