Like welcomed and celebrated children, beloved pets have many names. My most recent furry, four-legged gift from the Universe arrived some twenty years ago singing his kitty song as he emerged from the long grasses of a nearby meadow. On a break from writing, I sat on the front stoop of this woodsy home eating lunch. I couldn’t quite believe my ears when I heard him. As he rounded the corner of the cabin, I felt he knew exactly where to find me.
No feral cat this. I knew the signs because I’d tried to tame several of his wild relatives before our meeting on this summer day. Ever since I discovered that living in a woodsy cabin meant sharing space with all manner of insects, mice, voles, and squirrels, I’d been longing for a cat companion. In those days, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d lived without one. My longing was huge.
Despite my previous kitten and cat experience, Princey demonstrated revelation after revelation regarding feline abilities. Before meeting him, I’d never loved a hunter cat, a joy-filled killer, one with five toes on each paw, one who smiled while wolfing down whatever he caught that dared enter what from that day on became his domain. That first day, I shared my tofu lunch with him, unaware of what he could do with his delicate jaws, his sharp little teeth, his dainty pink tongue. He ate the tofu from my fingers, mindful of my tender flesh and careful not to bite me.
I asked him the usual questions about where he’d come from, what he was doing so far from home, who might be looking for him. His answers were definitive. He purred. He rubbed against my legs. Then he curled beside me, both of us feeling the rightness of our new friendship beneath the forest canope’s shifting shadows.
The Burlington Humane Society runs touching adoption ads in Seven Days, a weekly Vermont paper, always with pictures of the furry adoptee above descriptions of known histories. One day I was startled to read they had “Working Cats” available, cats who live in barns and catch mice and any other interlopers for food and companionship. I read about barn cats several years after I’d welcomed Prince to forest life. By then, my beloved kitty companion had been called Killer, Toes, Pretty Kitty, Honey Bun, Sweetie Boy, and Princey, as well as the name attached to his magician’s sudden appearance in my life. At one veterinarian appointment, when I replied with his full formal name, the young woman taking notes looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Prince Meadow Lark! That’s the best!” with such enthusiasm I had to laugh.
Over the years I am happy to say Prince learned to leave birds alone. At high risk were the pesky red squirrels who did their best to invade the cabin’s attic. These energetic creatures learned the hard way the machinations of Prince’s gullet. He ate them enthusiastically, tail and all. He quickly learned not to eat the voles that lazed by him when he was out sunning, retching after his moment of forgetfulness and looking around hoping no one had seen his lapse into carnivore foolishness. He continued to kill these slow moving, burrowing creatures, afterward bringing them to me as a love offering.
His favourite sport, tracking down the source of rustling inside the cabin, became a source of enormous pleasure to both of us. With the patience of a monk, he would meditate on the sound until his radar prompted him to crouch in a very specific spot. The end of the story involved his gleeful devouring of the entire mouse, head first, tail last. After such meals, he’d look at me with love, joy, and pride, his eyes half-closed in bliss.
He knew I’d miss him after so many years of play, cuddles, and work together, and so he began to show me, little by little, that he was getting ready to return to the mystery that first led him to me and our long-ago, tofu sharing day. Over the years of his slow decline, he would look at me as if to say, “You know I can’t stay forever, right?” Years before, my grandmother had to tell me she was “going” because she too understood the deep grief of loss and how I was doing all I could to deny our approaching separation. Prince used his eyes to let me know, his less and less frequent head bumps, his waning enthusiasm for mousie play, my fingers the mouse teasing him from beneath the bathroom door.
