“Eyes to the side, I hide — Eyes to the front, I hunt.” Look a housecat in the face. You will see the eyes of a killer. Even the most pampered Persian or ragdoll, g…

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It was the faint scent of the old kibble that drew him in, I suppose. What other choice did he have? This winter was the toughest one yet for my outdoor crew, with temperatures sinking to forty degrees below freezing again and again. Snow fell to six or eight inches more than a dozen times as the wind ripped across our property at speeds up to sixty miles per hour, flinging furniture into the back acreage, exploding a standalone patio heater, and making it painful for me to open the front door long enough to distribute the morning and evening meals. It was a season of dying and dead bicolor cats, littering the roadside and decomposing in the ditches south of the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. When you’re hungry enough, you will cross a snow-covered road regardless of the risk… or visit a property that is already in the full control of a night-black and vicious-quick feral colony.

In November, reading the forecasts and already fearing the worst, we’d placed electrically heated mats at the front door, which claimed to maintain 40 degrees F in any condition. Then we bought more heated shelters to place in the barn, in the garage, and in front of the house. Mini Danger Girl and the Commander built ten impromptu cat shelters from those yellow-and-black crates you can get at Home Depot. We lined them with moving blankets and duct-taped them together. Some went near the house, others on the game trails between us and the woods. When we lost a few to the wind, I placed 15-pound free weights inside most of the remaining shelters, under the blankets.

During the worst of the cold, much of the food I set outdoors went uneaten, usually frozen rock-solid within an hour, even though I placed the stainless-steel (by Weathertech!) bowls directly on the heated pads. So twice a day I would empty them into the snow that covered our patio, then fill them with fresh room-temperature kibble. Danger Girl was displeased once she realized I was doing it. Just another instance of me being careless, sloppy, incompetent. I was littering in my own front yard. It wasn’t that leaving the food out would attract vermin, of course. We wanted some vermin to visit the front yard. No mouse, mole, chipmunk or vole long survives the notice of the Sibbings, who range in a pack from our front door out to the treeline and back. Each mouse is a free hot meal, ya know. So DG’s concern was more a case of the food rotting and being in a single disgusting mass when the snow thawed. She was right, and I stopped doing it… most of the time. Sometimes it is so hard for me to wrap my head around this and all of my other quotidian failures, so hard for me to focus entirely on keeping something clean, remembering to switch off the lights, always locking the door when I leave the house. Also, not leaving cat food out to spoil. I’ve been this way since I was a child, distracted and useless much of the time, but usually there was some woman to walk around behind me and make it right. Now, at the age of fifty-four, I have exhausted the patience, or refused the presence, of anyone who was still willing to clean up after me.

Sometimes, however, I am lucky despite my incompetence. We had a sudden thaw in late February, followed by strong rains that washed the patio clean and revealed a bathmat-sized mess of surprisingly well-preserved kibble. I made a note to get out there and clean it… then promptly forgot, of course. The next day, I looked up from my office window and locked eyes with a never-before-seen bicolor.

I snapped a couple grainy zoom shots with my phone, then carefully stood up, at which point the cat bolted. A few hours later, I saw him again. When he looked up at me, I could see an awful, bloody wound to the right side of his chest. We locked eyes, and the cat disappeared once more. So I went and stood patiently behind the front door, camera up to the glass. This is something I know how to do: wait in silence, close to motionless, for hours at a time. It is a skill you learn in the military, or in a rural township, or in correctional facilities, and always for the same reason: because you plan to hunt. And in due time, the animal returned, unaware of my now-nearer presence.

Other than the wound, this bicolor seemed healthy enough, and sizeable besides. I thought he might be a brother of the long-missing Albino Kitty, although the patterning was closer to that of Christine McVie. If this cat was actually a relative to any of my feline flock, however, he certainly didn’t act that way. The presence of any other cat was enough to send him running. Thus his choice of the old, frozen food dumped to the side of the patio; it was all that remained when the Sibbings, Tiger Dad, and the other outdoor cats finished eating their twice-daily meals and left for the treeline or for other pursuits.

