Jack’s Weekend Out

Once again I find myself confronted with change and looming mortality, albeit on a smaller scale. Also, is this the best life we’re living? One cat seeks to answer this most important question.

I’d done it before, but they all came back in. These were the same cats, too, Jack and Luna, who slipped out the primitive screen door on the side of the mud room facing the backyard, because I’d neglected to put the big concrete chunks in front to keep it secured.

The first time this happened, they came back inside quickly on their own volition. This time, Luna had to be dragged out from beneath my son’s car. 

Jack ran away.

Jack, from our last years in Colorado Springs. Although we’ve had Jack since my daughter brought him home as a kitten in August 2011, it’s only in recent years that he increased in mass (not fat, mind you) to become our largest cat. Also, several of his whiskers are bright white now.

I hadn’t realized he was out until I came back from my evening constitutional and saw his large, black-furred frame standing to one side of the porch in the front yard. I called his name. In cat-like fashion, he looked blankly back at me. I went inside, and was promptly asked, “Have you seen Jack?” 

Well....

Jack, doing his flat-cat thing on my old futon in my Colorado Springs basement office. For many years Jack could lie down on something and his uncanny ability to conform to the surface made me wonder what he did with his internal organs. 

I went back outside and walked the perimeter of our yard. The regular outdoor ferals were out and about as always, but no sign of Jack. 

“Well, it’s not the first time he’s spent the night outdoors,” I said, coming back in. “He’ll show up when he’s hungry.”

“A reasonable assumption, human. However....”

I found myself looking through every window I passed as I drew the curtains and closed up the house for the evening. I was in the master bedroom upstairs peering through the windows that overlooked the front yard when I saw a familiar shape sprawled comfortably across the front walk. I unlocked the window, but by the time I had pulled it back to call his name, Jack was gone.

After a few minutes I went back downstairs. Jack was back on the front walk. The porch cats were in the yard hunting grasshoppers and moths, and, so far, coexisting quite well with the large black gelded tom reclining across the concrete like he owned it. I opened the front door and stepped out to the porch.

“You think you know me, human, after all these years. Bah!”

Jack saw me. He knows my voice. He knows the inside of the house, which he could certainly see through the open door behind me.

When I called him to come in, Jack ran away into the darkness.

“I suppose he’s where he wants to be,” I told my wife.

“He has no claws.”

I said I figured he’d do the best he can. “Remember that cat in Anchorage with no front claws that managed to kill every last rabbit in the bog near our house?”

I looked out the windows every now and then, but I finally had to give up and go to bed.

I expected Jack to appear as I fed the porch cats in the morning. I saw no sign of him. Jack is something of a “chow hound,” if you’ll pardon the expression, and it wasn’t like him to miss a meal.

I walked out into the yard and looked around. I looked toward the big empty lot across the street from our house, then up and down the street.

I turned around and went back inside. I could only hope he was close by, and unharmed.

My wife, as always, articulated what was already pointing a bony, accusatory finger at me from the back of my mind. “I kinda feel guilty for not feeling worse about this. I really don’t miss him that much.”

Indeed, Jack’s defection to the great outdoors presented an opportunity we thought we’d only have upon the death of our eldest cat, namely, to bring the big, shaggy white rag doll mix we call Gal into the house.

Gal is a tale unto herself, being one of the first cats I noticed that “came with the house” we moved into two years ago. I used to call her the Yeti, because she was so huge and shaggy and white. She would scowl down on me from the top rail of the old chicken coop in the backyard, when the stray cats used to all congregate there. (That they don’t anymore is a mystery. They all stay near the front porch when they’re not inside the abandoned house across the street.)

For the longest time, we never saw her. I couldn’t tell you when she showed up again, only that it was sometime over last winter. Over the past year we noticed how she got closer and closer to us as we went outside to feed the outdoor cats. She would run between our legs to get at the bowls we were filling.

One day this summer, she let my wife pet her. The next day, my wife held Gal in her arms. I was still recovering from surgery at the time, but it wasn’t long before Gal was in my lap, nuzzling my chin. There is no doubt in our minds that Gal was abandoned, perhaps by the same people who left this house empty for two years before we came along to buy it.

Note Gal at the door. She comes inside to visit us from time to time, but isn’t comfortable with the indoor cats. Everything is a work in progress.

It didn’t sit right with me, though. I watched Saturday afternoon as Jack tried playing with Angel, the big white tom, only to narrowly miss getting his face taken off. Again, Jack has no claws. He can’t even run up at tree when the occasional stray dog comes around, and it wasn’t looking good for his acceptance by the born-and-bred ferals under our porch.

Saturday evening I tried cornering Jack so I could bring him indoors. Everywhere he saw me, he ran.

Maybe this was it, after all. This was the life he wanted to live and he’d find a way. And if he didn’t, he’d die giving it his best shot. It’s what any sensible, self-respecting creature wants, so why I am trying to cage him in this house?

Spooks (full name Spooky McSpookerton) is of the third generation of kittens to be born since we moved here, and for as well as he gets on in the great outdoors, would not enjoy being domesticated at all. 

Regardless of these thoughts, I went out on Sunday morning, this time leaving the front door wide open. He regarded the open door before him. I took a step towards him and he shot up the steps to the porch, across the porch and into the house.

The family was complete again, our weekend-long crisis over in three minutes. Jack had to make the decision, I keep telling myself. He wanted to do this.

The other cats in the house had a grand time sniffing him over for all those exotic outdoor scents, and Jack didn’t mind the attention. That was all there was to it. Jack hasn’t tried escaping since. He’s even a little more affectionate with me, even demanding of it from his perch on the chair by the picture window looking out over the front yard.

He’d made his decision. Was it the best one? I don’t know, but I’m glad it turned out this way. The incident gave me much to think about in terms of freedom versus comfort.

If nothing else, they do furnish a room.But is that all we’re here for? To furnish a wet rock spinning through space? Yeah, we’ll stop here. I’m obviously tired.