The French Forest Cat

Every year, many men from the Montafon went abroad to find work. Once a man from St. Gallenkirch, in France, had a strange experience. As he sat one evening in the parlour, his hostess asked him whether he was not homesick and whether he wished to know what his wife was doing. She could tell him everything exactly, if he wanted.

That, of course, he very much wanted to know. So she went out, but returned after a short while and told him that his loved ones were at supper, how they all sat at the table in turn, what they were eating, and that the mother had just given the little child porridge, and her too — the storyteller — a spoonful. The man could not wonder enough at this.

When he came home in autumn, he asked his wife who had once come to supper and to whom she had offered a spoonful of porridge. She answered that no one had been with them. Only once a great black cat with terrible glass eyes had peered in through the window. She had thought it a starving forest cat and given it a spoon of the child’s porridge, after which the animal had gone away again.

The man understood at once who that cat had been: his French hostess had taken the form of a forest cat, flown in one nightly flight over the Alps to Sankt Gallenkirch, looked at the window of his house to see everything, and returned. From then on the man kept away from French women on his work-journeys, for they were not all human.