Sammie

In the wake of Sammie’s death, aside from the grief, I am swamped with guilty feelings, that I should have known something was wrong, should have noticed his decline sooner. I was responsible, and he died on my watch.

My mother would say, oh, for crying out loud, it was just a cat. Then I remembered an incident when I was 12 or 13, when I came home from school and noticed my pet chicken was not in her pen. Now this chicken was named Gemma, my name, because her feathers were the same auburn color as my hair. I’d had her since she was a tiny ball of yellow fluff, when I was, I think, about five. Unlike my first cat pet, Pinkie Tiptoes, who broke my heart when he couldn’t be found when we moved from Ft. Smith to Miami, Gemma had been crated up with a couple of other hens, and joined us in our new home. I don’t remember her accommodations at the first two rent houses where we lived that first year in Miami (4^th and part of 5^th grade) but at the last rent house on “B Northwest,” the pen was about 10’ x 12’ and the ‘barn’ was an upside-down enamel washing machine tub propped up on one side so the hens could get inside.

I would sit in the sunshine with Gemma, stroking her warm smooth feathers, making chicken noises just to be friendly. She knew me, would come to me and huddle next to my legs. I imagined she was lonely and bored in that tiny pen without a blade of grass left standing. Now she was gone.

Without Sammie’s help, the chair would float away

After growing increasingly panicked in my fruitless search for Gemma, I raced inside the house to ask my mother. She confirmed that she hadn’t seen Gemma and said I should look for her, that maybe she got out of the pen. She stated further that maybe I hadn’t given her water and that was the reason she got out of the pen.

I spent an hour wandering the neighborhood, especially the overgrown vacant lot across the street, swallowing down tears and calling “Here, chickey chickey chickey” until I was hoarse.

I don’t remember anything further from that day, but the guilt assigned to me by my mother has remained part of my psyche. It was years before I thought about that and asked my mother if she knew what had happened to Gemma. She had no memory of the event, only faintly remembered the chicken.

But I know what happened. My mother lied to me. She knew that Gemma had died and had been part of the parental decision to remove the dead body. I doubt my dad would have made up some story about her escaping her pen, much less assigning blame on me for her disappearance. But Mom never missed a chance to assign blame. For her, life was about assigning blame; this is still her default reaction to anything she judges to be problematic. Someone must be blamed.

It’s useless for me to attempt any further discussion of the issue with her, as her memory by now has disintegrated into a five-second attention span, if that. Now I mostly feel sorry for her, that her life as the middle child of nine had been so fraught that she could only adopt her mother’s habit of judging and negativity. I think I understand—to a mother or a child of the Depression, a person couldn’t afford to invest much emotion into the welfare of an animal when deprivation constantly lurked at the kitchen door.

What’s left for me to do is always remember, especially with my pets now, that I must go out of my way to take care of them—cats, primarily, as my medium and spirit animal. What happened to Sammie was a function of undiagnosed feline leukemia and feline immunodeficiency virus (cat AIDS). How or when he was infected with those viruses I have no idea. My neighbor, who obtained Sammie from an older man down the road, who more or less fed a feral female cat and generations of her kittens without a fucking care in the world that he should have had her spayed or at least vaccinated, belatedly confirmed to me that when he got the kitten, he did not have him vaccinated for anything.

Somehow, Sammie knew early on that he wanted to be here instead of next door with the neighbor, whose immaturity meant that Sammie might or might not get fed. I first saw him here when he’d been treed by Cu and Weezy, watching me call off the dogs from his perch high in an oak tree just outside my yard fence. After that he appeared at the edge of the yard, uneasy about the dogs but clearly very hungry. I started putting out food, talking to him. It was months later that finally I asked if I could ‘adopt’ Sammie.

The neighbor agreed, even though I could see the young man felt affection for the cat. But he knew he wasn’t being a good pet owner and, I think, was relieved. The first thing I did was have Sammie neutered, as the evidence of his masculine pursuit of females had begun to scar his face. I should have asked about vaccinations then, but I didn’t.

Guilt.

So began a little more than two years of Sammie at my house, well fed and slowly being accepted by the existing cattery of four other cats. Hellion considered it her duty as top cat around here to run him off, while Esmerelda and Nali tolerated him, even came to play with him and respond to his polite throaty trilled greeting seeking permission to join their company. Finnegan was a different kind of adversary, being male (neutered) and seeing his duty to eliminate another male. But slowly they too settled into a benign tolerance, thanks to careful work by myself and whichever adult child of mine was spending time here as the two males often ended up in that part of the house.

