Image #1: Snow Paws

The paw prints are cinematic in the snow. My own L.L. Bean slippers have typical human industrial obliviousness to them, unlike these, these magisterial things that almost look like a photocopy of cat’s feet that would raise Norman Rockwell’s eyebrows, not least of which for the clarity with which each individual paw is articulated, but also that fleeting pause of a thought of — ‘Wait a second. How many paws are we talking about here? Are we sure it’s a cat? And we just let this … thing use the photocopier we have out here in the wild? What would Dalton think of this?’

The intentional silliness here elides a question worth asking, though: how did this particular cat — for these feet belong to a cat — feel when they took a step into the snow? Were they stepping into the snow for the first time? What makes animal curiosity?

One way to answer that is through — and it’s crucial to spell this word correctly, because otherwise people might get confused — neophilia. The love of new things. Primates love looking at new things. Rats like exploring mazes even without the promise of a reward. Homing pigeons prefer exploring new areas of a maze and investigating rearranged layouts over ‘solving’ the maze.

And so what can a cat’s neophilia tell us about snow? Something particular. (Is there a Mitch Hedberg joke for cats about snow? Is this line too much? Almost certainly.) Something a little cold, a little damp. Something that quenches the annealing of the world, and whose transformation re-sets our patience once again.