Although this cat didn’t seem bothered by his injury, that was no reliable indicator. Cats can and will hide pain to an extent that no human could mimic. I wondered how it had happened. Was it a fight? Had Tiger Dad gone for the throat and, being no spring kitten himself, simply missed? Was this some sort of abuse from my God-damned idiot neighbor, who had recently re-distinguished himself by nearly hitting my daughter’s GX460 on our road twice, first head-on then by locking up the brakes in snow and nearly taking out her back bumper?

Because I always secretly think that every cat’s story begins in a home, despite the multifarious feral evidence to the contrary throughout the township, I started to imagine that he had been in a loving house when he was injured. The owners had wanted to heal him, or at least to look after him. But he had chosen instead to run away, because he didn’t want the unavoidable intimacy and vulnerability that comes from being cared for. It felt better, safer, to run away. It had been still autumn when he’d escaped, still the sort of conditions in which a cat could heal and grow stronger and live wild on the forest diet. But then the first snows had come, and the killing wind. At which point he realized his mistake, and knew that he would die in the cold. Maybe he wanted to go home. And he tried. But there was a new cat in the window of his old home. A reliable one. Sourced from a shelter, maybe, previously abandoned himself, and desperate himself for a home. A real housecat, devoted to his owner, who wouldn’t run off for reasons unknown.

Origin stories aside, the obvious thing to do was: trap the injured bicolor and get it to the vet. But this fellow looked too wary to trap. And there was the little problem of the Sibbings, who would run into any cage and eat any new food regardless of where it was. Leaving a trap out would only catch a Sibbing. There had to be another way.

The thaw persisted. I swept up the old mess then began leaving a bit of new food in the same place. But by then the big bicolor had started joining the regular meals, albeit at a distance. Not part of the clique, not participating in the various head-rubs and nose-touches which are the equivalent of gang signs on my acreage, but in the general vicinity at least. I started to think that the kids and I could corner him and get him into a net.

Something else worried me. Cats are superb healers. Cut them deep, or even flay them with a stuck collar as was the case with Broken Meower two years ago, and they will recover more quickly than you would imagine. But the wound on this animal’s chest was not getting smaller. If anything, it was spreading. I started to think of him as the Fisher King.

Some of you, if you were sufficiently schooled in various miscellanies and inanities, will recall the Fisher King from Arthurian legend. He was the last keeper of the Holy Grail. A disgraced or exiled British cyning, he has been wounded as a result of his leadership failures. His wound — sometimes said to be in the leg, but often in the groin — has rendered him useless, impotent. He cannot hunt, because his injury prevents it. And the wound, like the wound discussed in the recorded time-and-temperature line advertisements of my youth, will not heal. So he waits, and survives on fish. But nothing ever changes.

The musician Gordon Sumner, known to most of you as “Sting”, abandoned his rockstar credentials in the Eighties and put out a pair of smooth-jazz LPs with the aid of not-quite-yet-famous Branford Marsalis. The best track among the two records is probably “The Lazarus Heart”:

He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast
That burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother's hand

In the liner notes, Sting recalls having a dream about this, being very excited, writing it down when he awoke, then calling a friend, who said “Oh, come on, man, that’s just the story of the Fisher King!”

“Can’t I do anything original?” Sting wondered. Let’s face it, however: the 1100 A.D.-ish A.D. first drafts of the Fisher King story were already hoary with cultural frost when someone wrote them down. Surely the core tale precedes the birth of Christ. What is more human, more desperation-inducing, than having a wound that will not heal? As I write this, many people are up in arms about Canada’s “MAID” program. Medical assistance in dying. Apparently some 80-something woman went into a Canadian hospital because her back had started hurting. Before taking any action to address her illness, her injury — they offered to painlessly kill her! She refused this “care”, managed to heal despite the disapproving looks of her providers, and went on to climb a mountain the following year. Plenty of folks have been shocked by this story, and rightly so.

And yet. If you’ve ever had a wound that would not heal. If there has ever been something wrong with you that renders you unwanted, unlovable, unable to continue your life as you want. Then perhaps you have known what it is to wish for a painless death. A little bit of MAID in the USA, if you will. I can’t say I have ever felt that way about a physical injury. Few people have been knocked around like I have over the past forty-ish years, yet with so little disability and long-term pain to show for it. I am grateful. When I go to church and can kneel in the pew despite being loaded with a Mig-25’s worth of titanium components, I thank God. But I would be lying to you if I said I did not have other reasons to want to disappear.