It occurred to me sometime over the past summer that Sammie had not been as active as usual but I put it off to the terrible heat. About a month ago, I noticed that he wasn’t always showing up for dinner, and I put that off as maybe another neighbor was feeding him. I didn’t notice that he was losing weight; it was subtle and over a long period of time. BUT, guilt, even if I had noticed sooner that he was struggling, there was nothing I could have done. He might have had these viruses since birth.

I’m trying not to linger over my failures, as I have no clear evidence of any role I might have played in his death. I loved that damn cat. He was full of personality. A true gentleman, he never bullied the other cats, always took the submissive role, and just wanted to have a good time. Like other ginger cats, he was easy-going, a laid back cat, just wanna have fun. And eat whatever I might offer. And snuggle, get petted. His purr came readily, sometimes before a hand actually touched him.

As I watched the vet sedate him and then return a short time later with the slender hypodermic of bright pink death, I thought of so many other cats that need rescue, and tried not to cry.

But I did cry. I hardly made it out of the clinic before ugly sobs racked my throat. Hot tears ran down my cheeks and even though I’m an old woman worn with the losses in my life, I felt like my heart was breaking. I brought him home, wrapped him in a soft towel as his still-warm body lolled loosely in my arms, and laid him to rest in the hole I had already dug in my garden.

Sammie will be missed. He had a special talent for making me and my kids feel good, and that’s what pets are for. I will keep trying not to feel guilty, but when you take someone into your care, it’s part of the contract that you are responsible for his life. I’ll never escape that no matter what my mom might have said oh so many years ago.

An Ozark Interlude

Yesterday, the pesky doe had circled the fenced yard all day, causing the dogs to bark incessantly. Nerves shot, at around 5 p.m. I decided to fire off a few rounds to scare her away. I grabbed my .22 rifle and stood on the porch at the west end of the house, which is my daughter’s apartment, and looked for the doe. From there a person can look downhill toward the ponds and pasture, normal doe hangout. Nowhere to be seen.

I returned to my dinner preparations, fed the dogs, fed the cats, and fed the goldfish. One cat of the four—Esmeralda—didn’t show up. I thought, okay, she followed me to the apartment. So I went back there and looked for her, called, nothing. Usually she is front and center demanding food at that point, so this was highly unusual.

Then the barking started again. I grabbed the .22 and went to the gate. There stood that stubborn doe not a hundred feet from the house.

Now let me say that this has been an ongoing war for multiple deer generations. Before we got these two hounds, the deer jumped over our yard fence and helped themselves to whatever they pleased—hosta, flower beds right by the porch, any tomatoes or other veggies I tried to grow in the raised beds. But for the last five years with hounds running free in the yard, the deer have decided discretion is the better part of valor, hosta notwithstanding.

But this doe has become quite clever at avoiding the hounds by jumping the fence in the wee hours of morning when the hounds are sacked out in the house. Consequently my tomato plants have been topped multiple times and the peppers probably won’t come back. This is after a second planting. So I really don’t care that it’s not deer season or that my .22 bullet wouldn’t be a clean kill.

In the winter, I would have opened the gate and let the hounds chase her off. But it’s tick season. Worse, the last time we let both hounds go at the same time, the younger one—Weezie—didn’t come back until well after dark. She was shaking and terrified and smelled of tobacco smoke. Someone had penned her up. So now when we let Weezie out, it’s without her big sister Cu. She usually bounds around chasing squirrels in the adjacent woodland, living dog ecstasy for ten or fifteen minutes before she’s ready to come back in the yard. Cu, on the other hand, will stay out much longer, baying as she tracks scent clear back to the canyon.

So I’m standing at the gate with my rifle and the dogs are going nuts. The deer is being coy, facing me with several large trees between us. I can’t get a clear shot. Plus I’m having pangs of conscience. The .22 can’t deliver a kill shot. She might have a fawn around here. I’m thinking, well, if I let Weezie out, she’ll put a good scare in that bitch and I won’t have to shoot her.

