Our two outdoor cats, Chloe and Dusty, were watched cat TV Wednesday night.
Something caught their attention. Over there.
Chloe lost interest. Dusty did not.
Then Chloe thought, maybe there is something over there.
Nope. Nothing to see over there.
Now tell me again just how many lives a cat has. We aren’t sure how many Sylvester has used up, but surely he must be getting close to the limit.
He came home Saturday limping — was that morning or late evening? I can’t remember. Leah said he seemed sore all over. He complained when she touched him almost anywhere on his body. That is pretty much normal for him these days. Not the limping, but the overall sensitivity to being touched. Maybe it was a sprain, we thought. Maybe he would get better, we thought. He was still limping badly on Tuesday, so we took him to the vet. She dragged him out of the carrier and palpated his leg while her assistant held on firmly. I don’t know why he didn’t kill everyone in the room, because he certainly would have if we had tried that. She said she couldn’t feel anything except a swollen leg. No breaks, no obvious wounds. So he got an antibiotic shot and came home with us. Today, Thursday, he can still barely touch his left front foot to the ground.
His routine lately has been to come in, maybe in the morning or maybe late in the afternoon, eat, and spend several hours asleep in a living room chair. Then he might eat, and go to the door to go back outside. And he goes, no one knows where, but he stays out all night.
There are at least three new cats around, two all white and one black and white. We know who “owns” them, but no one keeps them inside. At least one of the new cats is a male. We know that because we have seen him spraying in our front yard. The other two are probably female. We don’t know whether Sylvester is fighting them. If so, he’s not doing well. We are wondering whether he makes the rounds, visiting each one on successive days, getting his butt kicked by each one in turn.
We were trying to think of how many times Sylvester has been to the vet for ailments or injuries. We believe that the number is countable, but for us it is unknown. He has one large, hairless scar on the back of his head that took weeks to heal. There is another scar lower on his neck. I can’t remember which that one is. He also recently recovered from something (someone?) apparently taking his head into its mouth, with one set of teeth on the top of his head and the opposing set on his face, which included his eye. That was the time he had an actual dent in the cornea.
And, of course, there was the time he disappeared for six weeks, apparently spending much of that time in a neighbor’s garage/storage shed. He came home thin and with ailments of his fundament, probably caused by lack of fluids.
Before that he has spent time in stir I mean boarding at the vet’s for urinary problems. Was that only once, or was it twice? Who knows?
When he goes outside, I think of old movies about boxers. Sylvester is the one that staggers to his corner with blood coming from his nose, one eye black and nearly swollen closed, dizzy and confused. And still he goes back out into the ring.
Returning from a doctor’s appointment (orthopedist — arthritic knees) on Monday afternoon, I had to stop for a parade.
So why were these turkeys crossing the road? I have no idea. They wander. The real question was why did the last few of them seem to be so reluctant to follow the rest of them. As I pulled up to them, two stayed in my lane and kept looking back in the direction they had come from.
If you look carefully, you will see what they were watching. It’s close to the edge of the photo on the right. At first I thought it was a small turkey. Then I thought it was just a piece of wood or trash. Then I realized.
They were watching a cat. I couldn’t see it very well, but it looked like it might have been a tortoiseshell like Mollie. It turned and walked back into the woods as I passed.
Retreating was probably a good idea, no matter how hungry it might have been or how interested it was in chasing birds. These turkeys were bigger and heavier than the cat. I suspect it would not have fared well if it had attacked, although there seems to be some debate about whether a feral cat could kill a turkey.
This cat was probably dumped by someone and has been living in the woods down at the bottom of the mountain. We have seen cats that we assume are feral living along Huffaker Road, sometimes over periods of months, so they apparently can find enough game to stay alive. For this particular cat on this particular day, it was probably better for the cat not to try to have a turkey dinner.
And dogs
And cats
I got back from my trip to Colorado last week. I had two fairly long days of driving, splitting the almost 1400 miles in two equal parts. This was the view to the west at sunset on my first day on the road.