While I plotted a cat capture with my children, I was visited by another old friend: the biggest, and most obviously decrepit, of my opossums. He is massive, slow-moving. Perhaps slow-witted as well, even by marsupial standards. My cats tolerate him as a matter of course, though they could kill him with a single bite. He’d come out to enjoy the thaw, maybe catch a meal or two… but when he turned towards me, I saw that he had a massive scrape on his head, down perhaps to the bone.

“I bet a car hit him,” was DG’s verdict, and I agreed. Well, not a car. A truck. One of the many old Chevrolet and Ford pickups that serve as default transportation in the township. A big possum could lie down just flat enough to not be killed by the bumper… but the front or rear differential might basically scalp him. And so it appeared to have happened. Yet he showed up on relatively steady legs and took a late dinner several nights in a row, always moving slowly. I went out to speak with him, unsure about how to handle the situation.

“Do you want to go to the vet?” I asked, not actually sure if our lovely local provider would, in fact, treat an opossum. But he didn’t seem like he wanted to go anywhere. He was eating lustily, cleaning up whatever food I’d spilled or misplaced during the previous snows. And his wound, unlike that of the Fisher King, appeared to be healing. I left him alone, and when it snowed again, he stopped coming to meals. Which did not concern me, because opossums don’t move much in those conditions.

A week later, during a sub-freezing, snow-driven night, I was woken by siren-loud feline anguish. I went to the front door and saw Tiger Dad ready to kill the Fisher King, as he had killed other pretenders in the past. They were growling at each other when I interrupted them…

well, that was not quite correct. The sullen-looking bicolor was crouching low and growling at Tiger Dad, who said nothing in response. And it wasn’t growling as much as it was… yowling.

You see, dear reader, the Fisher King was actually a Fisher Queen. And she had dragged her wounded, bloody body into a strange place, eating rotten food and enduring the hateful company of the Sibbings… for the oldest reason of all. My tabby patriarch didn’t seem all that interested, to be honest. As with the late Paul Walker and Cormac McCarthy, who were as prominent in their fields as he is in his own, Tiger Dad likes his partners about as young as he can get. But the lady in question was persistent, appearing night after night to join TD in his evening meal… and around 2 in the morning on a Saturday I awoke to the sounds of a very dramatic coupling. Apparently there’s still quite a bit of gas in this tiger’s tank. I went to the door and almost immediately saw TD coming back to finish his meal. We showed each other a bit of mutual respect in feline fashion, via a brief stare and a slow closing of the eyes. Not too old to get it done, eh? But it’s nice to have a decent dinner afterwards, instead of hanging around.

Having been serviced in accordance with her request, the Fisher Queen promptly disappeared and was never seen again.

It’s now on her to survive the winter, to bear her kittens in the forest, to perhaps eventually lead them back to me for a meal and — make no mistake — a bit of the old trap/neuter/release. I hope she makes it, though her success means additional vet bills and endless springtime drama. I have a lot of sympathy for her predicament. Wounded, desperate, hungry. Reduced to pleading for affection and involvement from someone who could, frankly, take her or leave her. Maybe she really is a former housecat. Maybe she ran away from a home or a someone, only to end up bleeding into the white snow to an empty audience of the precisely zero people and animals who really care about her now. Maybe, and I don’t want to think too much about this, maybe she had to run away because of her wound. Maybe the wound came first, and made her unworthy of love to begin with. Maybe everyone she meets now, like Tiger Dad, will see the wound first and treat her with disdain or distance. Maybe she will always be useless to everyone but her children, once they arrive.

A month later, the spring thaw came for real. Danger Girl found me in my office: “We need to go out and take care of the black-and-yellow crates… and you need to be prepared for what you find.” I went out to the trio of stacked makeshift cat houses near the treeline. Opened the first two up, and found nothing but blankets. The last one was heavy, sodden with unwanted weight. I took a deep breath, cut the duct tape, pulled the top… and found a polyurethane Rogue fifteen-pound free weight. This was one of the houses that I’d loaded down to keep from flying away in the wind. My back was turned to DG, shielding her from what I expected to find, and I think that when I laughed out loud it horrified her.

