“Somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, but there is no joy in Fairfield…little KittiPuss has struck out.” (on her own, alas).
It had to be the roofers, loud-talking men with nail guns and bad manners, pounding away for hours on end while a cat tried to sleep. A little bit of roofing noise goes a long way with the feline element, inured to listening to comforting sonatas while lazing on posh pillows and drawing up plans for the total destruction of Rottweilers. Was there no end to this atrocious racket, no human in charge of administering earplugs and adjusting the volume? There’s only so much a cat of regal bearing can take, only so many insults to her tender sensitivities until she snaps and, like a poetess weary of life with a lumberjack, decides to leave the building.
But where to go? In Catland, there are no abuse shelters, no domestic violence hotlines to direct a kitty to the nearest homeless barracks. You’re on your own in a world of selfish raccoons, lurking coyotes and yapping canines. The highway ramps are all occupied with human vagrants and the SPCA shelters have a nasty habit of caging a body and applying the gaspipe. What to do? Maybe that house down the road will have a sympathetic owner, let’s have a look….
And so Kittipuss Ellison, no spring chicken, left the roost and meandered north to try her luck, much to the chagrin of her bereaved owner who’d foolishly neglected to hire Roofers Lite. She tried her luck at a few casinos, got tossed out of a gay bar and briefly engaged in fisticuffs with a rival over a nice spot in a drainage pipe. Rumors ran rampant over her fate. She was seen nibbling fast food scraps near a food bank, growling at a Chihuahua over some nice buzzard roadkill, climbing on Big Daddy Pollitt’s hot tin roof. The truth is she was gone, our green-eyed gal, solid gone.
Bonanza!
Siobhan Ellison, the bereaved KittiPuss owner---if it’s even remotely possible to think a cat can really be owned---was, of course, penitent. She searched high and low, roamed the nearby streets, recruited a posse and posted large reward signs at strategic intersections. A next-door ally, wise in the ways of cats, alerted the neighborhood, passed out fliers and had the Department of Transportation post an Ebony Alert on its interstate message boards. Returning home one night, a lady living in nearby Long Pond Plantation noticed a sign and wrote down the phone number of the unfortunate owner. The same night she saw a cat like the party described lolling on her back porch with her own cat posse. The location was about a mile as the crow files from KittiPuss’ previous residence. Siobhan was there in a trice, carrying the finest in treats and a handy cat carrier, imploring the reticent kitty to abandon her underground digs below the neighbor’s house and return to Eden. KittiPuss wasn’t so sure. What about those goddam nail-pounders? Stalemate. You can lead a cat to Friskies but you can’t make her eat.
The Cat Came Back
“We thought she was a goner but the cat came back.”---Harry Miller
When your cat suddenly disappears, reassurance comes from all corners. “It may take a week, it might take two months but she’ll be back,” friends will tell you, relating anecdotes of their own positive feline experiences and amazing tales of heroic returnees who battled their way through blizzards, typhoons and gut-wrenching truck stop food to find their path home. According to the Lost Pet Research project, there have been valid reports of cats traveling 20 miles in 21 days, 30 miles in 10 days, 38 miles in six months and even 50-80 miles in 2.5 years to get back to where they used to be. One of the most popular and widely supported theories has to do with smell markers. Felines have an extremely well-developed sense of smell, with more than 19 million scent receptors. Cats use smells to mark their territory and it’s possible that’s also how they orient themselves toward their homes.
Another theory is based on research that includes homing pigeons. Scientists think these birds (and maybe other creatures) are so good at finding their way home because of “an unusual sensitivity to the geomagnetic field of the Earth, which enables them to keep a compass-like fix on their home region regardless of distance and direction traveled.”
Jacob Richter of West Palm Beach had give up on his tortoiseshell cat Holly, who fled one night from a fireworks extravaganza while the family was in Daytona. Despite being microchipped and pictured on posters Richter put up all along the coast, Holly was still lost after two months and Jacob was sure she was dead. Sixty-three days after her disappearance, however, Holly turned up in a West Palm Beach garden just a mile down the road, having lost half her original weight and too weak to meow. Richter thinks she followed the coast road, keeping the sea to one side.
Dr. Sara Berg, the veterinarian who examined a dehydrated Holly, said “Maybe it’s intuition, scent or following the sun, there’s no consensus how or why.” Animal expert Professor Mark Bekoff of Colorado State University guesses “She may have had a basic sense of direction and got clues from sights or sounds. The truth is, we’ll never know.”
