cats invade heart and home

Yesterday the back door was wide open and my husband unthinkingly raised the garage door and put the three dogs in the car to go to the dog park. When we returned an hour and a half later, Milo had vanished. I searched every room, under beds and sofas and chairs, behind dressers and bookcases, inside shelves, on top of high things. I called and called. He was nowhere.

Milo is our new 14-month-old Siamese cat, acquired by a friend whose son was allergic. We had had him only two days and though obviously an affectionate feline, he was skittish in his new environment and extremely wary of our Great Dane Maggie. She was overbearing, overexuberant when she first met him, remembering, I suppose, her intimate relationship with Niger and the Siamese didn't like it. He hissed and spat and swatted though that was harmless, as he's been declawed.

We went to bed that night, sick-at-heart, certain that Milo had bolted through the open doors and was now cowed somewhere in the woods or marsh. He's always been an inside cat and I was sure the wilderness would terrorize him. Not to mention the preying coyotes. My only consolating thought was that he was hunkered down under the decks surrounding our house and would appear when he was hungry.

As I was going to sleep I remembered another runaway cat. We were living in the Yukon and my daughters were 7, 5, 3 and 1. A friend had given us "Cinder", a large black feline because she was leaving the territory. When he arrived I said to the kids, "Don't anyone open the front or back door or the cat will escape." Cinder had been with us perhaps an hour and was hanging out by the back door poised to flee when #3 kid decided to test my admonishment and opened the back door "just a crack". Of course, Cinder, seeing his chance, pushed open the door and ran off.

I was so upset I took a valium and went to bed to avoid violence. Kill my kid? Easily. How could she have defied me and put the cat's welfare at risk?. Even drugged I worried all night long about that cat. We lived on the edge of never-ending bush, a long way from the home Cinder had come from, though in the same neighbourhood. I didn't know if he'd try to get back or simply disappear into the wild. I was terribly distressed to have let my friend down. She had loved the cat and counted on us to take care of him.

I spent an anxious three days without him. Then on the fourth day, at bright Yukon summer dawn I heard a small yowl at the back door and looked out and saw the black cat. Brilliant beast! " Cinder! Cinder!" I shouted and everyone went down to greet him. He walked in as if he'd always lived there. After a mere hour in our house, he had known to return to it.

He moved to Toronto with us a year later and lived to be 15. He was always a prowler.

I kept telling myself Milo was as smart as Cinder and would either stick by our house or return to it if he attempted find his former one, (which was in another town.) I didn't know what to tell my friend if he didn't show up. I knew she'd be very upset and that made me feel worse.

Milo was wearing a new collar with three bells so I always knew where he was. I hadn't heard him in the vicinity of the open back door. Was it possible he hadn't gotten out? If so, where was he? I went over and over this all night long, listening for bells but never hearing them. I could see him in a coyote's jaws as surely as I'd seen Niger two weeks before.

Then in the early morning dark, as my husband took Maggie out, I thought I heard him say, "Hi Milo." Really? I hadn't heard the bells. Then I heard them. I lept out of bed and looked down the stairs and there was Milo, the consummate hider, rubbing up against a doorway. When I greeted him, he came right up to me, the long lost friend.

We hadn't seen him for at least 17 hours.

I still don't know where he was hiding. Wherever it was, he goes there occasionally but he's beginning to stay out more and more. This morning he's tearing around with the kitten, Hu Jin as if they're siblings.

From now on I'm going to be extremely vigilant about the doors.

Already Milo and the little kitten, Hu Jin are members of the family. They haven't replaced Niger, (for whom I still mourn and cringe at the way he went), but they've insinuated themselves into our dailiness in short order. That brings the pleasure of their company and their antics, of course, but it also brings the deep and obsessive attachment I always feel towards my animals and the vulnerability that is the corollary of that. My animals are fragile, impermanent and the pain I feel when one of them goes is overwhelming. I overlove them and elevate them to the status of offspring. I know I'm not alone in this.