Do cats eat bats?

​At 12:15, I drifted from sleep into consciousness and noticed that a light was on - the girl was in the bathroom. I sleepily muttered "go back to bed" and with that, she let out a blood-curdling scream. "BAT, BAT, there's a bat!"

There is a little closet off the bathroom - a closet that's really a part of the crawl space that runs under the dormers on the front of the house. And while she was sitting on the toilet, a bat had slipped out from under the closet door.

And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

My husband scrambled out of bed in a haze, I grabbed the hysterical child, the cats fled, and we pondered what to do about the bat careening around the upstairs of our little house. The girl offered to find her tennis racket, except that she would have had to cross the dangerous hallway with the frantic bat. I thought about calling the police, and eventually my husband towel-snapped it to stun it. He gathered it up loosely in the towel, and took it downstairs and outside; it flew away, apparently unharmed.

Far too much drama for the middle of the night, but no one got carted off in an ambulance.