The Rest of the Animals
Posted by Holly at March 16th, 2007
The Rest of the Animals
The current chapter in our Animal House involves the luxury of having room and time for whatever animals may drop in. Pets seem to rule our world and we consider them members of our household and we’re not alone. Tiffany, our neighbor who lost her horse a week ago, understands completely and commiserated with us when, a few months ago, one of our cats left home. The cat left home because we got a dog and it was just the last straw for the poor cat. We got the dog because I heard that dogs would keep the coyotes away from the cats. Two of those animals I’ve included in sentences before this life-change but, frankly, coyote only passed my lips in spelling bees a thousand years ago in grade school. Now, however, living in farm-land Oregon, I have been instructed in the semi-circular shallow hollows the coyotes dig out to lie in as they observe the household pets and I have heard their maniacal sound – a cross between cawing, hooting and crowing – and I fear for the lives of our treasured cats.
So we got the dog, Gemini, and immediately Waldo, the eldest of the six kitties, left home in a huff. No other way to describe it; it was a huff. Waldo was an outdoor cat for much of his 18 years but three years ago, for reasons beyond his control, Waldo moved in to the city with me and his new bonus brother, Koufax, a polydactyl orange cat I have taught baseball tricks that he sometimes performs. Koufax and Waldo were permitted short sojourns on my deck overhanging the Puget Sound and even those guided experiences made me nervous.
Nevertheless, I was happy to let them try and wander when my good fortune in this lovely marriage included 40 acres. Waldo took to it instantly motoring, as my husband calls Waldo’s somewhat arthritic path to anywhere, to the front door in the morning as if heading off to work. He stayed out all day, arriving home for dinner when he was called. Koufax, for all his macho cat bravado, acted like he wanted to be out but was pretty skittish and came home after only a few minutes. His behavior reminded me of a favorite saying I learned many years ago when describing someone who made it sound as if he or she were an adventurous daredevil but turned out to be really pretty cautious – he talks big but he shits pretty close to the house. That’s Koufax.
I should probably mention that Koufax and Jim are engaged in a battle of the wills. Frankly, they are jealous of each other; the four-footed one is used to sleeping with me (Koufax and Waldo have always done so); and, now, the two-footed one is, too. Each of them likes to nestle. The day I got Koufax (at a garage sale, unexpectedly), I got him home and he instantly ran under the bed where he stayed for six hours. That night, at 10:30, he came out, looked around and determined their were no little kids around such as had been the irritant in his previous domicile, jumped up on my chest and put his little arms around me and hugged. Honestly. He does that all the time, now, and sometimes is so overcome by emotion that he starts to drool and will put his teeth around my chin. At least the vet has explained it as overcome by emotion. Jim thinks, when Koufax does this to him, that the cat is going for the jugular and hoping to remove Jim from the picture. Koufax does glower.
Anyway, the two cats had happily found their own pattern in this big and open house and our new ménage was off to an interesting start.
Then, one day, some neighbors called to ask a big favor. Could we possibly take care of three newborn kitties they had pulled away from their nearly feral mother, a cat they’ve had for years that defies capture and continues to have litters. The couple, our friends, each had some health problems and caring for baby cats was a drain.
When I got home with the three gorgeous kittens in a box on my lap in the car, Jim opened the door, looked in the box, gasped and said “Oddball, Eightball and Cueball!” Turns out they are the duplicates of three kittens he had rescued a year or so before when his cat, Blackberry, gave birth and disappeared … undoubtedly prey for the coyote. Jim looked for Blackberry’s kittens and could find them nowhere until, ten days later, he heard a tiny sound at the end of the horse barn (have I mentioned the 11 horses?) and found a scrawny, starving kitten. Jim looked up and, yes, two others were in the hayloft. All were nearly dead and he fed them with an eyedropper for weeks. They were a black cat, a striper and a Siamese-looking cat so he named them Eightball, Oddball and Cueball. They lived in the barn and grew stronger and scampier. Every night, after he fed the horses their nightly snack (that’s 11 as in eleven horses), Jim would call the cats into the tack room and tell them a good night story. They would jump up into his lap and he would tell them a Once upon a time … they lived happily ever after story. Eventually, the three cats disappeared, one by one, leaving a very sad Jim who gets under the skin of his animals to think with them in order to train them. When I brought home the duplicates – clearly there are father cats running around whose progeny populate our corner of Cornelius – he had three new babies to tend and still, eight months or so later, tells them a nightly Once Upon A Time story.
The three babies were as cute as newborns can be – still are – and not at all what my older cats saw any reason to tolerate. There was a lot of hissing and spitting on Koufax’s part – just as there was when I brought Waldo to live with us – but patience, separation when needed and simply time passing brought us to, if not sharing, at least living peaceably together in the same space. It is fascinating to watch these little personalities develop and the way the cats act around each other and around us. It’s like a little Skinner laboratory and because there really isn’t the same imperative as with raising a child – these cats don’t have to go out and be upstanding and productive beings who can improve the world; we’ll always take care of their universe – and because we are not raising children at the moment, we have a little license to observe their domesticated behavior. It’s so interesting, for instance, to watch the three little ones when something new or unexpected happens – even a person arriving at our front door. They used to sleep in a basket the size of a hat with their arms and legs around each other. Now they do wander separately in search of different pleasures but, no matter where they have scattered, when something unexpected occurs they are suddenly all three there together, sitting identically, turning their little heads together, six eyes wide open.
