Foxlily

I’ll never forget the frogs in my shoes, that first spring we lived here.

I discovered the first one when I slid my feet into some old gardening clogs I kept in the garage.  I nearly levitated.

The frogs kept appearing.   Baffling.

Then, one day, I saw the black cat bring his gift from a nearby pond, and place it carefully in the shoe.

Perhaps he was trying to assure his place here, after I’d tried to discourage him from staying.

When we moved to the country in January 1993, I brought four cats with me from town.   Soon after we  arrived,  I noticed the good-looking black cat hanging around, licking the dishes from which my cats ate.

The black cat looked to be about a year old;  clean and competent, if a bit hungry.  He was too healthy to be a stray.  Assuming he belonged at one of the neighboring farms, I wouldn’t feed him or let him in.

The black cat kept showing up.  He  grew thinner.  The weather  grew colder.  After a week or so, I made a  bed for him in the garage, and gave him a little kibble each day.  Even on short rations, he was always here.

He gradually became one of the family, eating and sleeping with the other cats.  We still assumed he belonged elsewhere, so we didn’t  name him or get too attached.  By spring, though, when my shoes were sprouting cuisses de grenouilles, we’d begun to call him “Pookie,” or “Pookie Bear,” for his sweet disposition and  thick coat; or “Pookmeister,” for his quiet determination to stay.

When we’d lived here about eighteen months,  the man who formerly owned this house appeared unannounced at the door, with one of the neighbors, a burly man who once played college football.  The stranger said the black cat belonged to his family. They’d meant to take him when they’d moved to a northern city,  but he’d run away. They couldn’t stay  to search for him.   They’d been too busy with the move to contact us.  His children missed the cat, whose name, he said, was “Midnight.”

I was incredulous that  a person who would abandon an animal without inquiring about its welfare would presume to show up a year and a half later, asserting belated claims.  He easily could have found my name in the telephone directory,  left a note on the kitchen counter, or sent an explanation by mail.  He knew the address, after all.

I said I’d rather keep the cat;  that we’d grown fond of him, and had looked after him since we’d been here.  The man offered me money, about seventy dollars, as I recall, in a  condescending way.  I wanted to slap him.

But the man was big and aggressive, so I said nothing more.  I didn’t want to make a scene in front of the neighbor.   Silently fuming, I found the cat,  who’d fled to the barn.

The cat wasn’t pleased when I handed him over.  He squirmed and writhed.   I was pretty miserable too.

Were such a scene to unfold now, I  can’t imagine surrendering  the cat.  I certainly can’t imagine going to search for him, like a servant, for an uninvited man who stood in my driveway, criticizing my general lack of charm.

Then, younger and easier to overwhelm,  I felt powerless.  That made me angry enough to push back just a little:  ”If you insist upon taking the cat,” I said to the northerner, “you can also take the cans of old paint you left in the garage for me to dispose of.”

Obviously startled by the edge in my voice, the man began to toss the detritus from the garage’s far corner into the trunk of his car.   Then he opened the car door to fling more things into the back seat.

Seizing the main chance, the cat once known as Midnight sprang from the car, dashed to the woods, and  ran up a tree.  I laughed.  This irritated the man, who was puffing and red-faced from carting his junk out of the garage.

Pookie had made his choice.

“Just keep the damned cat,” the man muttered, slamming his car door and roaring away.

That was the last we ever heard from him.

Pookie never left this place again, except for brief visits to the vet. He spent most of the next twenty years as our benevolent daimon, surveying his domain from trees, escorting me to the barn, prowling the fields, and hunting mice.  He was vigilant and reliable, almost as if he felt responsible for us.

As an older cat, he tolerated our newly acquired dogs.  He treated them with calm superiority, as if they were dimwitted kittens.  He didn’t fear them and never struck them. If they annoyed him, he simply retreated, or put a warning paw on their heads without showing his claws.  When they went astray on walks, he’d herd them back into line.

Years later, a neighbor mentioned that as a kitten, Pookie had  lived with German Shepherds.  That perhaps explains much about his habits.

He was oddly gentle for a cat:  quiet and affectionate;  not a lap cat, but companionable. He liked to chase golf balls, which we found curious before we learned about his previous life with dogs.  He purred easily, but otherwise said little.  He affably came when called, and never strayed beyond the fields around the house.  He was a capable mouser, but never cared much for toys or catnip.  He was genial and even generous toward the other cats we rescued over the years.

In the end, he outlived them all, except the latest arrival, Simon, who came to us this winter as a mouser, a job the increasingly fragile Pookie had given up. By the time he quit hunting, we mostly called him “Bear,” or “Old Bear.”  It suited his grizzled appearance, and expressed both our great affection for him and our sense of him as a guardian.

In January 2009, at seventeen, the Old Bear still felt well enough to join us for sledding during an unusually deep snow here.

By January 2010, he spent most of his time  in his heated bed in a finished room in the basement. He occasionally looked out his room’s french doors at the bird feeder in winter, or stepped outside for a supervised walk in warmer weather;  but mostly he slept and dreamed.

By January 2011, the Old Bear was at least nineteen, wraith-thin, and burdened with geriatric illnesses.  Although he still ate reasonably well, responded when called, and loved being scratched between the ears, we knew he might not last till spring.

During our recent trip to England, he stayed with the veterinarian who had looked after him so well for the past year and had bought him so much time with her compassionate and expert care.  He seemed glad to be back in his old haunts, once he realized he was home.

He proved amazingly durable.  Spring passed, and summer came.

He stayed with us until this fine, fair summer day.  A perfect day for frog-hunting.

I imagine I still see him, from the corner of my eye, streaking toward the woods, lounging in the yard, or leaving a frog in my shoe.  In that vision, he is as sleek and beautiful as he was on the day he decided to stay.

Goodbye, old friend.   The time always goes too fast.