“No… see?” I asked by way of explanation, holding the weight up and forward as a priest holds the communion host before the congregation. “Everything’s fine! No one died in these crates!” Then DG, too, could laugh. I faced the treeline and raised the weight once again, in benediction.

Come forth, Fisher Queen, when the time is right, I thought. Suffer the little kittens, and forbid them not to come to me, though it bankrupt us past current penury to care for them. Perhaps the April sun will shine on a quintet of bicolors and tigers, led by a fully healed mother. I want to believe that. But I will, regardless, start searching the woods for her body, alive or dead, with or without mewing progeny near it, in the weeks to come.

It might be that her wound is too much to bear, that it will finish her off as she lies terrified and alone beneath a fallen branch somewhere. For now, I will choose to expect something else. She might not heal. Let’s be realistic about that. And she probably no longer has another home to which she can retreat. If anyone ever loved or cared for her, they might have long since chosen other cats, other situations. Who could blame them? It’s a hassle, dealing with the wounded. Yet I think about how she dragged herself through the winter and the woods to my house, just for one chance with the strongest possible father for her children, and I think, with apologies to Jeremy Renner in “Wind River”: That’s a warrior. Maybe she can make it long enough to deliver her kittens and get them into my hands before she lets go. And that would be a victory in and of itself. I think that maybe it’s okay to be unwanted. There’s a strength in that, if you can find it. And if you can use that strength, and put it into your children when they need it, then is anything else truly necessary? Does it really matter if you heal, once they are safely gone?

Good morning, friends and readers. It’s been a very close-run thing, but Amazon now confirms they can do paperback delivery for Christmas Eve in most states.

Cat Tales is about the size of The Great Gatsby. Like that book, it’s about a man who went to “Oxford”1 but it contains a lot more action, trust me. Read twenty stories, most of which are new for the book or feature significant revisions, about the eternal battle between Tiger Dad and Albino Kitty.

Get the paperback HERE! Orders placed by the end of Saturday, December 20, may arrive in time for Christmas.

Get the Kindle edition HERE! If you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, Cat Tales is free to check out and read for a limited time.

The limited hardcover edition, which features “The Snobes Supremacy” as the back cover, releases in January. It will be on Amazon, but it can also be had by contacting hardcover@cattalesbook.com. I will sign it as you like. The price will be $30 shipped and signed in the Lower 48, and payment is via PayPal; please inquire about international rates. Paid ACF subscribers who order the book will receive a 1-of-100 “Snobes” sticker with imagery from the book cover, plus a few bonus ACF-related stickers.

By the way, this fantastic book cover is courtesy of Matt Tierney, who did it in a single day, under pressure, while handling other work. Photography by the Commander.

Want color photos of the leading characters, and an absurdly long biography of the author you all already know? Go to

CatTalesBook.com

That’s all. I’ll be the first to admit the book isn’t perfect, but I think a lot of you will truly enjoy it. Thank you for considering the purchase, and for reading Avoidable Contact Forever.

We are all scared of something; I am scared of renting. When my parents divorced, back in the Betamax era, Dad left Mom with our lovely suburban house that, last time I checked, is worth about a million bucks. She couldn’t keep it. She was a first-rate musician and the smartest person I’ve ever known, but she couldn’t do basic checkbook math to save her…

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Seven months ago, I asked the readers of ACF to help obtain medication for “Loopy”, a blind tortoiseshell calico under the foster care of a reader here. About two dozen of you contributed a total of nearly two thousand dollars to ensure she received the pills and the cardiac exam she needed to stay healthy.

Over the past few weeks, Loopy has been exhibiting a lot of pain and discomfort, likely related to cancer in her facial bones. She lost her willingness to take medication and became incontinent, then unresponsive. This morning, Loopy’s foster parents brought a vet to the home to euthanize her.