They have developed their own personalities and interests. Eightball is sleek and athletic, balancing on the banisters. Looks like a kid from Brooklyn who might have a tee-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and, in another age, might have tucked cigarettes into the sleeve. Oddball is fluffy and solid… very solid…even though he was so spindly with a neck we could enclose in the smallest of our finger circles. He is a flopper. He’ll run around madly and then take a pratfall flop to get his belly rubbed. He almost does this on command, now. He looks like he has a little overbite so his mouth is very puffy and sweet. Cueball is the most elegant. When we took the three to be spayed the vet wrote down Siamese for his breed. He has no breed. Like the others, he has one mom and who knows how many dads contributed to his beautiful good looks. He has blue eyes. If there is such a thing as gender choice in cats, our Cueball would prefer to be a female. We sometimes call him Martha. He is the one who admires the action of a broom or vacuum and collects pieces of shiny paper from the floor.
The three babies sleep in one room – our office – and every night they find a new commodity to slip beneath the door. It started with a game of Ticket. We must have dropped a movie ticket stub in there one night and, after their story, we closed the door and immediately the ticket flew out from under the door jamb. We shot it back. It came back out to us. We did this a dozen times. It was obviously a game. We already knew they were soccer players – they’ll bat things around for a long time, sometimes leave the object alone and then go back to it later or another day – so we knew this wasn’t random. For a long time we got cue tips although we couldn’t figure out where they were finding them (I had tucked some inside a bowl, it turned out, and didn’t remember that) and, we can always depend on a twist-tie or one of the multi-color striped paperclips I use and that they have pulled out of the old Russian caviar tin in which I keep them.
The cats all seem to know the generation and group to which they belong even though they will acknowledge each other in their saunters around the house. Upperclassmen and lowerclassmen. The lowers treat Waldo, at least, with great deference (except when it comes to food; Oddball has been seen to head-butt Waldo out of the way of his dish.). Koufax could be either a role-model or a playmate, mostly depending on Koufax’s mood. He has definitely been instructive. Given his six toes on his two front paws, Koufax can do things other cats can’t. He can open doors, for instance, and more than once we have awakened in the middle of the night to many cats scampering around bedroom. Koufax does this not so much to let the babies out as to trap his nemesis, Jake, by using the surprise of an opening door in the middle of the night as part of the attack.
Jake is my son’s cat. At heart he is very sweet but you have to get to his heart to find that out. He is, what would be polite here?, shy. He lives here because my son had a six-month gig at the South Pole and couldn’t find any one of his friends who would take Jake for that length of time. He’s 10 years old and all of Charlie’s friends know him. One friend even kept him for a different six months when Charlie traveled in Europe. She nicknamed Jake Snacks, and with good reason. There’s a lot of cat there. Anyway, it’s hard to engage with Jake. He runs away making petting him a real challenge. One day, when Charlie called, I happened to mention that Jake was sitting there and staring at me. “Really?”, Charlie squealed, “He’s being really social with you.” Who knew. Now we do and we’re happy when we see Jake sitting immobile in the middle of the floor just looking at us. Despite this tendency to be a loner, he definitely wants to interact with Koufax. In my animistic relationship with my pets, I am sure Jake is the personification of a child who was a little off, a little different and shunned by the other kids. He has baggage. He has somehow sensed a kindred spirit in Koufax who is also set apart not only by his six toes but by his behavior. I think Jake wants to play with him but Koufax has had his sole cat position so eroded that he just won’t allow one more incursion. I’ve got Jake to the point where he will sit next to me for hours, resting his head on my arm and purring away; and Koufax claims my attention during the night hours when Jake is tucked away with the kittens. But I don’t think I’m going to get them together before Jake goes home in a few weeks. It’s been a long six months.
Waldo was able to accept Jake – from a distance, but the dog was just too much. Which is too bad because the dog is also an amazingly sweet animal. We got him at the local shelter and chose him largely because he wasn’t jumping up and down and vying for attention. He seemed to hold back, maybe not wanting to be disappointed when no one chose him. Or maybe he was just cagily playing his hand right. Whatever it was, Jim was attracted to him right away. Gemini had his arms crossed, his head on his arms and his tail wagged desultorily back and forth. That arm crossing is a natural position for him. Now when he comes in the house, he lies down, chest up and arms folded over. Very dog-of-the-hunt proud. He rarely barks – only at the dinner hour when he trots over to the edge of the blackberry and Christmas tree fields and barks his head off as if someone or something is in there. I am hoping it is the nightly warning to the coyotes to look but don’t touch. He is amazingly smart (well, all of our animals are, of course) and learns fast now that he’s beyond the puppy stage. Before that, he learned that Jim has a pretty loud bark himself when the car upholstery got chewed or yet another boot or croc was either chewed up or carried away. We lived through that, although there were a couple of times when I thought the dog was going to be dropped off at the shelter one dark night. It also took a long time for Gem to accompany Jim up into the vineyard or out to the barn. Gem, we speculate, was originally a stay-at-home dog and probably belonged to a single woman owner; one who figured such a handsome dog would get noticed by cute single guys. (This is a habit of mine, to make up little stories. I used to do it all the time when I was a college commuter student on the Long Island Rail Road. The train would be speeding past houses and I would realize little stories flitted through my vagabond brain about figures I saw in the windows. It still happens.)
