Burying the wrong cat in the rain
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
Why is it that town folks believe all us country folks need mousers for our barns? Some city slicker just dropped off at my back door a box filled with five kittens. I refused to get attached to the critters, hoping they’d just go away. They haven’t.
They are skittish enough that bonding with them doesn’t seem possible. And as long as they run and hide every time I open my back door it’s fine with me. The closest they have come to me is peeking around the corner of the house while I tilled up a flower bed in my front yard. I am sure they were certain I was just softening up a nice litter box for them.
Admittedly over the years drop-off feral cats have kept the gopher and field mouse population in check, but these five tiny balls of fur couldn’t hardly be a match for a gopher and probably would run in fear of a field mouse. They are cute, but I don’t think that is winning them a place at my house.
The last cat I allowed in my house was Wazoo, a cat that supposedly was my daughter’s pet. Then she got married and moved away. of course without Wazoo. One rainy winter morning I dressed in a suit and tie and headed out to work. As I started to pull out of my driveway, I spied Wazoo smashed in the roadway.
I knew that within a few hours my two young sons would be leaving the house to catch the school bus and would have to walk right past squashed Wazoo.
I couldn’t let that trauma happen, so I returned to the house, stripped off my suit and dress shoes and put on mud clothes and barn boots. With a shovel and a plastic bag I scooped up the remains of Wazoo, trudged up the hill on my property and dug a hole in the black mud to bury Wazoo.
I shed the muddy clothes and boots on the back porch and took a shower to make sure I didn’t have mud stuck on me somewhere before I redressed for work. I was sitting on the stairs leading to the bedrooms upstairs in my house tying my shoes when suddenly Wazoo jumped in my lap.
I had heard the old saw that cats have nine lives, but this was almost more than a heart could take, especially since the night before I had just read Stephen King’s "Pet Sematary," in which a college professor’s cat comes back to life after he is killed crossing a roadway.
The reason I was dressed in a suit on a rainy winter day was because I was headed to teach a class in journalism at Umpqua Community College. The parallel did not escape me.
Honestly, I don’t believe all that rubbish about nine lives and cat reincarnation, but at that moment I swore off getting cozy with cats.
I still don’t know whose cat is buried up on the hill behind my house, but Wazoo lived on to old age. When he died I buried him on that same hill. Wazoo was the last house cat I called a pet.
Sure, there was one I called "Blackberry," a feral cat dropped off by one of those city slickers, who patrolled my acreage for gophers and would always bring the heads and leave them at my back door to show his prowess. I called him "Blackberry," because he was solid black except for a white spot on his forehead and he lived under the blackberry bushes out back. He would never let me get near enough to him for us to get cozy.
Now that is my kinda cat.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)