I want to personally thank each one of “Loopy’s Loonies” for helping her have a little extra life, and a little additional dignity, during the past half-year. You are free to laugh at me or call me naive, but I believe that one day I will come to know her in a life that resembles this one not at all. And I do not believe there was anything small about her soul, I do not believe she is nothing but ashes now, I do not believe it was all for nothing.

I do not believe it is all for nothing.

So, Loopy:

If we meet again, why — we shall smile / If not, why then — this parting was well made.

Please enjoy the first chapter from Cat Tales: Short Stories of Friends and Ferals. To buy the book, visit cattalesbook.com or go directly to Amazon — jb

Death by iron. Five kittens gone. The whole litter, crushed beneath a rust-streaked construction dumpster and therefore beyond her ability to clean or even see the limp, paperback-book-sized bodies. Mama Kitty was a purebred Russian Blue, acquired under suspicious circumstances by brutish neighbors then evicted from their garage when nobody wanted to buy her kittens and getting her spayed would have been a waste of cigarette money. They let their dog chase her off the property. She went north to our acreage, already pregnant again. The cool, damp area hollowed out beneath the dumpster must have seemed perfect to instincts created before the dawn of history. In the summer of 2022 she delivered two tigers and a grey/white girl there, nursed them, hunted on their behalf, kept the raccoons off. The loss of her next litter in the spring of 2023, when a construction vehicle struck and moved the dumpster a critical few inches, must have seemed the casually violent act of an an uncaring god.

And the cruelest fact of all: the deaths brought her back into heat. In short order she was caught by the tomcats and bred once more. Thankfully, the construction dumpster was gone by then. The old steel barn in which she’d learned to hunt had been painted, wired for electricity, improved with cool concrete floors and a sound roof to intercede between her and the rain. So she delivered her next litter in the woods, but once their eyes were open she brought them over that threshold and out of the weather, to an empty cardboard box marked “Hoosier R35B”.

Again, she had delivered five healthy children. One jet-black girl, also the runt of the litter. A black tabby boy, broad and agile. Then three tiger brothers, replicas of the father who wouldn’t leave her alone and who still watched her from a new gravel driveway beyond the barn door. Danger Girl and I heard, then found, them in the cardboard box. I felt they could be handled and socialized. Maybe four weeks old, and the personalities already distinct; it makes you think about children and their destinies just a bit.

What to do with them? Giving them serious names would make no sense with ferals who would absolutely not be living in our house. So: Sister Kitty, because she was the only girl. Grover, the dignified black male, because my son, who not was yet colloquially known as “the Commander” had just learned to play Grover Washington’s “Mister Magic” on the bass guitar. The brown-furred tiger looked perpetually dusty, so… Dusty. A silverish tiger who couldn’t make much noise, so he was Broken Meower. Finally, the silver tiger with the thick stripes and solid black patch on his head. Resembled his father more than the others. He was the one who was always instigating something, biting his siblings, stalking your shoelace. Therefore, he was Attack Kitty, or AK for short.

In the summer evenings last year, once the house was built and we’d moved in, Danger Girl and I would sit in the barn and play with the cats, feed them, talk to them. Mama Kitty took them hunting. They were eerily adept at eating the best organs out of a mouse, like little Hannibal Lecters. The tiger boys moved and played as a unit. Dusty was the most affectionate, to us and to his siblings, while Sister Kitty early on developed a habit of slapping and biting anyone who came near her share of the food. Grover stood apart from the other four, as if he knew something they didn’t.

One morning Danger Girl ran in the house holding back sobs: The garage door was closing and AK ran under it, he got hit by it, he’s dying. I found him stretched out immobile on the ground, mouth open and tongue hanging out. He’d voided his bowels, one sad little lump behind him. His body no bigger than my outstretched hand. I realized that we needed a veterinarian. Like now. Started calling around. Out here the vets mostly focus on livestock and horses. Or they’re not taking new patients. A clinic in the poorer part of Mansfield picked up on the tenth ring and told us to come over.

