Ernie finds a niche living where the wild things are

THE Santa Monica Mountains are home to many life forms, not the least of which are the forest creatures that wander through the hills and the canyons, howling, growling, clicking, slithering, hissing and otherwise announcing their presence.

Although leery of any sudden confrontation with them, I accept the fact that they’re going to be around. The problem is that you can’t always be sure of their mood should you encounter one on a trail or around the house.

Wild animals, like politicians and actors, cannot be counted upon to act in a rational manner. A neighbor, Ollie, found a rattlesnake in his yard once and, being tolerant of all living things, tried to transport it in a burlap bag to a more appropriate environment.

The snake, unaware of the man’s generous intentions, rewarded him by sinking its teeth into his hand, which, because he was allergic to the anti-toxin serum, resulted in several days of pain in a hospital bed.

“What a bummer,” I recall Ollie saying in a fit of suppressed Nordic displeasure. A park ranger suggested that the next time he confronted a snake, he should talk to it in a soothing tone. By quieting its fears, the snake would understand, smile and go about its business without causing any harm.

Many animal lovers envision a world where man and snake can coexist and even join choirs together and co-write screenplays. Ollie apparently didn’t buy this. Rumors circulated later that when he finally got out of the hospital, he hunted down the snake and chopped off its head with a shovel.

The reason I mention this today is not to rattle those who can get weepy over a chicken’s postmortem contribution to coq au vin, but to express my own inability to tolerate certain of God’s creatures that bound through the forest like Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch.

That would be rats.

I realize that there are many other concerns in the world greater than these ugly little rodents, but the other inconveniences are not at the moment invading my house. Rats are a condition of living in the mountains, and not one of the more pleasant ones. They creep through the slightest opening and make their presence known in various disgusting ways.

To illustrate their disagreeable presence throughout history, one need only cite their contribution to London’s 17th century plague, which killed more than 100,000 citizens, including both Cockneys and powdered swells. Blame the fleas if you will, but it was the rats that transported them there.

Many mountain dwellers, even fine ladies with perfumed hair, shrug when rats are mentioned, accepting them as an integral part of living in the peace and quiet of the Santa Monicas. Others, in denial, simply refuse to believe that they are cohabitating with anything other than a lover or perhaps a small dog. Rats indeed.

Rodents are less a nuisance in our house now due to the presence of Ernie the Spot, our midnight-black predator cat with a single speck of white under his chin. Thus the name. We acquired Ernie from our daughter in Sacramento, who found him wandering the streets like an indicted lobbyist, and took him in.

Here again, one cannot rely upon animals to appreciate acts of charity. Ernie acknowledged her largesse by biting her. This caused an infection, the results of which lasted for weeks. She gave Ernie to us, gladly, I think, because with the death of our dog Barkley we had nothing to pamper, except, of course, me.

One of Ernie’s first acts of appreciation was to bite the gentle Cinelli too, which similarly caused an infection, not to mention a wary distrust of his questionable nature.

My wife is a forgiving person and, despite the bite, has learned to coexist with the cat to the extent that today she is his favorite person to snuggle with. His purr is that of a well-tuned Lamborghini, and his tendency to nip has lessened with the growing realization that he probably shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds him. It’s a lesson lost on many dogs and more than a few teenagers.

I identified Ernie as a predator. In the few months we have had him, he has killed a rat, a mouse, a lizard and a bird named ... well, I forget its name. The bird was a parakeet that somehow fled its cage only to flop into a corner within the cat’s reach. Knowing Ernie, we choose to believe that the bird’s demise was not long and agonizing, but a sudden end from a quick bite. Requiescat in pace, bird with no name.

Any one of those events would have been cause enough for some to have shipped Ernie back to Sacramento to find work as a press secretary, but he has the redeeming quality of being hell on paws to rats. While others are complaining of infestations, we have seen the presence of only two rats, one of whose carcass Ernie displayed by dragging it up the stairs into our bedroom, meowing loudly. It was the equivalent of Dick Cheney mounting a lawyer’s head on his wall after a successful hunting trip.

Cinelli compares Ernie’s character traits to my own tendencies to purr, prowl and bite as the mood takes me. I have yet to pounce on a rat, but the season is still young.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.