Safe haven for all God's creatures

Safe haven for all God’s creatures

Knowing how we in this part of the country are all partial to keeping animals—horses, dogs, cats, mice, etc. I thought I would tell you the story of our one and only cat. We were able to keep that cat for about a day and a half.

Needless to say, we have plenty of mice out here in the hinterlands, and we needed a cat—or better mousetraps. Unfortunately our dog Steve was pretty sure that we didn’t need a cat. Actually he was pretty sure we didn’t need any animals on the place except for him. He kept the deer, the wild turkeys and the neighbors at bay whenever they passed too close to what he considered the boundaries of our, or maybe his, domain.

In spite of Steve’s antipathy toward extraneous animals (except of course for mice), when an estranged neighbor offered to give us an offspring of her mama cat which was an excellent mouser, it took only a small bribe to get us to take the little thing.

I must further explain that we happily negotiated on the amount of the bribe because we had just spent a rugged couple of weeks characterized by elevated mouse-in-the-house sightings with me passing a good part of that time standing on a chair. Where was Steve when mice were prowling around the perimeter?

Steve also neglected to keep the other natural rodent predators, besides cats, out of the house. Yes, I could be found standing on the dining table when a pretentious snake came inside, ostensibly looking for dinner. (He probably thought he had found the sushi bar.) That is another story, but we came down considerably from our asking price when I came down from the table.

True to form, Steve didn’t take to the cat. One or the other of them had to be penned up, and Steve knew he had seniority. Whenever we tried to encourage the two natural enemies to be friends, somebody got scratched or bit. Usually me. The cat soon learned to stay away from the dog. At least she could run inside the proverbial mouse hole when Steve happened to notice her.

We didn’t see her much that Saturday. She came down from a tree or from under the car when she got hungry.

The next day being Sunday with church on the docket, no one paid much attention to either the cat or the dog. Everyone was too busy finding his shoes or ironing his clothes to worry about a couple of animals that were outside and therefore out of mind.

When Mr. B. said the car was leaving, with or without all of us, we piled in and off we went down the canyon to the church, 15 miles away.
As usual, we arrived at the church with negative three minutes to spare so we hustled inside. Back at home after church, someone, namely me, wondered where the cat had gone. No one had seen her all day. We called her and coaxed her. We shut Steve in his doghouse to see whether that would precipitate her appearance, but she had seemingly vanished.

We got the family together and held a conference. Where was the last place the cat had been seen? And the last time?
“The last time I saw her, she was jumping down from on top of the spare tire under the car.--“

“Is that where she was hiding when she went under the car? Someone see if that’s where she is now.”

No cat.

Youngest child: “I saw a cat that looked like her down at the church.”

“What?”

Child two: “So did I. ”

Ding-a ling-a-ling.

“Why didn’t you say so? Where at the church?”

“She was running fast toward the field next to the parking lot. Oh-oh.”
---We went back to try to find her, but no cat. I just hope the neighbor who gave her to us didn’t find her there.