August 15, 2004
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My split-personality cat!
I am a born-again pet-lover. As a child, a beloved orange tabby was killed when she got up under the hood of my dad’s 1953 Chevy for the warmth. He didn’t know she was there and her neck was broken when he started the car. I remember holding her still-warm corpse and marvelling at how her little head rolled around so freely. That hurt so much that I totally shut down to critters for, oh, say fifty years or so.
Now all I have to do is see a dog riding in the back of someone’s pickup truck, and it makes my day. Dogs and cats have so much more grace and beauty and dignity than most of the domesticated primates I see shambling around. But I digress.
Silky is a gray and white dink who sort of adopted me after having been abandoned at Felony Flats along with her two sisters, Smoky and Spooky. I once had hopes of taking them all up the valley with me at the end of summer, but Smoky and Spooky have bonded–I can’t break up the set and Spooky is too, well, spooky to be caught. And Silky–well, for a while I thought that taking her home would work, but now I see I was wrong.
She has not bonded with any critter but me that I can see, and therein lies the problem. She often sleeps on my bed, and when I wake and stir, she pads up beside me for purrs and head-butts and pets. She sits on my lap while I watch TV sometimes. She follows me to the dumpster when I take out trash. She even follows me to the outhouse. But we have two other cats and home, and a very friendly but undisciplined dog–and she don’t deal with other cats well.
If another cat so much as gets on my porch, she hisses and growls. Once, Cassie ( a sort of multi-color polydactyl) came into the cabin and started eating Silky’s food. Silky–who was on the bed–flattened her ears and hissed and growled. Cassie ignored her, finished eating, and started to mosey around the cabin–it is only 10×12 feet, so that didn’t take long. Then she jumped up onto the bed–that did it! Silky erupted like a furry Catherine wheel, spinning and spitting and snarling. Cassie then casually vacated the cabin–”I was ready to leave anyway” she might have said. Silky then darted under the bed, staying there long enough to shit on the boxes of supplies and merchandise I had stored there–she even managed to get shit on the wall! Then she shot out of the cabin heading south and I didn’t see her for two days.
She has mellowed a tad since–Cassie was in last night for a snack and Silky was okay with it. Cassie stayed off the bed this time. But last night, just after I had bedded down, turned off the light and all, with Silky on the bed–I heard this muffled thump, and still another neighborhood cat came in through the window. GROOWLLL! Silky was not amused, and the other cat (a striped polydactyl I named Jailbird due to her stripes and generally furtive air) beat a hasty retreat as soon as I slid open the door. (My cabin is odd–instead of a proper door, it has a sliding glass patio window/door.)
Silky stayed under the table for a while, but kept control of her bowels–thank goodness–and got back on the bed a few hours later. Peace reigned again in my own private wild kingdom.
Comments (6)
Relatively speaking, Koji is not undisciplined. He’s just excitable. Handout: now he was undisciplined, never had a bit of training. I seem to recall similar discussions about my son, who is also relatively well-disciplined (self-disciplined, because that’s the way I’ve always wanted it) compared to a lot of the kids he went to school with. Of course there are some of Doug’s peers who were reared with the iron hand of authority, and compared to Strongheart, Koji is a wild thing. Just bear in mind that pathetic little lap-yapper in Pooch Cafe, the one that was over-trained. We don’t want that, do we?
Never a dull moment with cats. If I had a raging cat allergy, I’d face my extreme needle phobia and get the shots just to have them. I am honored that they give me the affection they do.
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so
placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession….” –Walt Whitman (The One True Appreciator of Life)
william s. burroughs loved cats dearly. i think he loved them more than he did humans. he wrote a book about cats that is short but very good. written in the usual burroughs style but very mature written when he was alot older.
awww!! the only thing i hate about not living in new hampshire any more is not having a pet! your post was really cute!
If you really want to take Silie home, just stick her in the bathroom when you get there, OR a seperate room where she can hear, smell and almost touch ( like under the door) the other inhabitants. This can last from one day to 2 weeks; depending on how well she adapts. It would be a shame if you had to abandon her, if she’s come to depend on you, unless you can find her a good home. Take Care.Pax~Z
Sounds alot like my kitty Flinch!