I’m juggling the rifle and Annoying Emma the mongrel terrier is underfoot. The minute my hand touches the gate latch, Emma lunges, Weezie lunges, I nearly drop the rifle, and all three dogs are out the gate. Damn it.

Okay, calling them is worthless. In two seconds, two brown streaks are hurtling through the underbrush down by the pond. The doe bounds east and then south toward the canyon, dogs in fast pursuit. I go inside, put the rifle away, and eat my cold dinner.

This is worse than it sounds because Cu is my daughter’s dog. She’s housesitting this week and swamped with coursework for the two graduate level summer school classes she’s taking. Plus she’s seriously attached to Weezie. If she knew the dogs were out there dashing through the late afternoon heat harvesting ticks by the bucket and bound not to return for hours, she would be worried sick. So I decide not to tell her. Dinner goes down hard.

Then I remember I have a missing cat! Why? I could understand if she was preoccupied with her last stealth moves on a mouse or mole, but it’s been an hour. Something is wrong. I go back outside and stand by the gate. Emma goes out too, because she’s way too smart (and too old and too fat) to try to run with the hounds. As she exits the gate, which I’ve left open for the hounds’ return, she briefly sniffs the bed of ivy growing along the fence. She immediately jumps back.

What fresh hell is this? I lean forward toward the ivy before I hear the unmistakable rattle. I can see nothing—the ivy is a green mass about five feet wide and ten feet long and at least a foot deep. But the sound is familiar.

Snake.

I go back and grab the .22. I’m holding the gun listening. Can’t see a thing. Rattling continues. I shoo Emma back because of course if I told her to, she’d jump into the ivy.

I aim and fire at the sound. The first round cracks out of the gun and the rattle continues. I give it my Shaolin concentration and fire again. The rattle stops and the ivy starts to move. I fire a couple more rounds.

I set down the gun and grab the hoe from the other side of the porch. I start hacking at the ivy, trying to pull that tenacious vine apart so I can see what I’m up against. I don’t want a coiled snake to suddenly strike, so I’m working incrementally from the edge inward. Finally I see a flash of color, that familiar brown-rust pattern of a copperhead. It’s coiling and turning as I expose part of it to view.

I’ve learned that lots of snakes rattle their tails. Once I thought about it, I remembered that rattlesnake rattles are higher pitched, a hissing sound like air escaping a tire. This rattle was lower pitched, a tail hitting leaves. Either way, I’m always thankful for the rattle.

Hack, hack, I drive the hoe down on its body. As it moves toward me, I realize I’m only hacking at the last six inches. I chop more vine. Finally, there’s the wedge-shaped head. I slam the hoe down but it has moved. Toward me.

I’m sweating and cursing and keep telling Emma to get back damn it. I rip more vines and finally I can see the whole snake. I’ve done a fairly decent job of smashing a place six inches from its tail, and now I can see a bullet hole I managed to send straight through its middle. From that point to its head, it seems unable to fully move. Maybe the shot injured its spine.

That doesn’t mean it can’t bite and send its load of venom into my ankle. Or Emma’s face. So I land the hoe behind its head. The ground under all that ivy is super soft. I’m just burying the snake in dirt.

I hook the hoe under the snake’s midsection and lift it out of the ivy. Once I’ve tossed it onto the driveway, a swift blow behind its head finishes it off. Of course it’s still moving and Emma still wants in the middle of it, so I leave the hoe blade sitting on its neck and step back.

I’m thinking this explains the missing cat. This area here between the gate and my car is a place she frequents. If she spotted the snake, she might do what lots of cats do, which is chase the snake. I once had a cat that specialized in chasing snakes. She’d herd them right out of the yard and away from the house. That’s when the kids were little and I always thought she knew exactly what she was doing, protecting our babies.

Of course, I also once had a cat that got bit. Twice. Old Reece’s Pieces was a slow learner or had a contract with death, I never could figure out which. I’ve written about him before. Once he burst through the pet door and ran down the back hallway. I found him my daughter’s closet, cowering in the corner. His right eye was swollen shut and the area around it bloody and turning purple. Trip to vet. Fangs hit his forehead and eyelid, barely missing the eyeball. Vet thought he’d lose the eye but he didn’t.

A year or so later, Reece’s didn’t show up for dinner, just like Esmeralda hadn’t shown up. I remembered what happened then, how I searched around the house for two days before I found him lying in tall weeds. I talked to him, wondering why he didn’t get up and come to me. He was less than twenty feet from the house. How I missed him before I’ll never know.

