Outlier

I have never liked house cats much. I'm allergic to their fur and the way that they always seem entitled to their territory. They aren't aware of their own domestication and how good they have it, typically. The constant napping, the raised tail, the way they scratch and bite whenever they are in a bad mood, the way they come and go as they please. I don't like the smell of cat food or the havoc they cause in the garden. Their habits and personalities leave much to be desired in my estimation. Compared to dogs, they appear ungrateful, impersonable, they put me ill at ease with their dispassionate malaise. Perhaps I am biased from my own experience. The fact remains, domestic cats are at best an inferior analog to their jungle-dwelling predecessors. Those that hunt in streaks and prides, those that can take down full-grown ungulates in the desert or the rainforest. Those whose haunting figures are carved into cave walls, legendary in strength and speed. Feared among tribes and people across the world and throughout history. There's cats on other continents that can climb a tree with a full grown deer carcass in their mouth. I heard that once, and I bet it's true.

My wife, she's not a big fan of felines either, but anything with fur that looks hungry is hard to resist. The stray ones that we have around the property come and go from the farm equipment and little sheds and old boxes and barrels. Born in the barn in hearty litters and swooped up by owls and dogs, dulled by inbred blindness. Susceptible to simple infections, abandoned by their mother for lack of viability. Nature can be tough to survive. If a cat exists too far outside of average performance, they don't make it. One standard deviation from the mean and you're gone in the first couple weeks of your furry, hungry life. Too slow, too curious, too gullible, you're a statistic.

This past summer, We found a litter of 6 in an old trailer. Their eyes were closed still, suckling and helpless. Their mother hid them beneath an old stainless steel tank in a trailer. 2 calicoes, 2 orange and white, 1 gray, 1 black and white. After we found them, she wised up and moved them among the tines beneath the shroud of a tractor-driven rotary tiller, one at a time by the nape of their neck. We found them there too. Next, they were moved to an aluminum boat. Under the rotted wooden benches and tangled in splintering rope and sun faded flotation vests. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime. It spiked to 108, and dipped to 99 here and there. My wife brought them water and ice packs and food. They would drink and then climb into the water and fall asleep with their chin on the edge of the bowl. It was adorable. After the rototiller relocation, the two calicoes were gone. After the boat, the gray one was gone. Statistics. We raised the rest in the back yard. They hid out in the propane tank compartment of a gas barbecue. 1 meal per day, fresh water, an old towel to sleep on. Occasionally, we administered anti-parasitic treatments. Their thin faces and thin fur began to fill in around bulbous eyes, they put on weight and had more energy as time passed. They wrestled and fought on the top of the fence, they fell off. They climbed everything, chased each other, caught crickets and moths. They terrorized a lost snake in the yard. One would nap and another would sneak up and pounce. There was always a contest for strength. It was cheap fun for a while and everybody was enjoying it.

In July, while speaking to a group of clients outside of the office, I heard an incessant squeaking meow. Over and over, closer and louder, the lost kitten cried until I had to address it with the group. "If you'll excuse me, I need to bring this cat somewhere so we can continue without distraction." I set the cat on the porch and send my wife a text message. "cat on porch, please take care of." I saw her reach out the front door and grab the kitten. His head was covered in cobwebs, he was filthy and gaunt after a short life of starvation under an old steel shipping container. He was from a group of kittens that we had not known about before. Now what? I thought.

After the meeting, I went and found her getting ready for work. "what ever happened with that kitten?" "he's in the back with the rest. I think they adopted him." In the yard, I could see him feeding from the mother of the litter that we had found months prior. He was a runt, smaller than the rest and more playful. His meow was a squeak; likely a stigma of early malnutrition and subsequent stunting. They were all friends now. The mom licked his ears and he slept in a pile with the rest as the nights cooled in September. I like that part of the story most I think.

These animals haven't lost their natural instincts yet. They act grateful for the food, they don't take for granted the attention they get when you fill the water bowl. They hunt anything that moves, they grapple all day, simulating deadly bites at the neck and pinning each others furry bodies to the lawn. They pick fights with sleeping comrades, they brawl in groups of 3 and 4. They climb to see what is at the top of anything. They act so tough, and they are so young. Each night they still curl up near their mother and sleep like babies in complete vulnerable solace. In the daytime they startle and run at any abrupt movement that I make when I'm around them. They warm back up and creep in with intense curiosity when you sweep the back porch or stack firewood. They wrestle with the broom and walk across the pile of tools you have laid out near your project. They sit atop the engine when you are working on it, they bob their heads and stare like you owe them something. They climb into the dumpster to lick the chicken juice from discarded foil. They eat fruit and bugs. They box tall weeds that waver in the breeze. They wrestle jalapeño peppers on the porch. They chase their tail and each other's tails. Their coordination improves, they get faster, they look healthy.

We finally decided it was time to get rid of them. This lifestyle was good in the early stages, but it couldn't go on as they got bigger and more entitled to the food we gave them as they weaned from their mother. After too long, there's several half-grown cats on the porch making a ruckus, climbing the screen door, meowing. Back to the math; that's several too many. We gave 3 away to friends and family with little kids. Free pets are often good pets. 2 of them are in Nevada now, one of them is at a farm nearby. They lucked out in a big way.

After the distribution and the statistics, we ended up with 1 orange cat left. He slept on the front porch and took on the name Pumpkin. He waited for us to come home and tried to get into the house every time we opened the door. My wife fed him cheap food from the store and if we ran out, we tossed him a piece of bacon or a chunk of sausage. We ate inside, he ate outside. Early in the morning he'd sit in perfect symmetry with his tail wrapped around his front paws, focused on the front door. He was becoming complacent, dependent, less feral.