A decade or so before this ache of Prince’s passing, a beautiful city cat, Jimi, joined our woodsy family He’d been a rescue whose history with unkindness left him unpredictably violent with people and dogs he didn’t like. Our city letter carrier, a big burly man, confided once that our barking dog didn’t frighten him at all, but our prancing dancing little black cat did. Jimi loved our dog, Mike, and he loved us as long as we respected his need to live as he needed to live, close but not too close.When he arrived in these woods, Jimi decided he liked Prince, but he made sure Prince understood his right to eat out of both food bowls whenever he was moved to, and to kick Prince off my pillow when he chose to sleep there. Through all of Jimi’s tough-guy posturing, Prince remained the gracious host, knowing I suspect, that something dark and sinister brewed in Jimi’s lithe little body that would take him from our home when he was still in vital middle age.
A vet who made hospice house calls helped me to understand when to call him to end Jimi’s pain. The dark and sinister force in his body turned out to be bone cancer that announced its presence with a sudden limp after an ordinary jump from a bed. Kindly, the vet said, “You’ll know. His joy will be gone. As long as he’s happy to sit in the sun, to purr with you on the sofa, to offer the occasional head bump, he’s still experiencing the quality of life you want for him.” He was right. Jimi told me “It’s time,” as he withdrew from our mutual tendernesses.
Quality of life is such a subjective call to make, one that comes with the responsibility of pet companionship. I didn’t have to call anyone for Prince. Like the magical cat he’d always been, he went out to the driveway to sip from a puddle knowing I would follow him. I followed him everywhere in his final days. The day he died, we walked to a puddle, our pace set by his aching, arthritic hips. Once there, I stroked his head and scratched his chin, and talked to him a bit about the wonderful sunshine making its way to us through the trees after a long rain storm. He gave me a look of understanding and sat down to take in his shimmering green world.
After a few minutes of shared beauty and peace, I walked back to the cabin to check something on the stove. I watched him from the kitchen window for a moment or two, his head turning from the puddle to observe the long grasses leading to the woods he often explored. Minutes later, when I returned to the spot I’d left him, he was gone.
During the waves of terrible heat he often found a cool, damp, shadowed spot to doze. I turned from the drive to the woods, expecting to see him curled in a favourite spot, but he wasn’t in all his usual resting places. I still haven’t found his lovely frail body although I can’t help but look for him. Seeing him still and lifeless might provide closure, but I doubt it. Losing him will be an open wound for quite a while. And yet his passing feels so right. As he appeared out of the meadow, singing, he disappeared into it, but with a quieter song.
It’s been two weeks since his physical leave taking. Throughout this time I have grieved, lighted candles, walked out to look for him, done all the things I can think to do to love him and release him to his next adventure. My beautiful Prince Meadow Lark, my wonderful Sweetie Boy is gone from this place. So far, the mice are unaware of his absence. His Killer energy remains, will aways remain, in the tall grass where he spent so many happy hours hunting.
Now and again, he appears to me in shadows as I walk outside, looking for him, longing for him. I see his tail twitching next to a stump or stretched out on the meadow rock that became a favourite sunning place in cold weather. I see him inside, curled before the fire, languid on the sofa, sitting in the kitchen watching me cook. When I receive these visual gifts, I know Prince Meadow Lark has found his forever home.
Of course he had to go. It was his time. His wisdom told him so, and I trust his wisdom as I trust my own. But knowing the rightness of his death and feeling the pain of losing him is a challenging landscape where comfort comes in wisps or not at all. I miss my Kitty, my Toes, my Beloved Prince Meadow Lark, my Sweetie Boy. He was so faithful, so loving, so kind and generous. And such a proud killer.
In The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence writes of a child who killed chicks left to die in the burning sun on the sidewalk. She performed this violent act of mercy by stepping on them. Hagar, Laurence’s main character, says of this girl that she was the kind of person who could do what needed to be done. It was an ugly act, but in the long view, a kind one.
Prince, like that young girl, could do what needed to be done. And when nothing was needed, he knew how to play, to snuggle, to eat for pleasure, to clean and admire his big paws. He was a lovely Being who, against all odds, found me and my longing for him in these vast woods. Life here, in the meadow, on the puddled drive, among the trees, will always hold him tenderly, so tenderly, as will my grateful, broken heart.
Until next time,
Jane