This was the view to the east the morning of the second day on the road.
Zoe was a great traveler. She stood, sat or lay in the back seat and never made a peep. Or a poop. Now that’s she’s home, she seems pretty comfortable on Leah’s side of the bed.
We don’t allow her on the furniture, but sometimes she jumps up if we’re not looking.
The main question was how the cats would react to her, and her to the cats. As it turns out, not particularly well. Zoe has a very strong prey drive, and cats look a lot like a dog’s natural prey. Zoe focuses intently on the cats as they walk around the house, and she chases if one of them runs. That’s usually Mollie. Mollie has taken to hiding under the sofa. She has hissed and swatted at Zoe a few times, but Zoe is oblivious. I think the two will eventually come to some kind of understanding. At least that’s what I tell myself.
The only other cat that comes inside is Sylvester, and Sylvester has his own story now. He disappeared Monday and didn’t show again until Tuesday afternoon. Leah was convinced he had been killed by a coyote as our gray cat, Smokey, was, but it seems he escaped by the skin of his teeth. Or maybe the cornea of his eye.
Sylvester’s left eye was completely covered with pus and mucus. We took him to the vet, who cleaned the eye and found a dent in the cornea. The vet also found a wound on the top of his head. She thought some kind of animal had bitten Sylvester on the face. It might have been a coyote, in which case Sylvester has used up yet another of his allotted nine lives. I’m not sure how many he has left.
So now Sylvester has to wear the cone of shame for a couple of weeks, until his eye heals.
He may end up completely healed, or he may end up with a scar right in the center of his cornea. In the meantime, he gets two eye drops once a day. Doing it has not been terrible for anyone involved, an unexpected blessing.
Sylvester’s vet visit was the third vet visit since I got back home. The first visit was when I took Zoe in for an ear check, which found a yeast infection. So she gets eight drops of medication in each ear for 10 days.
The second vet visit was Sam, who injured his dewclaw while playing with Zoe. Sam’s dewclaw was a bloody mess. The vet yanked off the outer part of the nail, which Sam did not like.
This is how they play.
Poor Sam used to be a runner, but Zoe’s legs are just too long. Zoe stays ahead, but I think she holds back a little, enough to keep Sam almost within reach. Occasionally when Zoe has to make a sharp turn at the edge of the grassy area, Sam can cut the corner, and then Zoe really has to pour it on to stay ahead of him.
When they stop, they lie down on their backs head-to-head, and continue to gnaw at each other’s cheeks.
Zoe is much taller and heavier than Sam. I was a little worried that she would play too hard for him, but he seems to take it in stride. They aren’t the buddies that Sam and Zeke were, but maybe they’ll get there.
The shelter where I got Zoe said she is a German Shepherd-Doberman Pinscher mix. I was not sure at first, but at some angles her head looks just like a Doberman. Her coloring is obviously German Shepherd. This is a nice coincidence, since I like Dobermans and Leah likes German Shepards.
I have already posted a photo of my friends’ dog Elroy, who looks a lot like Zeke, but here’s another.
Elroy did not like Zoe, pretty much the same way he did not like Zeke. I kind of understand that, since Zoe’s manners are somewhat lacking.
Elroy is pretty old now and has a really hard time getting around. He can’t take NSAIDs, the standard arthritis medication, but his mom and dad are going to try something new. I hope it works, because I really like old Elroy.
I told Elroy that he is to be there the next time I visit.
Oh, and fall arrived while I was in Denver. Here is some proof.
I see oak, which is mainly yellowish brown, some hickory, which is bright yellow, and maple, which is orange or red. There is even a green leaf.
Smokey didn’t show up for breakfast this morning, which was a very bad sign. Early this afternoon we found his remains in the woods in front of our house. All that was left was a handful of fur and some blood. It appears that a coyote caught him.