When we got there it was a packed room with Seventies-style wood paneling and a few tired benches. The receptionist was cheerful but dead tired and quite matter of fact. “Why is the cat called AK? Like the gun or something?” “Sure.” I could already tell we were wasting money and time. Except we weren’t, not at all. The vet, when she arrived, was a lovely and empathetic woman of a certain age. Very soothing. And the bearer of good news. “We did an X-ray. He’s got a little fracture in his neck. You’ll need to keep him indoors for maybe a month, to let that heal, so he isn’t killed tussling with his brothers.”

And just like that, reader, we had an indoor cat. For a while, anyway. AK adjusted to air-conditioned life the way some women adjust to five-star hotels: with obvious gratitude but also a certainty that they deserve the very best. He was impeccably clean, always playful. In the evening he would mew at the door for his two brothers, and they, in turn, would bump heads against it from the other side. There was no choice but to permit supervised playdates from the third week on. By the fifth week it was obvious that what we actually had were three indoor/outdoor cats. They came and went as they liked, sleeping on beds and couches during the day then rushing out to the treeline at night. Dusty was the best hunter by far, securing a wide variety of field mice and chipmunks. Broken Meower got (most of) his voice back but remained the shy and retiring one, sleeping far more than the other two.

They were sizable by the fall. Fast and fit, a joy to watch even in the unconscious cruelty they showed to prey before completing the kill and tossing the dead body between themselves. AK did not like any situation where he was not the center of attention. He quickly destroyed the screen outside my office because climbing onto it was the easiest way to ensure I would immediately let him in the house. His sister took a turn as a full-time inmate after her spaying; AK would demand to check up on her, rubbing his head against hers and licking her face clean.

Most of the time, the three tiger boys had the run of the yard, while Grover preferred to relax in the barn beneath my Radical race cars on their jackstands. As Carlito Brigante liked to say, however, the street is watching. We started noticing adult ferals from the surrounding area at mealtime. Most notably a battered tuxedo cat with frostbitten ears and torn-off tail, whom I named Heckler, and his sleeker, faster brother, yclept Koch. They always yielded to AK’s aggression, because if they didn’t the other two tigers would sprint through the long grass and back his play. So for a while there was peace on the yard, so to speak. Then the first chills of winter came, and with them a pair of stronger adversaries.

The first was a black-and-white cat with pink nose and visible skin showing through the white fur of his face. I named him Albino Kitty. He had a permanent hangdog expression, but he was big and broad-shouldered. The first time he challenged AK, he was driven off with a bloody face and permanent scars on his nose and chin. Problem solved. But two weeks later, my little tiger was limping when he came for breakfast. It was a Saturday morning. Our reassuring rural vet was unavailable. I took him to the Ohio State emergency clinic, thinking AK had broken a front paw. It was a beautiful facility and we didn’t have to wait ten minutes.

“Something bit him really hard,” the teenaged vet-to-be told me shortly afterwards, “so we put him under, drained the abscess, sewed him up, and bandaged him.”

“Thank God,” I replied. “The bill will be $557.” Between the first incident, this one, and the neutering, this was now a thousand-dollar “feral” cat who had also done $400 worth of harm to my window screens. From his warm perch inside the house, AK licked his injured paw and hissed through the window at his returned adversary, Albino Kitty, who was now sporting a set of long, bloody wounds to his face and neck in addition to a permanently half-closed left eye. Had I been able to catch Albino, I’d have taken him to OSU, as well. No playing favorites, every cat the light touches is mine — but he was too wary of people for it to be possible. With AK hors de combat, Dusty and Broken Meower were afraid to challenge Albino, who became entirely too comfortable on our front porch… but around that time was when AK’s father, Tiger Dad, returned from his mysterious sabbatical and decided to start attending the meals.

Cats aren’t dogs; they don’t maintain a hierarchy and they don’t devote much of their brain to social matters. But you wouldn’t need much grey matter to know that Tiger Dad was the OG of this square mile. We saw his children by other moms sprinting across farm fields or loitering in the sun, both to the north and south of us. The coyotes and raccoons held no terror for him. The other adult ferals he treated with the detached contempt of a Sun King, swatting at them then stretching out in satisfaction when they ran. Mama Kitty, who had disappeared for months and consequently had missed out on neutering, returned as well, and was discovered in the garage with five new kittens, two of which were female tigers. Tiger Dad pranced around the property in celebration while Albino watched from a distance. Too much dignity to run from me, but somehow the big tabby was never close enough to catch for neutering. Not that I fancied my chances of getting him into a travel crate. You’d have had better luck with a young bobcat.

