Cat

The cat in Henry David Thoreau’s account of Walden is a recurring point of contact between domestic life and the woods. One ordinary cat surprises the narrator on the pond’s stony shore; another, encountered with kittens, behaves fiercely in the wild. The more remarkable “winged cat,” reported from a nearby Lincoln farmhouse, is described through its seasonal coat and preserved tufts of fur, but its supposed wings remain unexplained. Together these encounters make the cat less a single character than a test of the apparent boundary between the familiar household animal and the wild landscape.

Encounters at the pond

While walking along Walden Pond’s stony shore, the narrator once sees a cat, an encounter that surprises him because cats rarely venture so far from home. The surprise is mutual. The moment briefly reverses the expected relation between observer and animal: the cat has arrived in a place the narrator considers remote from domestic life, while the animal’s own response indicates that it, too, did not expect to meet him there.

Yet the narrator does not treat the cat as simply out of place. Even a thoroughly domestic cat, one that has spent its days lying on a rug, appears at home in the woods. Its sly, stealthy conduct seems, in his interpretation, to make it more native there than the regular inhabitants. The observation is not a claim that the cat belongs to a particular wild species; rather, it registers how quickly familiar behavior can look at home in a different setting.

A second encounter gives that apparent ease a more defensive edge. While berrying in the woods, the narrator meets a cat with young kittens. The mother and kittens raise their backs and spit fiercely at him. Here the woods are not a picturesque extension of the household: the animals defend themselves and their young against an approaching human. The scene contrasts the solitary cat on the shore with a family of cats whose behavior is visibly shaped by their vulnerable, wild situation.

The reported winged cat

The account of the “winged cat” reaches the narrator through the household where the animal had been taken in, rather than through sustained observation of it in the woods. A few years before his own residence there, the animal was associated with a farmhouse in Lincoln nearest the pond, that of Mr. Gilian Baker. When the narrator called at the farm in June 1842, the cat was away hunting in the woods, as it customarily did. He explicitly could not determine whether it was male or female, and used the common pronoun rather than claiming certainty.

According to its mistress, the animal had first come into the neighborhood a little more than a year earlier, in April, and was eventually taken into the house. The account preserves a detailed physical description: it was dark brownish-gray, with a white patch on its throat, white feet, and a large, bushy tail like a fox’s. The narrator relays the description as testimony from the person who knew the animal, keeping the extraordinary feature tied to a specific local report rather than presenting it as something he had personally witnessed.

The animal’s unusual appearance was seasonal. In winter its fur grew thick and flattened out along its sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long and two and a half inches wide; a similar growth appeared beneath its chin, like a muff. The upper surface was loose and the underside matted like felt. In spring, these appendages dropped off. The changing coat supplies the account’s central physical puzzle: what looked like wings was described as fur that grew in winter and disappeared with the returning season.

Evidence, conjecture, and the joke of a poet’s cat

The narrator still possessed a pair of the supposed “wings” given to him by the farmhouse occupants, and notes that they showed no appearance of a membrane. That material detail limits what can be inferred: the appendages were preserved, but the feature that would most readily confirm a wing-like structure was absent. Some people thought the animal might be part flying squirrel or another wild animal. The narrator adds that naturalists had reported prolific hybrids from the union of the marten and domestic cat, making a mixed origin possible in his account, not established as the animal’s true identity.

The story ends not with a resolution but with a playful turn toward the narrator’s own imagined household. If he had kept a cat, he says, this would have been the right kind for him; a poet’s cat, he muses, ought to be winged just as a poet’s horse is. The wish makes the animal’s unexplained coat a fitting object of imaginative attraction. It also preserves the distinction between evidence and fancy: the coat, its seasonal growth, the saved tufts, and the competing explanations belong to the report, while the winged companion belongs to the narrator’s humorous possibility.

Domesticity and the changing woods

Across these appearances, the cat occupies a shifting position rather than a fixed one. The shore cat carries the surprise of a household creature encountered away from home; the mother and kittens defend themselves as wild animals; and the winged cat moves between the woods where it hunted and the farmhouse that took it in. The narrator’s descriptions repeatedly unsettle the easy distinction between domestic animal and native inhabitant, but they do so through specific conduct and reported physical evidence, not through a claim that all cats are wild.

The cat’s small place in the account also sits against a landscape altered by human use. The narrator recalls that woodchoppers further laid waste the woods after he left the shores, and that trunks on the pond bottom, an old log canoe, and the surrounding dark woods were gone. He laments that there would be no more wandering through those wooded aisles and openings toward the water. This remembered loss does not directly explain the cats’ behavior or the winged animal’s coat, but it frames the encounters as observations of a local natural world whose setting was changing. The cat remains memorable precisely because it crossed those categories of place and habit while the landscape around the pond was itself becoming less like the remembered woods.