But he didn’t get up, just meowed weakly. So I picked him up and the hand I put under his belly came back bloody. He’d been snake bit in the stomach. In the two days he’d been laid up, the bite wound had spread about six inches in diameter, the hair had fallen off, and the skin was black and rotten. He was too weak to move.

The vet shook his head, shot him full of antibiotics, and sent him home to die. I kept him in my bedroom where he crawled under my bed. He wouldn’t eat. The next day, I sat nearby eating cantaloupe and he sniffed the air. I gave him some. He couldn’t eat enough.

Who knew? For the next several days, Reece’s Pieces ate mashed cantaloupe. Then he started eating regular food. Slowly he got well.

Is this what happened to Esmeralda? Was she lying in the grass somewhere or in the woods, paralyzed by copperhead poison?

I began searching, again touring the house, under the beds, my daughter’s apartment. Then outside—the flower beds, under the porch, under my car. The weeds. The underbrush, hoe in hand, because one snake is never the whole story.

Meanwhile, every fifteen minutes or so, I’m calling the dogs. I can hear them way down in the woods. Then even further, like they were down in the canyon now. Paying absolutely no attention to my calls, my demands that they get in the yard right now. They’re tracking, hollering as they go.

Which is, of course, what hounds do.

What about snakes?! They could easily stumble across a big rattler—years back, a neighbor shot a timber rattler that was nine feet long. I killed a velvet tail coiled up right by my car door after I thought I was getting a flat. I shot two bigger ones about six feet long and traveling across my yard. I regret killing them. They were beautiful and if the stupid little Pekinese I had at the time had left them alone, I wouldn’t have needed to shoot them.

If those hounds got snake bit out there in that rugged country, I’d never find them. I’d have to wait for the buzzards to start circling. Oh, damn, this is not going well.

I don’t find the cat. Anywhere.

cats2 — Taco instructing Finnegan on cat rules.

I’ve never regretted killing a copperhead. I leave this one lying on the drive. Our old patriarch cat, Taco, comes by to sniff. Our two younger cats investigate, appropriately wary of the smell. There is a strong scent to poisonous snakes and cats have good instincts. Except the young male Finnegan, appropriately bold for a young king. He wants to pop it a couple of times. The snake is still writhing like they do after death. That thrills him. He stalks around it, hair standing up on his spine.

I try to watch television, springing up at every commercial to look again for Esmeralda. I imagine she’s dead or dying somewhere. I may never find her.

I call the dogs. It’s 7:30 p.m. I can’t hear them at all.

Light is fading. It’s 8:30. No dogs. No Esmeralda. I’m calling, calling. Go to the far end on my daughter’s porch and call some more.

Minutes tick by. I listen to the bullfrogs warming up at the pond. I hear lapping noises at the water bowl. I think it’s Emma. But it sounds like a big dog…

Yes! I step back inside her living room and there is Weezie lapping water like she’s dying of thirst and Cu spread out of the floor like she can’t move one more step. Both dogs panting as fast as they can.

I hurry through the house to close the yard gate before they decide to venture out again. They have no such intention. They’ve been running for three hours in this miserable heat. They follow me to the kitchen where they stretch out on the cool floor. Panting. Lots of panting.

As I step back into the kitchen from closing the gate, there’s Esmeralda. What? Where did she come from? She’s all relaxed, doing her ballet stretches as I scold her. Then she’s all about her dinner.

The only thing I can figure out is that she was having a nap in the apartment and just wasn’t ready to respond when I was back there searching. Or whatever. She’s one of those Cats.

As for the dogs, they are too exhausted to move. Forty-five minutes elapsed before they stopped panting. Covered in ticks. Fortunately, their meds kills the ticks once they bite, so it wasn’t like they were going to be sucked dry. Still, I couldn’t stand it. I got about a dozen off each ear and that was all they’d let me look for. I’m so glad it’s not late July. That’s when the super tiny ticks start, the ones you can’t see that spread like dust by the thousands.

Today has been a vast improvement. The snake is in an old dishpan. It’s about two and a half feet long. Esmeralda is pursuing enigma. The dogs are napping. Once it cools off a little, I’ll walk down the driveway and toss the snake into the woods.

