My Very Good, Very Bad Cat Read online

  Molly, on the other hand, is gregarious and affectionate. She is an adventurer, and in her relatively short life, her adventurous spirit has gotten her into trouble several times. To the uninitiated, Molly and Maisie look exactly alike, both sleek and black with just the tiniest smudge of white on their chests. However, those in the know can quickly tell them apart since Molly has what I can only describe as a “flat head” as the result of a previous accident.

  As I watched her bound across the grass, I wondered what mischief she had gotten herself into this time. I didn’t have to wonder for long. A few minutes later, my father-in-law rounded the corner looking rather sheepish. He lives next door, and Molly adores him. She follows him around incessantly, like a faithful puppy. I may provide Molly with food and shelter, but in her heart she is Harold’s cat.

  I watched as Harold shuffled uncomfortably from one foot to the other, making small talk about the weather and my morning at work. My husband noticed I was home and abandoned his yard work to join us as we stood on the front path with our eyes fixed on Molly. We all looked at her as we talked about everything but the matter at hand. Neither man offered an explanation.

  Eventually, Harold blurted out that he had cut off part of Molly’s tail. I thought he was joking, but then I looked at his serious expression and realised he was not. Molly was now rubbing affectionately against his ankles, and I wondered if he was somehow covering for her, but my husband assured me that it was true. He had heard Harold’s first confession an hour before.

  Slowly, the story unfolded. It was a beautiful spring day, and Harold had decided to spend it working in his garden. As soon as he stepped through his door, Molly, his faithful shadow, was at his side. She walked beside him as he puttered about, and when he decided to prune the shrubs in his patio flowerbed, she followed, rubbing affectionately against his legs much as she was doing now. Unfortunately, Molly had embraced her inner dog at an inopportune moment and “wagged” her tail right into the path of Harold’s secateurs. The result had greeted me when I arrived home.

  I looked at Harold as he finished the sorry tale. He held his breath and waited anxiously for my reaction. I looked at my husband, no doubt prepared to be the peacemaker. I looked at Molly, the white bandage dancing as she continued to heap love on an oblivious Harold.

  And I laughed.

  It all seemed so ridiculous. Molly wasn’t upset, so I wasn’t either! Relief replaced the discomfort on Harold’s face, and he gave an uneasy laugh of his own before telling me how Molly sat contentedly on his knee and purred, even as her tail was being bandaged. I wondered what had happened to the bit of tail that got cut off, but decided not to ask.

  If Maisie, the prima donna, had lost part of her tail, she would have tried to exploit it for every possible perk. It would have taken her years to get over the offense. Molly, however, remained unwavering in her devotion to Harold. It just goes to show that for all the negative publicity cats get, they can be every bit as loyal as dogs.

  ~Deborah Kerr

  When the Gussycat Flew

  Fun fact: Domesticated housecats can run at a thirty-mile-per-hour pace.

  It was late. Very late. Four in the morning late — that deep, dark hour when all is calm and peaceful, and nothing crazy ever happens.

  Except this time something crazy did happen — and, of course, Gus was right in the middle of it all.

  I was working a late shift back then, not long out of college, still living at home with Mom and my sister Paula, and our cats, WT and Gus. I had gotten home around 2:30 a.m., made myself a bite to eat, and watched a little TV. The hour had just passed 3:30 when I finally plopped down onto my bed, all set to enjoy a long morning of well-earned sleep.

  Alas! The household’s junior cat had other ideas.

  Our Gus — formally, Augustus H.T. Cat; informally, The Gussycat — had come to us from a litter of feral kittens. After a rough start, Gus had fit in well with the family. Even WT, the senior cat, tolerated his presence fairly well. But Gus always retained that little bit of wildness, that touch of strange and crazy that sometimes led him to do unexpected things — even if the clock said, “No, sorry — no crazy right now. Go to sleep!”

