You! You kids!

[elfs]

Dinah.

This afternoon Dinah went up to the front door and chittered. She did not meow, softly as she does now, being sixteen years old and much of her voice gone. She chittered, a sound she makes only when a moth has entered the room, or her arthritis medicine is working for her and we pull out the laser.

I wondered what caused her to do that, so I looked out the window. A pair of ravens were on the grass outside, digging at the ground and looking simultaneously ominous and coy. "Do you want to go out?" I asked. She knows what that sound sequence means and butted her head up against the door.

I opened it and she stepped out onto the front stoop and in the loudest voice her aging throat could muster, growled at them. It was quite the sound; I don't believe I've ever heard anything like it.

I do believe I've now heard the feline equivalent of "Get off my lawn!"