A Rat’s Ass

Last night, my faithful yellow cat Mao brought me a late supper of Rat. He’s generous that way, concerned that my regular offerings of crunchies and delectable leftovers not go without reciprocation. And unlike some ungrateful cat owners, I accept his offerings with praise, petting, and a token nudge at the critter before turning off the light and trying to get back to sleep.

As usual, Mao became slightly perturbed that I didn’t actually taste his hard-won offering. I admit it’s rude not to appreciate the no-doubt rich flavor of a fine, plump, mostly grown Rattus norvegicus. He resorted to his usual tactic, which was to continue with his breathy purring and occasional trills while tossing the rat across my throw rug and otherwise demonstrating its near-life status in order to tempt my appetite. Eating small mammals while still technically alive is a code among cat-kind and he must think me thick-headed not to take advantage of such a careful presentation.

Sometimes this last flurry of playing with the food results in escapes that require human intervention, such as opening the closet door under which the frenzied furry thing wriggled away or otherwise facilitating the rediscovery of prey. Mostly, Mao is far too skilled to allow real escape. However, he does encourage fake escapes so that the fleeting thrill of capture can be enjoyed multiple times with any given victim.

The half-grown rabbit he brought in a couple of weeks ago managed to escape and get re-caught countless times over what seemed a period of hours. Sleep became a fiction of half-dreams punctuated by shrill bunny screams. It was a relief when the inevitable crunching of skull broke the wee hour silence.

They always start with the head.

Conceding to the gentle reader’s possible horror at these goings-on, allow me to explain that I live in the Ozark woods where Nature exhibits her ruthless beauty on a daily basis. In spite of forty years of living here, always in company of cats and various other domesticated creatures, there has been no diminution of birds or small mammals. I’ve learned to respect the flow of things and step aside for the ways of everything from snakes to ground hornets to the occasional bear. And cats.

Mao came to me as an injured feral stray who even now tolerates contact with few humans besides me and who goes completely nuts when put into a cat carrier. When he appeared at my front steps, he’d been shot. The wounds had mostly healed, but one area on his left shoulder kept abscessing. Over a period of months, I fed him and watched his wounds fester then drain in a desperate cycle that increasingly weakened him until even my tempting roast chicken failed to put much meat on his bones.

I lured him to a cage and the vet discovered a dozen BB-sized pellets lodged in his body, some of which remain ten years later. But the shoulder injury that kept him on death’s door responded to treatment, which involved me locking him in a spare bathroom for ten days in order to visit him twice a day with antibiotics. He literally climbed the walls in that room. Closed doors remain cause for terror.

The vet estimated his age at about one year at the time of his capture. Who am I to get between this cat and the means of survival he learned living alone in the woods? More than most cats, his hunting is part of his life. There’s no shortage of prey. He brings me gifts, heralding his delivery as soon as he hits the pet door. I thank him.

The rat had already succumbed to unconsciousness by the time Mao woke me to announce that the food order had arrived. In order to preserve the relatively unstained state of my new bedside rug, I subtly dragged the senseless limp rat body several feet away. Mao promptly brought it back. I haven’t figured out if the attraction to my bedside rug is based in its proximity to my sleeping body, or if it has to do with the textural similarities between a natural land surface and a rug. But after four futile attempts to relocate this particular feast to the easily-mopped surfaces nearby, I gave up and let Mao have his way.

It took him quite some time to dispose of the rat, due in part to my inconsiderate lack of interest in a meal meant for two. I found a tiny bundle of leftovers this morning, the gall bladder and the skin and tail of the rat’s hindquarters. This phenomena continues to intrigue me, as all cats who have ever patrolled my woodland property and delivered rats to my bedside have left the rat’s ass on the floor. All other creatures are consumed in their entirety, every last bit of fur, nails, feet, and tails of rabbits, moles, voles, and squirrels. But not the rear ends of rats. Quel mysterieux!

I’ve provided the image of last night’s leftovers in order to share Mao’s impressive abilities. The hide of the hindquarters is turned inside-out with tail and foot protruding so that the hip meat could be consumed without touching the anal region. Meticulous butchery, to say the least. I’ve written about this before, my conviction that this particular eccentricity in the cat-rat dynamic is the basis of the old saying that someone wouldn’t give a rat’s ass.