This cat is celestial. Brought to the house on a sled down a snowed-in road, he arrived in the deepest winter I’d seen in years. Fresh from a shelter, he entered our home wide-eyed, a couple years old, sniffing everything. My girlfriend said he was perfect.
The year before had been hard. We’d lost four cats, each a stray that stopped in. Understand, we did our best to keep them before they vanished. Eaten, no doubt. I wrote about them here.
In rural country, most outdoor cats mean meat for wild carnivores. The wiliest survive, while the rest of the barn cats are picked off by birds of prey, eaten by coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, squashed while running across a back road. You don’t get too attached to barn cats. Some aren’t named for ten years or more.
This one was from a shelter, not a feral that came sniffing around and decided we were the better option. Once we got records we learned he had, indeed, been a neutered feral from a mesa near where we live, traveled to the shelter an hour away just to come back home.
Records showed this plump Russian blue as having started as a barn kitten. A few phone calls revealed he had charmed his way into a house, fell in with the right people, petters, door-openers, the ones he was looking for. After that, he was separated, went through different hands, and ended up at a shelter. Original owners said they were glad he’d found a loving home. They said he was a special cat.
Special, I discovered, meant he slept most of the day and, as far as I could tell, most of the night. He ate kibble, snuggled up to us in front of the wood stove, and purred like a furnace. He seemed happy to be inside, happy to be alive. He stepped out once into the snow where flakes touched his dark fur like stars. Startled, he ran back in. Like he didn’t know.
The snow was not what sent him fleeing. It was his gaze caught in the dim understory of pinyon and juniper around our house. It was his pause, peering into the corridors between trees. He had some sense of what could be out there. The only marking he had was a nip taken out of his left ear, could have been anything, swipe of an owl claw, the tooth of a coyote, a close call.
As spring began, he wanted out. Left alone with food and water for a few days, he’d start peeling at the threshold on the door, bending back metal. His eyes sharpened whenever we opened the outside door. His head would snake to see what he could through the gap.
It’s now May and we leave the doors open. That means he’s lived longer than the others. He steps outside, takes in the sun, and looks to the woods like he might fall into them. He’s been a good mouser, which was our hope, and prefers to stay indoors, increasing his chances of survival.
A question came up online recently, should a cat stay inside or be allowed out? Countless answers arrived. Mine: most city cats should stay inside, devastating for bird populations that use the city as refuge. In rural country, cats are more part of the ecosystem, keeping house-perimeters. Much farther than that, they get eaten. There’s balance.
I walk with our cat now and then. We go farther than he’s explored. He follows. I watch him. He is an antenna. His ears and the small gray heart of his nose rise to attention. Any sound, any bird click or branch, gets a sharp stare.
Maybe there’s hope, I think, as he wanders ten feet behind me like a trigger-happy scout. I give him a quick lecture on predator-prey relationships when you’re out this far. You have to be at the top of your game away from the house, or you’ll be et. I feel like a dad.
Maybe the cat hears me. He is at least listening, his ear ticking toward me. Come on, I say, follow me.
Don’t tell my girlfriend that the two of us walk to the canyon’s edge together, possibly farther than he’s gone before. She doesn’t want to lose another cat, but that cat has to live. In former lives, he’s crossed country, trekked mesa to mesa. Who knows what he’s seen out there? We have that in common. He doesn’t want to be inside, however comfortable it might be. The former owners, once we figured out who they were, said he’d tear through screen windows to get out.
How about a little farther? How comfortable are you? The cat follows. I’m not trying to get him eaten. I am a guide, allowing him freedom from the couch, watching his senses tingle. Is he not another person like me? Is he not flesh and bone, and eyes with fire in them?
I sit at the edge of the canyon and he comes near, meowing sweetly, back arched for a touch, ears like radars. He peers over the rim, seeing steep slopes of woodland boulders and a creek at the bottom. We look at each other. I say, sure. He hops over and we go down.
Please don’t tell my girlfriend.
Cats and other creatures are known to walk on water.
Perhaps you feel that is possible, but in this area feral and/or barn cats eat the birds and snakes which are necessary to the ecosystem. My dog and I do not allow that….why would a cat’s desire to roam and hunt be more important than the birds who nest in the fallow field and oak savanna?
Beautiful! And it describes the heart of my 18-pounder, who sees a red tail hawk sitting in the tree above His garden and wanders out to the middle of the path, lays down upon the sand, and bares his tummy to the predator. The hawk looks down, shakes its head (I swear to this), and flies away. “It must be rabid. I won’t eat this one.”
That “nip taken out of his left ear” — could well be something done by the folks who neutered him. I’ve heard they do that to feral cats to let other feral-cat-neuterers know that the nipped ones don’t need to be re-trapped and re-neutered.