  Not long after I hit the sack, pandemonium broke out in the hallway outside my bedroom door. If you’ve ever worked a late shift, you know how important it is to get your sleep. Any loss of that precious dreamtime is not appreciated. I dragged myself out of bed, as grumpy as you can imagine, and threw open the bedroom door, demanding an explanation: “What the (censored) is going on out here?”

  My angry question generated no comprehensible response — just a stream of unintelligible, panicked cries from my mother and sister, both of whom were already tumbling down the stairs to the first floor. My fuzzy, sleepy brain could only pick out a few random nuggets of information: Gus, window, glass. Nothing that made much sense.

  “What?” I asked, hoping for some clarity.

  “Get WT away from the glass in my bedroom!” commanded Mom from the bottom of the stairs before she disappeared into the living room.

  I made my groggy way into my mother’s bedroom, where the pieces started to come together. At least, the pieces of the mystery came together; the pieces of the windowpane — which lay scattered on and beneath the windowsill — were most definitely not coming together, and never would again.

  The sight of the shattered glass finally helped me do the math. Somehow, Gus had jumped through the window and plunged to the patio below.

  Gus hadn’t jumped out the window; he had jumped through the window, shattering the glass in the process. There wasn’t a cat-shaped hole in the window, like you’d see in cartoons, but there was an impressively jagged empty space where once a pane of solid glass had stood. No wonder everyone was going crazy.

  Everyone, that is, except WT, who had stationed herself by the broken window and was surveying the scene with what can only be described as detached bemusement. Given my assumptions — that we already had one mangled cat on our hands — I made sure to perform my assigned task.

  “Shoo!” I said to WT, whisking her away from the carnage before she did any damage to herself. “Go on. Get out of here.” WT complied, jumping down from the windowsill and slinking out of the room with a cat’s typical studied indifference.

  Once I had seen the sane cat off to a safe distance, I returned to the window to learn the fate of the crazy one. I peered through the jagged remains of the pane and looked down to the back patio, where the search-and-rescue operation was in full effect. Fortunately, our back yard was small and fenced off, so Gus was effectively corralled as soon as he landed. In just a few minutes, the tag team of Paula and Mom recovered our wayward cat and brought him back to the safety of the great indoors.

  Later, I was able to reconstruct what had happened: Not long after I had gone to bed, Gus was seized by a fit of “the crazies.” This condition, common in young cats, had sent Gus zipping around the house at top speed, running from room to room like his fur was on fire. When his frenetic path took him into Mom’s bedroom, Gus decided that a flying leap onto the hope chest beneath the window would be just the thing to make his night complete.

  Unfortunately, Gus did not realize that upon this hope chest’s slick, ultra-smooth top surface sat a folded blanket. As soon as Gus’s paws hit the blanket, the whole bundle of cat and fabric shot across the chest’s lid, propelled forward by the leaping cat’s full-bore momentum. The blanket acted like a magic carpet ride, launching the leaping Gus forward and upward into a low orbit that sent our feline daredevil right through the window and out into the night, until at last he landed in the yard below.

  What damage resulted from this unscheduled liftoff? The window was totaled, of course; it would take several days to get a replacement pane of glass installed.

  But the Gussycat, despite bursting through glass and plunging to the ground from a second-story window, survived with just a cut on his right front paw. He seemed completely unfazed by his airborn
e adventure.

  Long after that crazy night, the legend of Gus the Flying Cat lived on. For years thereafter, Gus seemed like a Super Cat: indestructible, amazing, and capable of anything at any time.

  Gus survived his night flight and lived on for another decade, until he finally made his last leap away from this world and into the next. I miss him to this day, but I will always remember the night when the Gussycat flew — the night when I learned that cats really are capable of just about anything… and sometimes “anything” happens at four in the morning!

  ~Stephen Taylor

  A Sunny Welcome Home

  Fun fact: A cat’s ability to find its way home is known as “psi-traveling.” One theory is that they can do this because they have magnetized cells in their brains, like compasses.

