mrs. thievery

not mrs. thievery, but a great image from pixabay

1952, Cook Islands, the South Pacific:  New Zealander Tom Neale arrives on the Anchorage islet of Suwarrow, where he will live by himself for stretches of time until 1977.  Well, not strictly by himself.  Wild pigs and chickens had been left on the islet from a wartime settlement, and then there were two other fellow imports, as we see in this bit from Neale's memoir:

...I decided it was imperative to take a cat, for though I knew Suvarov had virtually no insects or mosquitoes, it did have a colony of small indigenous rats. With all my carefully sealed tins, it was unlikely they would eat me out of shack and home, but I just happen to hate rats. As I was already the possessor of an old cat with a kitten I decided to take them both with me, and so that they should travel in style I built a special box to house them for the six-day boat journey.
We were not old friends. As a matter of fact, I had only had the mother cat for a very short time, and she was a confirmed thief which seemed a good reason for calling her Mrs. Thievery. The son I named Mr. Tom-Tom...

Mrs. Thievery kills her first rat five minutes after she comes ashore, but she and Tom-Tom get lots of nice fish and Sunday chicken.  She also manages to find Neale's last pack of cigarettes after he loses all hope.  When he leaves his first stint on the island in 1954, Neale carefully packs the pair up and brings them back to civilization, and after that we hear no more.  Want to read about it?  Here's some of the book online (you can advance to the next chapter at the bottom of each page).