Anyway, the dog follows instructions very well now and is our constant companion on near and far trips as he just loves to be in the car or truck. (Truck, I sometimes drive a truck now.) And he is just so loving. We think he really loves the little kitties by the quizzical way he turns his head to the side and looks down at them as they skitter past, and sometimes under, him. The big cats pay him little mind except that Koufax will throw him a watch-your-back hiss whenever they pass each other. Even Waldo lets Gemini be now, having made his point and piece by leaving home when he did.
When Waldo took off that morning, we, of course, had no idea of his intentions. I wonder if he did. When it got to be late that night, I left his food outside the door and the bowl was empty the next morning. I left his water bowl, too. Waldo loves water. Obsessively so. I believe this stems from the time he got floored over when I was having a bathroom remodeled in my Seattle condo. For days the floor lay open with exposed joists and pipes while the sink and toilet were shifted to new positions to accommodate a tiny shower in my jewelbox size bathroom. The day of the floortile laying, I got home excited to see the nearly completed project. I could tell as soon as I walked in that one of my cats was missing. You just know these things. I hunted in all of his hiding places but, admittedly in a 1000’ sq. ft. condo, there aren’t that many places to hide. I walked each floor and stairwell of the condo thinking he might have escaped during the workmen’s comings and goings. I didn’t think he could have gotten into the elevator but checked every floor anyway. It flashed through my mind that he was under the new floor but I put my ear to the floor and wall and heard nothing. Koufax was of no use in trying to find him, probably glad to be rid of the interloper.
I phoned the floor installer and the plumbers and contractors. No one had seen him but one contractor mentioned that the cat liked to crawl in between the joists in the underfloor. Still, I couldn’t hear him despite my crazed pleas for his response. It was the next morning that I heard a tiny meow and traced it to the floor. Yes, he was trapped there. The floor person, also an animal lover and a friend of my son’s, was across the water on a job but dropped that to rush back and break open the floor. It took him about an hour to get there during which time I sat on the floor and talked to my cat. I also called my sister in New York to sit on the phone with me throughout. She was screaming, I was screaming, Waldo kept meowing. Finally, Matt got there, broke up the new floor and, about 30 minutes later, saw Waldo’s little caramel colored head. The cat did not leap right out, probably terrified at that point. It took a little cajoling to get him within my reach. Once out, he made for his water bowl and, since then, makes a beeline for water all the time. Despite his arthritic body, he hauls himself up onto the bathtub to drop in and catch drippings from the showerhead. It is important to keep the seat down on the toilet. I have a big fountain with a fishtank pump in it set in a window and he stands on the ledge with his two front legs in the bowl, drinking to his heart’s content.
So water was my biggest worry during the two weeks he was gone. Jim was just as worried as I was as he really loves Waldo. Who wouldn’t. Waldo is a beautiful, if frail, Valentine Siamese; white with those caramel colored ears and striped tail. He is very dear, comes to you and pats you with his paw. He moves rather slowly, takes him 10 or 15 seconds to respond when he is called. He uses a stool and a chest to get up on the bed (probably should put a stool in the bathroom so he can get into the tub more easily) but he still has a great appetite, purrs sweetly and seems to have a wisdom to envy. Oh, and he will defer to any other cat who tries to muscle in on his dinner bowl, just as he always has. Now I have to watch and make sure he gets enough to eat because, after the two week absence, he was very thin when he finally came home.
Which he did at about 1 AM on the morning of September 22nd. I know the date – I would anyway – because Jim and I had been in Seattle on the 21st and drove home that night. We were in the bedroom when I thought I heard a faint, faint sound and went to the front door. Unbelievably, there was Waldo sitting there just as plain as day, waiting to be let in. We had searched everywhere for him – on foot and in the car – and had sighted him twice but he eluded us by taking off in the big Yucca plants beside the front door and then taking off into the woodsy Rhodie enclave behind the house. Oh my goodness he was thirsty and hungry. We finally stopped him from drinking as we were worried that his little stomach would overreact to the amount of fluid he was absorbing.
Since that night, he hasn’t been out except to the deck off the bedroom with access to nowhere else. Now that it is spring, I know he wants to roam again and I would dearly love to let him.
But I can’t bear the thought that I am going to lose him soon enough. That, soon enough, there will be nothing but the whisper of windtrails where each of us walked – cats, dogs, horses, humans. All with perfect souls.
