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I've been having morbid thoughts lately about Oscar the Death Cat, especially since Fuji took up at my house and started rubbing up against me as if we were old friends.

Fuji is the 6-year-old foster cat who has left the house of her birth and taken up at my house, just across the way. Oscar is a 5-year-old cat who seems to have an uncanny ability to predict death in the Rhode Island nursing home where he lives. When Oscar creeps into your room and curls up beside you, it's way past time to get your affairs in order.

The nursing home folks have kept records over the years, and they tell us that Oscar has predicted death accurately in about 50 cases. He just saunters into the room with the dying chap, curls up comfortably, and awaits the inevitable. If the door to a dying patient's room is closed, he will scratch at it until somebody lets him in. Then he goes in and keeps the patient company. If you put him into a room with a patient who has some time left on the clock, Oscar will charge out and go looking for someone at death's door. Oscar isn't interested in the lively living. He's antisocial until a person is about ready to check out.

Scientific minds have puzzled over Oscar's peculiar talent. They don't know how he predicts death, but Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, speculates that when death starts to creep over the body, dying cells emit biochemicals, which may be detectable by a cat's keen nose.

The thing that would worry me is whether Oscar is a cause or an effect. Does he go to a patient's room because the patient is dying, or does the patient die because Oscar goes to his room? Would the death rate at that nursing home drop significantly if Oscar were evicted?

Maybe it's something in Oscar's breath. Remember the movie "The Green Mile," when Michael Clarke Duncan inhaled disease from the prison warden's stricken wife and later exhaled it into a murderer and rapist, causing him to die? Somebody ought to check Oscar to see what's coming out of his nostrils.

It could have something to do with his diet. When Fuji took up at my house, I noticed a significant difference between the food she ate and the food prepared for Candi, my little white Peke-a-poo. Candi's food is either made from beef, pork or chicken or is a passingly good imitation of them. If you locked me up for a couple of weeks and offered me nothing to eat but Cesar Canine Cuisine, I could probably cultivate a taste for it. Candi and I have breakfast together in the office down the hall from my bedroom, I enjoying bacon and cereal, she enjoying the Beggin Strips and Pupperoni that I hand feed her. A couple of times I've caught myself just before popping a Beggin Strip into my mouth.

Fuji's food, on the other hand, consists of seafood marketed as "captain's catch," "Atlantic white fish" and some kind of tuna. I would guess that cat food includes a lot of fish parts that humans normally wrap up in newspapers and toss out.

Eating stuff like that could give you a deadly breath. I'm not saying Oscar is eating tuna and exhaling a deadly stink, but it's worth an inquiry.

Some folks might wonder whether Oscar is the angel of death disguised as a cat, figuring that maybe he is exhaling the spirit of the Prince of Darkness.

As far as I know, Dr. Dosa hasn't dealt with that possibility. He has a scientific mind, and scientific minds don't process things like devils, angels, and demons. They're all unscientific, and what is unscientific doesn't exist.

I'm not a believer in the angel of death. I've read my Bible from cover to cover and haven't discovered such an angel, unless you consider him to be the one who wiped out Sennacherib's army of 185,000 Assyrians as it was besieging Jerusalem in Hezekiah's day. Ordinary folks just die their natural deaths, with or without the presence of a cat or a feline-shaped angel. The ordinary housecat is not mentioned in the Bible, although there are references, laudatory and otherwise, to its big cousins, the lion and the leopard. Dogs play cameo roles, as in licking up Jezebel's blood after she was thrown out a window, and eating the crumbs from the rich man's table in the parable of Lazarus.

The housecat may have got its bad name down in Egypt, where Pharaoh's minions made it into a cult animal. The Hebrews were treated pretty shabbily in Egypt, which may explain why they leaned toward calves instead of cats when they decided to break the Ten Commandments by graving an idol.

Cats have lived down their bad name pretty effectively now. In the United States, cats number about 60 million, which should entitle them to about 85 members of Congress if they were counted in the U.S. census.

If Oscar really is the cause instead of the precursor of death, let's hope his condition is not contagious. Imagine what it would be like if 60 million cats were spreading death among the human population.

I'm not saying a cat could be the Grim Reaper in disguise. But just to be safe, I'm locking Fuji out of my room.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com