It was almost time for AK to return to the outdoors. I sat with him on the step and let him sniff the air a bit, knowing he wouldn’t run for the trees just yet. “Listen,” I told him. “You and I are not that different. We’ve broken our necks doing stupid stuff. We like a scrap, but we don’t always come out unscathed. And we both have these old fathers hanging around, being all menacing and stuff, long past their sell-by date in my opinion, really. I feel for you. But know this: you’re on two strikes, like Ving Rhames in Baby Boy. If I have to take you to the vet again, you’re gonna be an indoor cat from now on. So think about what you do next.” Then I kissed him multiple times directly on the face and called him the prettiest boy ever, which he hates.

This winter dragged on, snowing through March. The three tigers slept in heated cat houses outside the front door. Grover had a similar setup in the barn, as did Mama Kitty. Many of the older ferals had departed for somewhere else, including both Heckler and Koch, who either found a new territory or simply died in the cold. Albino reappeared, and started mating with Mama’s new kittens. Whenever AK saw him doing it, he would rush headlong towards his much larger opponent, breathing fire to interrupt the rape of his younger sisters — but surely he wasn’t interrupting every meet-up this way. “Oh, they’re too young, and nothing will come of it,” I said, ignorantly.

One afternoon I was in my office when I heard hissing and yowling. Looking out, I saw Tiger Dad out in the clover, surrounded by his three boys. Dusty and Broken Meower had flank positions, but it was AK in his face. “He’s your father!” I yelled. “He’s just trying to be in your life! Give him a chance.” AK ignored my therapy-sounding, candy-assed advice, and took a combative step forward: let’s go, old man. Tiger Dad evaluated the situation with the same dead-eyed look he gave everything else… then retreated in slow motion. His trio of sons did not pursue. They must have all read Robert Bly’s Iron John during those long winter nights. The goal is not to vanquish one’s father; it is to take one’s legitimate place as his equal.

This tableau played out again and again over the next month, but there was never any bloodshed. Rather, an understanding was reached. Tiger Dad started coming to meals at the appointed times, but he waited until his boys were finished before digging in for himself. There’s always a two-or-three-foot space between him and AK. A little hissing. Nothing too serious. They’re working it out. Sometimes I’ll look out and see the three tigers playing and rolling around, while Tiger Dad observes from a satisfied distance. He has to know they are his.

And now we are in spring. The three tabbies and two black cats are about to celebrate their first birthday, which in other circumstances would also be their midlife crisis. Time moves quickly for ferals, who without human intervention rarely survive two Ohio winters. You can fix this by bringing them inside for good, trading a short life of intense delights and sensations for long years spent with a nose against the window. They don’t know enough to make that choice, or spurn it. You have to be the one to decide that they will never roam, never really see the world, live as housecats. Sometimes, I wonder who made that decision for me.

With the exception of Sister Kitty, about whom more will be said another time, I’ve elected to leave everyone outside. To trap, neuter, and release them as well as I can, but to leave them as wild as they are meant to be. Danger Girl serves meals twice a day, a mixture of dry and wet food, while I fill a small water fountain. We have enough heated shelters to hold about two dozen residents, which is good because that’s about what we have some days.

I love all my cats but I have a special affection for Attack Kitty. He is the most beautiful of them, the sleekest, the fastest and most dangerous. You have to be born ugly, as I was, to truly appreciate beauty when you see it. His very existence feels like a deliberate gift. I was minding my own business in the barn when his mother brought him in. Her beloved son, with whom we have been well pleased, if occasionally impoverished in the course of things.

He meets me in the driveway at the end of the day, occasionally brings chipmunks to the door in consideration of my inept and ungraceful movements. His brothers wander off from time to time, but he never strays. Why should he? His possession of this fiefdom is more secure than mine. Inherited from his mother and father, then defended with blood and fury. We live here as rulers, but to quote one of the more depressing fantasy books out there, I only paid the gold price for it; Attack Kitty paid the iron.