Midnight Mutterings | More cat stuff

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

If you’ve been reading these columns, you have already met Sybil-the-Cat, who generously shared her house with me for sixteen years. What I haven’t mentioned is that for some of those years, there was another feline resident on the property. I don’t remember exactly when he arrived. He was a handsome, solid pale gray fellow (unless you count the white stripe in his forehead and his two while toes. He had a clipped left ear that showed he had had at least one human encounter before me. He wasn’t feral. He was just an adult cat who one day showed up on my deck and stayed, patiently sitting beside the door he was afraid to enter. For seven years.

From the beginning I called him othercat, assuming that his true name would be revealed to me when I knew him better. What I didn’t know at first was that othercat was the perfect name for someone so unassuming, so gentle and undemanding.

The cat sat beside my door for those seven years until one day he disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.

He was as friendly as he was handsome as long as I respected his boundaries. When I came home he rubbed against my legs and purred loudly, but he did not allow me to touch him. When the weather was warm and the door was open, he rubbed against the doorjamb and purred.

When the weather was cold, or windy or rainy, othercat sat outside. There was no roof and the shallow doorway offered little shelter and I worried. This deck was on the back of the house, against the hill, away from the weather on the water side of the house, but it was still exposed.

So I made othercat a house. Not an elegant house with shakes and windows, but a simple lidded Tupperware bin with a cat-size door cut in one end. I put a piece of wool blanket inside for a rug, and an ugly piece of foam on top for insulation. Then I lured othercat in with food. He obligingly ate the food, then immediately vacated his house and returned to his station by the door.

When the weather was really nice, I sometimes sat on the top step, and if I stayed long enough, othercat sat beside me. After a while, still purring, he might lean against me. But that was all. If I reached to touch him he was gone, flashing his tail, to sit in the far corner or the deck, all purring ceased. But there were no hisses or growls like those that came from the bad- tempered Sybil-the-cat.

I asked my daughter, who lived in Portland, what I might do to get othercat to trust me. She suggested that I hide my hands and pet him with my foot, or with my elbow if I could get close enough. And that worked. He was, as she suspected, deathly afraid of my hands.

After that, othercat occasionally joined Sybil-the-Cat and me on our walks around the neighborhood. He didn’t mind the crows,
who saved their vitriol for Sybil-the-Cat, and he was intelligent about the few cars that came along our road. When we returned to the house, he chose not to go inside with us, but sat quietly outside, beside the door to wait.

Sybil-the-Cat wasn’t really welcoming at all to othercat. In the early days, she occasionally slapped his handsome face for no reason I could see. But othercat never returned her hostility. He didn’t give up any ground, but just stood, seemingly waiting for her to come to her senses. Obviously, othercat left the deck on occasion, as he was meticulously clean in all his habits, but I think I saw him in the yard only once in those seven years unless he went walking with us.

Otherwise, beside the door he was. Rain or shine. When there was a rare winter storm, he wore a little cone of snow on his gray head.

Then, one day, he was gone and I never saw him again. I suspected an eagle caused his absence after I read a poem by Jill McCabe Johnson, about an eagle’s nest that fell, revealing small collars and harnesses, some with name tags. Fluffy, Hector. There was no collar on othercat. How could I have attached it without his seeing my hands?

Of course I asked around, even went to the shelter, where there were several cats who looked like othercat and were likely his cousins. But there was no othercat there. Or anywhere.