A few weeks of him laying around the porch and I started to wonder if we'd trained the instinct out of him entirely. He didn't hunt anymore, he laid around like a domestic cat. I couldn't blame him. His siblings had left and we were still looking for a place for him to live. One night, we came home and he wasn't there. I was relieved, my wife was sad. Maybe something bad happened? she wondered. I was apathetic, we did what we could and that was that. The night of his disappearance, our neighbors had a huge party. A hired mariachi band played loudly into the early morning hours, kids jumped in a big inflatable house, beer bottles clanked into garbage cans, the smell of Mexican cuisine wafted in through our open windows and we drifted to sleep. In the morning, no pumpkin. We went to work, came back, no pumpkin. We went to town for dinner and came back, no pumpkin. We left the front door open and the screen door closed that night, just in case. At least we would hear him if he came back.

Right before bed, we heard a faint meow. There he was, sitting as he had for weeks like nothing happened. He looked like he'd been up all night, he looked hungover. Tamarind candy and grease stuck to his orange coat. Too big for his britches, he thought he could just come back after a night of dumpster diving and playing with stranger kids, and pick up where he left off. I guess he could. My wife scolded him in jest and poured him a bowl of food. She pet him as he purred. With a new lease on the friendship it almost felt like he might stick around forever.

A few days later when I walked out the front door, I felt the first real cold of late fall on my face and saw my breath before me. It hadn't frozen, but it came close. Understandably, the orange cat was not in his normal place on the porch waiting for food and attention. He was likely holed up somewhere among tarps and cardboard boxes in the barn keeping warm. Maybe he was in the old barbecue or the toolshed, huddled among errant cuts of PVC pipe and lengths of shade cloth. Maybe.

At the end of the walkway, I passed a strange colored item laying on the ground. Out of context, I didn't recognize it. A short length of orange and white cat tail muddied and matted to the ground. It started making sense. My first though was that the cat had crawled into the engine compartment of my wife's car. The fan belt likely caught the tail in a pulley and amputated it in short order. I hoped that he had escaped a little lighter and a little wiser. Beside the tail there was evidence of a scuffle; larger paw prints and drag marks in the garden soil. Perhaps this was evidence of a more natural end. The last data to be observed in a predator prey relationship, the demise of many cats over time. I thought and paced the yard for a minute or so. It occurred to me that our from door security camera may have picked up footage in the night that would help tell the story of what happened.

03:15 AM, in the footage log there are three videos recorded. The stage is illuminated by the orange light emanating from the front porch. I watch the clips and see two fat Rottweilers prowling the perimeter of my wife's Car. I can hear them huffing breath and growling in short excited bursts as they work together to trap the young cat. They are too thick to comfortably fit beneath the car but they are determined. Circling and circling on opposite sides of the vehicle, they begin to lay down and work their fat bodies beneath to where Pumpkin is hiding above the rear axle. I can hear him meowing from the footage. The larger of the two dogs emerges a minute or so later with pumpkin in his mouth, his head held high in pride. The cat is squirming and fighting. The dogs exit off frame into the dark corner of the yard, and the camera stops recording.

It was hard to watch, even harder to tell my wife what had happened. I was angry about the whole thing. Understandably, this is how things go for stray cats sometimes. I would have rather left the ending a mystery but it isn't how it unfolded. After I watched the footage, I put my phone in my pocket and went to look for the body. Maybe I'd bury him and take care of throwing away the old bag of food and the bowl on the front porch before she came home from work. It was the least I could do to help ease the disappointment. Not a tragedy, but a tough start to a Tuesday to be sure. I found no body, I threw away the remnant of tail that I'd found, and tucked the bowl away in the backyard among garden tools and jute twine. Things happen, you move on. Nobody cried or made a big deal of it, we're all adults here. My temptation was to confront the neighbor on account of principle. It's rural here, big farms are stitched together with smaller lots along the highway. There is a house every quarter mile or half mile. There may be 200 acres with a home, next to a 5 acre lot with 2 homes. There is a lot left to the imagination about property lines and tresspass laws. Culturally, it's casual. Regardless, the contention remains: Aggressive dogs ought to be chained or fenced. I wondered if the cat was over in the neighboring yard and baited the dogs unknowingly to come and find him. Whose fault would that be? My hesitation to confront the neighbor rested in the fact that these dogs were loose in the yard to begin with. To get to the front door for a conversation, I'd have to deal with them. They are a natural security system in place to protect the hearty Cannabis crop that grows behind the tall solid fence they installed a few years ago at the back of the property. I can smell the dankness of the crop, and it hangs in the air between trimming and harvesting times when men load a box truck in the middle of the night and haul it to wherever it goes. I don't know how the operation works, and I don't care. I decided it best to keep to myself and play it safe. It was a fluke event, it wouldn't happen again, the cats are all gone. I reasoned.

a couple weeks passed and we'd nearly forgotten about the whole story. There were a few references here and there. I could still see little paw prints in the soft places around our porch where the overhang protects the ground from eroding rainfall. Temporary fossil evidence in a short history of deadly biological truth; things eat other things whenever they can. We were headed into the holiday season, busy with family events and work. It's my favorite time of year; the sweet spot between October and January.

On Thanksgiving morning, my wife was in the kitchen at the sink, the water was running. I heard her shriek and run out the front door. She disappeared around the corner of the house. I went to the window to see what she had seen. There, staring at me from the roof of the chicken shed was a bobtailed cat with a scarred blind eye. He sat with primal, still intensity. The orange and white pirate held gaze for a few seconds and heard my wife calling. He slipped away to safety beneath the rafter tails of a big steel clad shop building and peered at her as she bribed and bartered and tried to convince him to come down from the roof. The one-eyed gladiator slinked out of sight. Never again to trust, forever now to be feral. Forever now to see the world more clearly.