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| Robert & compadre |
Lonely Days And Lonely Nights
A man named Robert, who preferred to remain otherwise unidentified, lost his cat in California while he was planning a move to Ohio. Devastated, Robert ditched his plans to move and spent a year looking for the missing cat. “I even prayed to God about it, and I’m no big religious person,” he admitted. Eventually, the heartbroken man moved on. Seven years later, a woman spotted a cat which looked ill, caught him and took him to a vet. Luckily, the cat had a microchip and Robert got the unbelievable call. “He’s 19 years old and has been living in the streets for years,” the stunned but happy owner exulted. “He probably has a million horror stories to tell but fortunately I won’t hear any of them.”
Reverend and Mrs. James Davis moved from Long Island to Georgia in 1973. Their daughter being mildly allergic to animal fur, they decided to give their cat Pooh to a friend. Two years later, Pooh showed up at the home he had never been to before. (200 miles traveled)
J.C. Cox of Blanchard, Louisiana gave his 17-year-old cat ChiChi to his granddaughter, who lived in a suburb of New Orleans. ChiChi missed the old man, however, and to everyone’s astonishment crossed the Mississippi and Red rivers in three weeks and arrived home in time for Christmas. (300 miles traveled)
In 1987, Murka, a stray, was adopted by Vladimir Donsov in Moscow. Murka was a bad puddy tat, however, unlocking a bird cage and offing Vladimir’s canary. When she did it a second time, she was banished and sent to live with Donsov’s mother in Voronezh, but disappeared after two years. In October of 1989, Donsov found her in his Moscow apartment building, hungry, dirty, pregnant and missing the tip of her tail. She ate a large meal, slept for three days and left the birds alone after that. (400 miles traveled)
Rusty distinguished himself by setting an American all-time speed record for a cat return. In 1949, the ginger tomcat traveled from Boston, Mass to Chicago, Illinois in a mere 83 days, hitching rides in cars, trucks and trains. (950 miles)
Shaun Phillips, 16, and his father Ken lost Silky about 200 miles north of Brisbane, Australia in the summer of 1977. On March 28, 1978, Silky turned up at the Phillips house in a Melbourne suburb. According to his owner, he was “thin as a wisp and stank to high heaven.” (1,472 miles traveled)
Grand prize winner Sugar, a two-year-old part Persian, had a hip deformity, which made her uncomfortable during car travel. Consequently, she was left behind with a neighbor when her family left Anderson, California for Gage, Oklahoma. Two weeks later, Sugar disappeared from her adoptive home. Fourteen months later—having traveled 100 miles a month---she showed up in Gage, a place she’d never seen. (1,500 miles traveled)
So there’s still hope for a wandering KittiPuss.
The Prodigal Returns?
Siobhan is an apt detective but the quirkiness of cats defies reason. Their plans are quickly made and ditched at the slightest provocation. If KittiPuss left because of the noise, was her plan to (a) return when the racket abated, (b) push on to a nearby spot where the grass appeared greener, (c) blow it out and hop a freighter to Kat-mandu, or (d) none of these?
Maybe, as Siobhan thinks, she always intended to come back but has lost her way in the twisty jungles of Marion County. Maybe, like Jack Kerouac, she intends to criss-cross the country in search of love and adventure. Perhaps Papa was a rolling stone and Mama was a tumblin’ tumbleweed and she has the heretofore undiscovered soul of a nomad. Could be she’s found her musical soul and wants to be one of those Nashville Cats.
There are phone calls, of course, most of them from the KittiPuss Triangle, a group of homes in a rural neighborhood less than a mile away. Traps have been set, cages put at the ready, neighbors fully informed of the proper procedures to take if she doesn’t surrender without resistance. Banner-pulling planes and skywriters wait for the GO signal. Crowds pray in Vatican Square, pilgrims in Lourdes ask for divine intervention, Italian cat-lovers toss coins in Trevi Fountain. Will all this be enough? Or will KittiPuss meet her ultimate fate in the talons of a barn owl, under the tires of a speeding Ford 150 or in the jaws of Coyote Cal & The Jackals?
Meanwhile, nestled under a feed shed or beneath the shell of an old Plymouth or well-hidden in a disreputable culvert, a very small lion sleeps tonight, dreaming of salmon and salvation. Don’t wake her, she needs all her wiles for Tomorrow.
That’s all, folks….
