It was a warm day in early October of 2010 when we prepared
to set out on our cross Canada road trip to Prince
Edward Island, where we were to live with Merrill’s ninety something mother. I
had been packing for a month when we finally got everything we were taking
crammed in. We said our goodbye’s to our friends and loaded the two cat cages
in my van.
We
set out from Penhold, Alberta this fine, sunny morning with two overloaded vehicles
and an almost bursting trailer with a handmade box hitched to Merrill’s van. The
three noisy and complaining cats; Boo, Molly and Sassy, were none too pleased
to be locked inside their carriers; Molly and Sassy were small enough to share.
Actually it started out ok but then Boo decided he did want to play road trip
anymore he started with a yowly complaint which got his companions doing the
same. Have you ever been cooped up with three caterwauling, wailing cats that
just want to go back home? For a week no
less!
We
stopped in Hannah, Alberta where little Molly got away on us and we had to gain
the assistance of a kind gentlemen in a local lumber yard to use her leash to pull
her out from under a huge lumber pile that look as though it could have
collapsed on her, otherwise she would have become a permanent resident of that
little town! The whole scary scene was
not lost on Sassy or Boo and after that, all three of them balked at the very
notion of leaving the sanctity of their carriers; for the rest of the six days
we were on the road they had to pulled out just to clean their confines.
It
was a blessing that the rest of the trip was largely and in seven days, we
arrived. It was like another planet to them as they cautiously crept out of the
carriers and into the room we were to call our own; they didn’t know what to
make of the change.
During
the next two years they learned where home was when they were outside and
usually stayed close other than investigating the only neighbor we had who
lived across the road from us in large home with its expansive yard or the
massive field behind the house where the owners grew potatoes. Sometimes I’d
see them out in the small cemetery next to the house, catching mice. I could
always call them in and when they hesitated, a shake of their treat bag never
failed. They got used to being outside again and I never had any real problem
with getting them in but lately Merrill’s mother was getting very forgetful and
letting Boo out at night. Usually all my cats were indoors before the sun went
down but I was working nights and Merrill usually got home late. He had
absolutely refused to come in when called.
The
phone was for me that morning. Through a fog the neighbor was telling me she
saw a black cat that she thought was dead just outside her yard… this sent me
flying out the door and running across the road. It was Boo.
My
baby Boo and his brother Greymalk; I had found them both one winter in a
freezing barn on a farm we were living on in Alberta. The mother was skin and
bones and all her other kittens had died, their little wasted bodies strewn
around the snow crusted yard. A visitor to the farm took the mother cat to a
cattle and horse auction where she apparently found a home and did well. Her
two tiny kittens, one completely grey with a little white mark on his head; the
other black with a little white under his chin, were left screaming in the
barn. The tiny black kitten, whose eyes were sealed shut from neglect, came
screaming towards any source of noise hoping to find his mother and survival.
That day he found me.
I
bundled them up and took them home, nursed them back to health and they became
our first pets in Alberta. Some years before our move to the island and before
Sassy’s time I lost Greymalk, now I had lost Boo as well. There was little to
console me. Boo was a very special animal and I missed him dearly. It turned
out that Sassy had a surprise in store for us that would honor her friend and
companion Boo and help heal the wounds of losing him.
Catspaw
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