At this time of year, it is right to wonder about the miracles of the world we live in. Most of how nature works is still a complete mystery to science. The swallow-fledgling which, unaccompanied by any much-travelled elder, last September left its home in Kildare and safely navigated through night and day its way to its winter home in Zimbabwe, will in four months' time find its way back to the barn where it was born. We do not know how this was done - merely that it was and will be again, writes Kevin Myers
The mysteries of animal navigation defy all comprehension. Two friends of mine, Jack and Eva, who are microbiologists in a small Japanese plant in the Donegal Gaeltacht, were invited some years ago to help run an off-shoot of the parent company in Siberia. Eva is Czech and speaks half-a-dozen languages; Jack is a native Irish speaker, and is also fluent in German, Italian and Spanish, with passable Russian. However, the working language of the new plant was to be English, so language would not be a problem.
Their real problem was their cat Celestine, whom they adored. Celestine was a Donegal cat, ferociously feral in some of his habits, especially towards some of the strays to be found in that part of Gweedore, but equally enchanting - and indeed often voluptuously whore-like - in his conduct towards human beings, whose weaknesses he could instantly identify and exploit with a supple grace and epicene charm. He had a particular attachment to Maggie Cunningham, an ancient widow woman whose husband Willie, a Glasgow tunneller, was lost on SS Princess Victoria in 1953; and it was an affection which was returned with all the passion of the childlessly alone.
Jack and Eva were torn in two about the future of Celestine. Should they leave him behind with Maggie? Should they take him to Siberia, half a world away, where winter nights drag like an entire rainy season in a coal mine, and one might be grateful for whatever affection one could get? It was a problem which was soon resolved: Maggie's problem with drink, intermittent in the half-century since Willie's death, required treatment in John of God's, and so Celestine joined Jack and Eva on their journey to the tundra.
They expected bleakness, and bleakness they found. Their predecessors had been an aloof and austere Finnish couple who had sought Lutheran isolation, and Jack and Eva inherited their home, some 20 miles from the microbiological centre via a deeply rutted road that took an hour to journey on. Their fellow workers and were all Asian: Korean, Chinese, Japanese. They were very pleasant people, but the problem was that they all lived on the station. When they realised their isolation, Jack and Eva wanted to move into the centre with their colleagues, but there was no accommodation available.
So Celestine, Jack and Eva were obliged to spend more time together than they ever had before, and strangely enough, this enforced companionship proved to be congenial to all three. Moreover, in the nearby dacha - if that is the right word; probably not - an elderly couple, Jacob and Ivana, had taken an interest in them. More to the point, they also took an interest in Celestine, who had slunk into their favours with feline grace and a larcenous charm (as they discovered when a chicken due for roasting was gravely and irremediably mauled on the kitchen counter).
In the two years that followed, it seemed clear that Celestine had transferred some of his loyalties to Jacob and Ivana; and they, meanwhile, were entirely in thrall to him. So when Jack and Eva's contract was up - by which time were quite sure they had utterly exhausted the microbiological possibilities of the Artic tundra - they prepared to return home, to sweet Gweedore. But what about Celestine? Should he leave or should he stay?
Needless to say, Jacob and Ivana wanted him to stay, and since quarantine regulations made any possible repatriation schemes intolerably cruel, Jack and Anna bade their pet farewell, and returned to Ireland.
They did not travel overland, thereby leaving some kind of mysterious spore which a cat could have followed. They took an Ilyushin biplane to a regional airport, flew thence to Moscow via Airbus, on to London, and next to Derry airport, where they were met by Jack's parents, John and Mary, who took them home to Gweedore in their 4x4 shooting-brake.
It was only when they got there that they realised they had made a grave mistake. They missed Celestine. They missed his presumptuous charm. They missed his hermaphrodite voluptuousness. They missed his sinuous, hissing welcome as they returned at the end of each working day. They missed his lithe and murderous body coiling beside theirs as they lay in bed.
Imagine their guilt when they heard from a Korean friend some months after returning home that Jacob and Ivana had been killed in a car crash, thus leaving Celestine a cat-orphan.
Two weeks ago, nine whole months after they left Celestine in Siberia, fully 7,000 miles away, Jack and Eva heard a frantic clawing, scrabbling sound on their porch. They opened the door. And lo! There was Maggie Cunningham, rolling around on the floor, drunk as a district judge.
But as for Celestine, not a mew, nor purr nor claw. They still haven't heard from him, and they won't. That's cats for you, and that's a shaggy cat story.
Have a good Christmas.