I’ve just read Daniel Mason’s wonderful novel “North Woods” (Random House, 2023). This imaginative account of the goings-on of humans and wildlife over several hundred years is set in a house surrounded by apple trees and forest in western Massachusetts. The descriptions of the wilderness, its weather, flora and fauna remind me of the Adirondacks. There are ghosts, too, and a catamount.

A catamount is a mountain lion, variously called a panther, painter, puma or cougar. The catamount in “North Woods” is fearsome indeed. Its paw prints, glimpsed in the woods, are huge. It is capable of slaughtering any number of sheep and lambs — the exact count is not given — which it drags into the house, otherwise vacant at this point in the story. The beast then curls up on a bed or sofa and makes herself at home until, her quarry devoured, she returns to her sylvan haunts.

I have often heard it said that our domestic cats, while not perhaps as savage as catamounts, are still wild. An article in bbcnews.com, in fact, states, “The very existence of feral cats … demonstrates that not all ‘domestic’ cats are fully domesticated.”

Kittens unacquainted with humans after the age of two months “can adopt a feral lifestyle, scrounging or scavenging for their food.”

Housecats that find their own mates — rare these days because most owners have their male cats neutered — rather than having their mates selected by breeders “are still capable of moving in and out of domestication within a couple of generations, something no fully domesticated animal can do. Your moggie probably has a wild side,” the article confides.

I once made the mistake of buying a particular brand of cat treat for Jupiter, my tuxedo cat, which quickly became the only food he wanted. This seemed odd for an obligate carnivore, since the treat in question was just a bag of hard, dry little pellets, not meaty at all. Chicken? Ground round? Sardines? Forget it. Jupiter followed me around the house yowling. Withdrawal was horrible for us both.

Cats are finicky eaters. Other shoppers in the cat food aisle all say the same thing: Rosco will eat nothing but this. Zelda insists on that.

This persnickety behavior is tiresome. Why should we put up with it?

Lately I’ve been thinking outside the box about cat food, or outside the can. Why not indulge your cat the same way some pet owners indulge their boa constrictors?

Back when Jupiter was young and spry, he used to catch rodents and drop them into the bathtub, where he chased them around, creating a veritable bloodbath. Luckily he disported himself in this manner only during the middle of the night when I was asleep. If your cat won’t eat, you might try buying him some white mice. Live feeding can’t be any more expensive than all of that cat food you’re throwing away.

But that would be cruel! And besides, it probably wouldn’t work. Zelda doesn’t like white mice. Rosco eats only voles. Jupiter’s not in the mood.

The British really are the experts on cats. The BBC made a documentary in 2013 called “The Secret Life of Cats” in which “moggies” in an English village were monitored for a week in order to find out what they got up to when they “went out the cat flap.”

Ginger, Sooty, Coco, Rosie, Hermie, Phoebe, Deebee, Chip, Orlando and Kato were fitted with tiny GPS devices and cameras of the kind zoologists use in Africa to monitor the activities of lions and wild dogs. Data was collected and explained by eminent British “cat scientists” at the University of London. Little scribbly maps of each cat’s meanderings, in its own distinctive color, were shown to the enthralled cat owners.

There were some surprises: less hunting than expected, and several instances of cats going through the cat flap of another cat’s house and eating its food.

A lost cat was detected on surveillance camera secretly living behind a sofa in someone else’s house. One cat kept to its own garden, while another traveled several miles a night, and a third was mysteriously “drawn to a neighboring wood.”

While the cat scientists believe that domestic cats are still partially wild, they hypothesize they are gradually evolving to become more “what their human owners want.” I wouldn’t be so sure.

Have a good week.

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(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the Lake Placid News since 1996.)