Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years.
We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so…
Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around 16, maybe 17 years. We can’t be sure because she came to us fully-formed, as a stray. This was when we lived at our previous place, the rented house on the west side of town: deep in the heart of college-student apartments, but on a very large block at whose center was an old, heavily treed forest which butted up against our back yard. Like other strays who visited us over the years there, she (and/or her mother) possibly had belonged to a student who left for a summer and just “released” her into the wild.
In any case, one day I came home from work one day to find The Not-Yet Missus eager to tell me of the epic animal-kingdom moment I’d missed: this mottled tortoisheshell cat had appeared from nowhere and simply leapt, in a single fluid movement, to the top of the wooden fence surrounding the artificial pond in the back yard. Striking enough, just that much. But what elevated it to the level of a National Geographic feature was this: the four-foot-long blacksnake trapped, writhing and whipping about, caught in the cat’s jaws.