Smokey has been with us for a long time. We can’t remember when he first appeared, but we think it might have been as long as 12 or 13 years ago. He and Sylvester showed up at about the same time.
Of all of our cats, he was the most affectionate. He was the only one that really sought affection. He would jump up on the sofa beside us and lie down right next to one of us. He usually was halfway on our legs. Sometimes he sat next to our legs, looking at us. If we didn’t pet him, he would reach out and pat us with his foot.
He loved being petted.
He also loved food. He would sit beside our dining room table, staring up at us as we ate. When we fed one of the other cats, he would lie down facing their food bowl. Waiting. Waiting. Somehow he knew when we put out food for Chloe and Dusty on the front porch, and he would appear from nowhere.
He was a reliably playful cat. He played with Mollie, and tried to play with Sylvester, who was not always a willing participant. Here he is staring down a hedgehog toy we got for the dogs.
Smokey was pretty much a homebody. In the last few years he didn’t stay inside much, but we never saw him walking casually up the street towards a neighbor’s house like Sylvester.
If he wanted in, he didn’t wait to be invited, he just shoved his way around whoever happened to open the door. But when he was finished eating, he usually went straight to the door to be let back outside.
In the past we had let him and Sylvester stay inside at night, especially in cold weather, but when we moved into our new house we put little cat houses with heated pads in the garage. That was where Smokey could usually be found once it got dark.
But of course, in warm weather he usually stayed outside, we knew not where. It wasn’t obvious where he was, but we could usually find him lying under our rainwater collection tank, or under my truck, or under our little Mule utility vehicle.
He might not have been immediately visible, but he didn’t disappear for hours like Sylvester. That’s why Leah was so worried when Smokey wasn’t waiting at the door Sunday morning. I tried to reassure her that he would show up, and that it was too early to start worrying. But secretly I was a little worried, myself, because it was so unlike him.
So when I took Sam for his walk Sunday morning, I looked along the side of the road for a little furry, gray body. When Sam stopped with his nose up in the air, I let him sniff. If he wanted to check out something at the side of the road, I let him. We checked out a few places on the road in front of the house, but I never saw anything.
After lunch, I usually take Sam out and let him run free around the yard. On this occasion, he was suspicious of something on the far side of the driveway, but I couldn’t find anything. So I went down into the front of our yard and started pulling weeds. After a few minutes Sam came over and went into the woods beside the yard. He sniffed around for a while, and then seemed to find something. When I went into the woods, I found what he had found. It was a big mass of gray fur with a few leaves spotted with blood. The ground was scuffed around where the fur was. This was almost certainly the scene of the crime.
One of our neighbors had stopped on Friday when I took Sam down to the mailbox and told me her young kids had seen a coyote in their yard. Their big dog had chased it away. We talked about when and where we had seen coyotes. One night shortly after we moved into our current house we had seen two coyotes running around in the front yard, just into the woods. I went out with a flashlight and Zeke (on a leash, naturally), and eventually the coyotes left. We haven’t seen any in the yard since then, although they are often more active at night.
But Smokey was almost certainly taken by a coyote. There really isn’t any other predator that could have done this. We have (or have had) foxes, but they typically mind their own business around the cats. I don’t think any of our birds of prey could take a cat the size of Smokey. So there really isn’t anything else.
Now we have to worry about Chloe, Dusty and Sylvester. We know Sylvester is a wanderer. That may be a problem. We also know that for some reason Chloe has taken to sleeping in the woods. Her favorite spot is about 20 feet from where we found Smokey’s remains. We would bring her inside at night, but she absolutely hates it. She runs from Leah if she tried to get her to bring her in. And Chloe and Mollie do not get along. So there isn’t much we can do for her. Fortunately, Dusty stays on the porch almost all the time, usually only going down to the yard for bathroom breaks.
Of course we knew that coyotes were at least a theoretical threat for the cats. Now we know they are a real threat, and they are in our yard.
