The cat crouched, invisible in the striped shadows, her face turned into the breeze. Though it grew dark, there was no relief from the heat, and she was very hungry. The season had not been generous: too little prey, too many hunters. Hunger weakened her, and the weight in her belly made her slow. If she did not kill soon, she would not survive.

But there was prey, she could smell it, even here on the hill, prey close by, in the valley, in the wooden box where the grass seeds were kept. Fat, slow mice, enough for her and a litter, however many it might be. She had only to wait for night, when the humans slept, and be careful not to wake them.

The cat crouched, invisible, eyes on the valley settlement, ears twitched forward, triangulated on the distant scratch of fat mice, watching the humans prepare for night.

Seventeen hundred generations after her grandmothers' grandmother crept down the hill to hunt, Sappho moved in with me to have her own kittens. We found homes for all four of them: Sappho stayed on.

Let's get one thing clear: I like cats, but I am not fooled by them. Cats are not cute. Cats are killers. It is just the way of things. Their ancestors ate our ancestors, until a hungry cat figured out that humans farms were a magnet for mice. This led, over time, to the Treaty.

The terms are simple: cats keep down the mice, which means more of the stored food remains for us and our children. We provide cats with a secure food supply and relative safety in which to raise kittens. It generally works pretty well for both sides.

I suspect this deal was made between females. Thirty-five hundred years ago, when the North African wild cat domesticated hominids, it was the female human that worried most about grain supplies. The male was off hunting, or herding, or tilling the fields. The woman was close to the hut, and the granary, raising children, making food, drawing water, weaving, and trying to chase off the mice. This probably explains the long historical association of women and cats.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that cats are quiet company, or that women have traditionally done a lot of their work seated, squatting, or kneeling, providing the special security of The Lap, that the sound of a cat's purr is soothing, that women like to stroke soft fur, or, co-incidentally, that cats like to be stroked.

Over the years, each has developed some rudimentary empathy for the viewpoint of the other. Cats are not like us, although they are not so alien as the behaviourists would have you believe. While we have been trying to instill in the cat respect for certain human values, she has been teaching us to see human behaviour through the eyes of a cat, the eyes of one who likes, but does not need, us, whose ancestors ate our ancestors, and who has not entirely forgotten that....