  Sunshine came into our lives when I was five years old. My three-year-old sister, Candace, and I had nagged our parents for months about wanting a kitten. Our mom finally relented when someone she knew told her of an available litter at a nearby farm. She had one condition, though — the kitten had to be a ginger-coloured one.

  Well, as fate would have it, when we arrived to see the cats, it turned out that there was an orange Tabby kitten. Candace and I were jumping for joy. We were both certain that this kitten was ours. Unfortunately, Sunshine was the only kitten that the owners planned to keep. My sister and I were devastated. We knew we weren’t going to get a cat unless it was this orange one. Our mom had said so. When the owner saw how upset we were, she called a family meeting. They decided we could keep him, but only if we kept his name — Sunshine. We happily agreed.

  Sunshine came home with us, and we lavished attention on him. He slept in the old, dilapidated barn on our property. We lived near Belleville, Ontario, in a little house on top of a hill. Candace and I loved to play in the gardens around the house with my mom and dad. Sunny, as we often called him for short, ran on his own schedule. He would wander all around the property and beyond. His visits weren’t regular. Sunshine showed up whenever he was ready for some of our attention — or for some food. Our family learned to love him just the way he was.

  My job was to feed Sunshine. We could almost always count on a visit from him in the morning. I would open our front door and bring out his breakfast. Once it was all set up nicely on the front step, I would sit and wait, calling, “Sunshine! Sunny! Here boy, Sunny boy!” Sure enough, he would emerge from his sleeping quarters — the barn. Happily weaving between my legs and purring, he would have some of his food. He loved to stand on my lap while getting his ears rubbed.

  Work circumstances changed for my dad, though, and we had to move to Toronto. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Belleville. My parents found an apartment and we moved in. They decided to keep our house in Belleville — my dad hoped the Toronto move was only temporary. On most weekends, we drove to Belleville and stayed at our house. We would then spend the workweek in Toronto. Apartment living, we soon found out, proved to be a difficult one for our wandering cat. This cat was used to roaming around outside. I wanted Sunshine to snuggle with me at night. My mom just wanted him toilet trained! Sunshine thought otherwise. He sprayed the bathroom walls with urine, claiming his territory, oblivious to the litter box.

  The inevitable happened. My parents sat down with Candace and me and told us that Sunshine couldn’t be with us anymore. We were crushed. We had fought so hard for a pet, found one with the specific qualifications that Mom had called for, and we couldn’t keep him. My mom called some farms in the area to see if any of them were in need of a barn cat. Sure enough, a kind farmer in Aurora, Ontario, said that we could drop him off.

  I remember that car ride with Sunny. I was so sad, and Sunshine hated being in the car. He meowed incessantly. We drove a good half-hour north of our apartment in Toronto to Aurora. My mom dropped off Sunny near the farmer’s door, and we drove away. I cried the whole way back to our apartment.

  On weekends, we continued visiting our Belleville house but it just wasn’t the same without Sunshine there. Luckily for us, things soon changed. A year later, Dad got work in Belleville. We could move back home — for good! We packed up our things and drove home.

  I remember asking my parents during that final drive back home if we could get a new pet because we would be settling into our house again. They just chuckled, as they usually did when I asked them, and said “maybe.” It was a lot to ask for, I guess, with the move.

  Well, what a shock we got that morning. As Dad drove up the driveway, we saw an orange Tabby cat emerge from the barn. I felt a smile forming on my face just as he exclaimed to Mom, “That’s not Sunny, is it?”

  Dad quickly parked, and we all ran out to greet him. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Was it really him? This cat came up to us purring and weaving between our legs. Mom checked and there was his trademark: an extra toe on each of his front paws. My mom exclaimed gleefully, “It’s him alright!”

  I quickly ran inside to get some leftover cat food and milk, which I put on the front steps. Sunny came up to me, waiting for me to rub his ears. It was a wonderful, amazing thing. Somehow, our cat made the long journey from that farm in Aurora — a three-hour drive away — to our home in Belleville. Some thirty years later, it still seems unreal. I’ll never forget that joyful day when our Sunshine came back.

