"WONKY"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 121, 25 May 1942, Page 3

"WONKY"

REBUILT RAT TRAP

QUEEN STREET WONDER CAT

No mental stimulus is needed to make Wonky" rat-minded S !'° J* * he Queen Str eet counterpar, of Our Mary," of St . Mary s '. and is performing similar good J2KS. ='" K oS y c„", lty " ,oocl store Wonky is a rat of rare rharar-w She looks like something that has hern ( hewed up and left on the mat Actually that precisely i s what happened, more than a year ago She looked like a morgue case when the storeman in a laree Queen Street establishment ffid he? mangled remains in his store earlv ono morning. y With various legs broken, an Obvious fracture of the tail about midships, and a fearful gash at the back of her head, it seemed unlikely that even a cat could survive. An Kngitirering Job But. Pick the Storeman was a humane man (besides being reallv an engineer in training and bv instinct.) and set about salvaging the feline wreckage—obviously not for her intrinsic value, since, even if she survived she could hardly become more than a permanent cripple and a liability. That's where Wonky fooled the sceptics. She made a marvellous and complete recoverv and is to-day again sparking on all nine lives Not that it wasn't a pathetically painful business at first. For a time her head injuries so iislocated htr food intake that she could swallow small particles only to the accompaniment of a windmill-like action of the one forepaw that was not in splints. But. Wonky saw it through, and the day came when Pick removed the last splint and the last bandage and Wonky stood, a free cat, once more —not, however, a sleek and comely animal like her superior contemporary of St. Mary Bay. Although to-day she is once more full of vim and vigour, Wonky, as her name implies, is no longer physically a hundred per cent. Her original personal geography has been permanently altered, and to-day she violates every accepted principle of cat construction.

Consternation Among Rats There is, for instance, a distinct elbow in her tail, she is deeply icarred and her ears are moth-eaten, and, when she takes off on a rat raid, her legs, bending and sagging in all directions, produce the astonishing impression that she is travelling in several directions at the same time. The disconcerting effect this produces upon the rodents, whose destruction has become her life mission, may well be imagined. They simply can't tell whether Wonky is coming or going—until it's too late! It early became evident that the rebuilt Wonky was deeply sensitive of the debt she owed her benefactor, and so she lost no time in giving tangible expression to her gratitude. Wonky "says it with rats"—dead rats. She catches them during the night and lays them out in neat array b€side Pick's desk every morning. Her first quota was five, arranged on a sheet of newspaper with a mathematical uniformity that suggested a further subtle tribute to her engineer benefactor. For over a year now she has toiled tirelessly day and night, keeping the storerooms and basement free of rats. She never comes out into the light of day or into the wide world Bhe knew and which dealt so harshly With her. To-day, when she was brought into a quiet side street to be photographed, even a place on her master's shoulder failed to calm her frantic struggles when confronted with the camera, and she quickly escaped and flew "wonkily" back to the darkest corner of her sanctuary. Whether she can no longer see properly in daylight or whether she has a keen feminine consciousness of her marred beauty one cannot say. The writer knows Pick the storeman to be a very humane man, but also to be a keen engineer who has in the past applied entirely new engineering principles to a given problem. One cannot help wondering which consideration was uppermost in his mind when, during the present shortage of orthodox traps, he reconstructed Wonky, the indefatigable super rat-catcher.