I guess you might say that I’m the suspicious type. I have reason. I started out as naive as any other cat: all warm next to my mother’s stomach and surrounded by my squirming brothers and sisters. Life was easy. When I was hungry I had only to find my mother’s tit swollen with milk. She kept me safe and warm and I wanted for nothing that she did not supply.
Even when my littermates and I got old enough to venture away from our cardboard box lined with a tattered piece of blue blanket we were still within my mother’s protective circle. Life was grand as we played together and explored the little patch of green grass that was our larger world. If the bark of a dog or a sudden movement frightened one of us, there was always a home to scurry back to and the comforting attention of our mother. I liked the people who lived in our house. They held me gently, stroked my fur and made soothing sounds. It was no wonder I believed all humans were kind.
But that all changed in the space of one morning when my brothers and sisters and I were gathered into our cardboard box and taken far away from our mother. We rumbled along on a bumpy ride for what seemed like a very long time and then the big person from our house carried our box down a rocky slope and placed it in the prairie grass. He reached down with his hand and stroked some of my littermates and then we were left alone.
I didn’t know how alone we were for a long time. I huddled next to my six siblings waiting for our mother to find us and show us what to do. She had always found us before. Our mother would surely take care of us.
When darkness came we sought comfort from one another, but we were all frightened. Sleep came in snatches that night. The noises in the black countryside were terrifying. We were cold and hungry but there was no soft stomach to knead -- no sweet milk of innocence to suckle. But we could still smell our mother’s scent on the blue blanket and it gave us hope.
The next days were like a nightmare, and the images from that awful time still come to me often in the quiet times. Hunger forced us away from our box the next morning, but no bugs or bits of life that I managed to catch tasted like mother’s milk, and there was not enough to ever make the hunger go away. By the time the second long night was past, I somehow knew. I would never see my mother again -- we had been abandoned as surely as our mother’s scent on the blue blanket was fading.
Some of my brothers and sisters, however, still expected the people from our house to return. When we heard rumbling in the road above, they hurried up to see if someone was coming to take them back. Two of my brothers and one sister were killed in that road as they looked for the car and the people who left us there.
After that I sometimes thought it might have been better for the rest of us if we had met the same fate. I can still hear the scream as a monster bird swooped out of the sky and took away one of my brothers. The three of us who were left lived on bugs for quite a while. When all of us had given up the notion that we would be rescued, we dragged our blue blanket to a sheltered spot under the branches of a cedar tree and made a substitute home there. We learned to hunt mice to fill the emptiness, but it was a hard life. Every day was a struggle for us, and more than a few times we feared for our lives. Once I was almost eaten by a coyote, but I managed to throw myself down a gopher hole in the nick of time. As winter approached, our situation grew more desperate as the mice became scarcer.
I won’t go into the details of how I came to be the only survivor among us, but a man set his dog on one of my sisters and my other sister got very sick. She was the best mouser among us, but she missed our mother and our home and was heartbroken. When she got too weak to hunt I shared my catches with her. We curled up at night together to keep warm; but sadness took its toll and she died. I was finally alone – really alone.
It was then that I knew that the world was a wicked place. The only thing I could trust was myself – but I didn’t need anyone and no one needed me, now. The morning after my last sister died, I left our blue tattered blanket under the sheltering branches of the cedar and set out on my own.
The next few days were fraught with peril. A grass fire nearly surrounded me before I knew it was coming, and I was almost run over by a tractor. I grew very hungry and weak as I searched for a place to see the winter out. When snow began to fall on the fifth day, I headed for a dilapidated building I saw in the distance to take shelter. Though I was wet and cold, I entered hesitantly through a hole in one of the weathered boards into a vast dimly lit world full of machinery and pungent smells. I curled up there in the warm hay that was strewn over the dirt floor and slept peacefully for the first time in days. It didn’t take me long to decide to stay awhile in that old barn. There were plenty of mice about – it was the kind of place a cat could survive even the coldest winter.
There were other animals around but they were not much of a problem, except for the black and white dog who seemed to always know where I was. Luckily he could not climb the plank stairs to the loft of the old barn, so I made my sleeping nest up there.
There was a man, too, who came and went regularly, but he was easy to hide from. Sometimes I watched him from the rafters while he did what he came to do. His stomach was round under his blue coveralls and it was fascinating to listen to him whistle while he worked, but I kept my distance. I couldn’t afford to trust anyone.
One cold morning he left a pan of milk on the barn floor beside the door. I couldn’t resist sampling it after he left. It was the first time I had tasted milk since my mother’s. It was sweet and wonderful and I couldn’t stop myself. I drank it all, but I was very careful: I don’t think the man knew who stole it.
After that the milk appeared on particularly cold mornings, and he never seemed to be upset when it was gone. In fact I began to suspect he knew it was I who drank it all along and that he was putting it there for me. But I was careful all the same, and always waited until he was gone to drink it.
But, one thing led to another during that cold long winter and I let down my defenses long enough to get acquainted with the man. By spring we were friends and by summer I was part of the family. The dog and I have even come to an uneasy truce. I continue to catch and eat mice in the barn — they rarely get away. And the man still gives me sweet milk occasionally and sometimes tuna fish.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m still suspicious of most people, but sometimes on warm days when he is resting on the porch, I curl up in my person’s lap and take a nap on his soft blue stomach and dream of my mother and my squirming brothers and sisters curled up together on our tattered blanket.
THE END