July 12, 2004

• It’s a food chain out there.

  Since I did not see, with my own two physical eyes, my cat taken by a
  predator, I would be content to imagine her off on an “adventure” from
  which she would return whole and sound to tell the tale, if….

  …if I had not already been pleasantly
  amazed that all three of these indoor-outdoor cats had survived as long
  as they have in this predator-rich environment–far beyond the norm for
  cats with similar lifestyles I’ve lived with or known of in this
  neighborhood.

  …if she were not reproductively altered and were accustomed to
  extended wanderings, “catting around” as we’ve always called it when
  our other, intact, cats did it.

  …if, even once during the five-and-a-half years I’ve lived with her
  she had ever gone out for more than a few hours, or failed to show up
  tagging along behind me when I went out for a walk.

  …if
  her mother, her sister, one of her feral friends and her dog-buddy Koji
  had not displayed the evident concern or distress I observed in them in
  the first days of her absence.  Now, like me, they have
  adjusted.  I got this shot of the usually elusive feral gray tabby
  in the early days of Pidney’s disappearance.  He was hanging
  around, calling, near our front door and here by the cat ramp at the
  bathroom window.  The last time I saw Pidney she and this cat were
  lying in the sun together at the base of that ramp.

  …if I had gotten the usual response when I asked Muffin, “Where’s
  your sister?”  In the past when I’ve wanted one of these cats and
  asked one of the others where her sister, daughter or mother was, she’d
  gone out and then come back with the one I’d asked about.  This
  time when I asked our cats where Pidney was, Granny just looked at me,
  and Muffin came over to me, rubbed against me, head-butted me, and
  curled up beside me for comfort.  Usually, it had been Granny
  who’d gone missing before.  It is a regular pattern for her to be
  gone overnight or for an entire day sometimes, and a few times fights
  among the feral animals have frightened Muffin into hiding for extended
  periods, but not Pidney.  As hard as it may be for some people to
  understand or believe, we do communicate with the animals around us,
  and we observe them and become aware of their patterns of behavior.

  …if I had any sense at all of her being out there, either
  adventuring, lost, or in distress, instead of this intuitive blank
  where she is concerned.

  …if Doug, who all his life has been attuned to the cats, had not
  already walked the neighborhood searching for her and then given her up
  for dead and grieved his loss.

  …if I had not, in the shamanic state of consciousness, gotten the
  image of her taken by the hawk that nests in the muskeg across the
  street, and confirmed it later with an oracle.

  …if I had not always “known” or strongly suspected that Pidney would
  be the first to go since she was the one without the camouflage fur,
  and was frequently out there engaged in her own predatory activity.

  …if I had not seen hunting around here, or actually seen taking prey
  or heard reports of their having been seen taking cats, in addition to
  raptors such as the hawk and the eagles, owls and harriers:  fox,
  lynx, wolves, coyotes and feral wolf-hybrid dogs.  If a cat or
  other prey animal were injured, it would then be prey to any of a
  number of scavenger species such as ravens, badgers and ermine who are
  not above killing their carrion if it’s not quite dead when they find
  it.

  …if I did not understand that it is unhealthy to engage in denial and wishful thinking.

  One one level, I have no closure where Pidney is concerned.  That
  is how I like it.  It would not serve me to come upon her bloodied
  or decomposed remains.   This I know because I have in the
  past found the remains of some of my beloved cats.  Those images
  stick in my mind, horribly.  It is preferable, in my mind, to
  remember my cat-buddy as she was and to envision her limp body carried
  off across the muskeg to feed a nest of fledgling hawks.  After
  all, it is a food chain out there. 

  I hope that when I’m done with this body it will go into nature’s
  recycling system without all that corpse-worshipping cultural crap of
  embalming fluid and fancy boxes.  I like the way the former
  inhabitants of this area did it, exposing corpses on platforms for the
  birds to pick clean; and the way traditional Tibetans do it, hacking
  the bodies apart to feed to the buzzards, but that’s another blog.
  

  • 2:02 pm
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