  ~Rachel Lajunen Harnett

  Game Over

  Not-so-fun fact: More than ten percent of cats will develop an “elimination problem.”

  I was reading a story in a magazine when I turned the page and found myself face-to-face with the answer to my prayers. “Toilet Train Your Cat in Less than a Month!” the ad screamed. The story forgotten, I placed an order.

  When the package came, I was disappointed. Basically, it was a flimsy plastic tray shaped like a bedpan that fit over the rim and under the seat of the toilet. Somehow, I was expecting more. But they said it would work, so I got started.

  The instructions said to put a bit of litter in the tray so the cat would know where he was supposed to do his business. The concept was that he would recognize how flimsy it was and perch on the edge of the seat instead of putting his weight on the tray, thus training him to use the toilet instead of a box. Sounded reasonable…

  When I showed him the new facilities, my Siamese cat, Phaze, was less than impressed. He gave me a “You’ve got to be kidding!” look and swished his tail, but I was firm as I told him, “No, you go HERE now.” To make it perfectly clear, I moved his litter box onto the balcony where he wouldn’t see it.

  Phaze wasn’t thrilled, but he tried it. I cringed as I watched him put his full ten-pound weight on the tray. I could hear the thin plastic crinkling, but somehow it held.

  About a week into the endeavor, I came home to find potting soil on the floor and a surprise in my potted plant. Phaze had found an alternative. I cleaned up the mess and moved the plant to the balcony. Phaze followed me out, and when he did, he spied his litter box.

  I have never seen a cat so excited! He danced; he pranced; he leaped with joy! If he could talk, he would have been saying, “Mom, we found it! We found my litter box! Look! There it is!” He was not a happy kitty when I made him go back into the apartment and the litter box stayed outside.

  The instructions said to gradually decrease the amount of litter in the tray. I did, although Phaze looked more confused each time. He was also still sitting directly in the tray. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him to understand that he was supposed to perch on the edge.

  A week later, the inevitable happened. I heard a splash in the bathroom, and when I rushed in, Phaze was climbing out of the toilet. His back half was wet, and his front half was furious. He shook himself off, glared at me with disgust, and squatted on the floor.

  That concluded our experiment. Game over.

  ~Linda Sabourin

  Reprinted by permission of www.CartoonStock.com

  A Toast to Thomas

  Fun fact: Cats can’t taste sweetness in food.

 
; For years, Thomas was content with his own breakfast kibble. Then, one morning, I left part of the crust from a piece of toast unattended on a plate, and he discovered a whole new world of breakfast food. From that moment on, the ding on the toaster was his clarion call.

  Before Thomas discovered toast, my breakfast routine was simple. I’d take my plate with my sunny-side-up eggs on toast to the couch where I’d nibble as I read a book. After Thomas discovered toast, breakfast became more complicated. As far as I was concerned, the proper protocol would have been for me to eat breakfast and then give him leftover bite-sized pieces of crust.

  Thomas had a different plan. For a week or two, he yowled and tried to look imperious, hoping to shame me into feeding him first. Next he went for the sympathy vote and sat on my lap, staring up at me with huge golden eyes that said, “Feed me. I haven’t eaten in hours, days or possibly weeks. I’m wasting away to almost nothing. Another pound or two and you’ll be able to feel my ribs.” Then he’d suck in his stomach and sigh, one of the most plaintive sounds in the world.

  However, Thomas forgot two things. One, unlike him, I could tell the time. “Forget it, boy,” I’d say, checking my wristwatch. “It’s been exactly thirty-seven minutes since you got your real breakfast. You scarfed down every kibble and licked the dish three times to make sure not a single crumb got away. You even inhaled every molecule of the aroma.” And two, like me, he was in no danger of wasting away any time soon.