Calliope was sitting, bolt upright, on the floor beside my desk chair. She does this often, in the hope that I'll stop doing whatever it is on the computer, go into the kitchen, and give her a nice big bowl of Friskies Gourmet, whatever flavor happens to be in the can she is, not coincidentally, expecting me to open. She'll let rip with a few truly pitiful miaows now and then, just to get my attention.

Occasionally she'll jump up on the desk, and try to sit behind my laptop in order to stare at me over the top of the screen. Her logic is pretty obvious: that stupid human doesn't see me; if she did see me, she'd be in the kitchen right now, getting me my food; therefore, I must put myself directly into her line of vision. It's the same sort of logic used by a wide variety of protesters. (I'm sure the general public would agree with us if only they paid attention and stopped ignoring us. . .) She used to try and sit directly on the keyboard, but thankfully has given that up as a bad idea. She doesn't get shooed off the back of the desk any less quickly, but at least she's not risking actual death.

I'm also sure it's the same sort of logic that leads her to sit on the kitchen counter directly opposite the door. (I'm going to make sure I'm the first thing she sees, dammit!) This gets her into big trouble with Elvis. Less so with me, since I don't use that part of the counter for food preparation. To tell you the truth, I think that cat resents being short.

Anyway, after a while she wandered off. I figured she was off to either watch TV with Elvis or go wait to be fed in the kitchen. A short while after that, she started miaowing in the hallway. It got annoying fairly quickly, so I told her to be quiet, and that she'd get fed when she got fed.

She ignored me, as cats do, and even increased the volume of her yowling. She started yowling faster and faster. Eventually, I realized that she was yowling. I know that yowl: it's her "come kill this insect for me now" yowl. Calliope is a stray. Her mother was a street cat, and (presumably) she is decended from a long line of the semi-feral cats that prowl the mean streets of Istanbul.

But Calliope? Didn't get any of those huntress genes.

So I went out into the hall to see what she had found, and immediately freaked out. At first it looked like a worm, 5 or 6 cm long, with an elongated triangle shape, writhing away on the wood floor for all it was worth. Every so often it would raise the pointy end as if to strike, and Calliope would recoil in fear. But then, it would raise its wider end as if to strike, and I immediately thought Insect. Possibly a poisonous one-- I'd never seen anything like it before. I had a flashback to the time I found a scorpion in the bathtub when I lived in Texas. It gave me the heebie jeebies.

I told Calliope to get away from there, which she did with undignified speed, after which she resumed peering at the thing from the relative safety of behind my legs. I also shouted for Elvis to come quickly, and to bring a heavy magazine.

While I waited, I had a closer look at it. The more I looked, it looked suspiciously like a tail. Little scales and stripes and everything.

I like lizards. I've been known to spend oodles of time just watching them-- on a wall, on the train platform-- never mind contorting my body into strange positions and greatly risking my own personal knees, all for the sake of a photograph. Worms don't usually faze me either-- when I was 7 or 8, I used to collect a bunch of big fat nightcrawlers on the way to the bus stop, put them into my lunchbox and bring them to school, then use them to terrify my classmates at recess. I put my sandwich into my pocket first, of course, which led to a fairly squished-up lunch, but it was worth it.

But a lizard tail? All alone in the hallway, just twitching away for all it's worth?

That's a whole 'nuther species, so to speak.

It creeped me out.

Elvis turned up with the magazine, had a look, and agreed with me that it certainly appeared to be a lizard tail. It was still twitching away so I, compassionate wildlife enthusiast that I am, ordered him to kill it. Elvis dropped the magazine on top of it, and stomped on the magazine. Elvis picked up the magazine, and we discovered that the wider end had been smooshed flat. The narrow tip was still twitching away as if nothing had happened. Elvis scooped it up using the magazine (miraculously, no blood or guts or anything had squished out of the end, even though I stomped it pretty dang hard.)

We had a good look at it, then, and it was, in fact, the tail of a lizard.

So I turned to Calliope (cowering in the corner at this point) and demanded to know what she did with the rest of the lizard.

It's silly, I know, and I'm not particularly proud of that question. Why would I expect her to answer me, for one thing? She never has before. In addition, Calliope didn't necessarily sink her teeth into poor Mr. Lizard. In fact, it's very probable that she didn't. Lizards drop their tails on the run, hopefully distracting a pursuing predator. Given Calliope's reaction, this would seem to be a good policy. Fooled her completely, that did.

I didn't need to worry about Calliope getting sick from it, either, as there are no poisonous lizards native to Portugal. The only poisonous lizard appears to be the gila monster, and the tail we found certainly wasn't from one of those. Added bonus: lizards eat all sorts of insects so, hey, non-toxic pesicide!

The upshot is: we appear to have gained a new pet. A useful pet. A pet that we don't need to feed and (probably) won't shit in the bathtub. Lord knows where it will shit, and what form it will take, but still. We seem to have acquired a lizard.