Author’s note: Welcome to Volume 2 of Cat Tales. If you enjoy this, visit cattalesbook.com to get Volume 1. It’s free on Kindle Unlimited, and affordable as a paperback, hardcover, or e-book!
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, and 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 placed outdoors went uneaten, frozen rock-solid in an hour. So twice a day I would empty the bowls into the snow that covered our patio, then place a fresh meal on steel bowls that, in turn, sat on the heated mats. Danger Girl was displeased when 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 in 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 to the treeline and back. That’s a free hot meal, ya know. It was more a case of the food rotting and being in a single disgusting mass when the snow thawed. DG was right, and I stopped doing it, but 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. 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 now, at the age of fifty-four, I have exhausted the patience, or refused the presence, of anyone who is 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 zoom shots with my phone, then carefully stood up… and the cat bolted. A few hours later, I saw the same cat 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 large enough, and healthy. I thought he might be a brother of the long-missing Albino Kitty, although the patterning was closer to Christine McVie. If this cat was 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 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. He chose 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 exercise his remaining powers. 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 cat. Sourced from a shelter, maybe, and desperate himself for a home. A new cat, a real housecat, who wouldn’t run off for reasons unknown.
The obvious thing to do: 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 the trap out would only catch a Sibbing. There had to be another way.
The thaw continued. I swept up the old food 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 would 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 king he has been wounded as a result of his kingly 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-ish A.D. origins of the Fisher King story were already hoary with cultural frost when someone wrote them down. Surely they precede 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”, healed 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 and 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 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 talk to 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, I was woken by yowling in a sub-freezing, snow-driven night. 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 them 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 who loved her, 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 not worthy 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. It 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 under 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 has no other 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 gone?