It’s been 13 days since I last saw her. Our semi-feral cat, with us five years, was estimated to be 17 or 18 years old. A respectable age to bow out. Since February 2019 when I brought her home, there was not a single day without her showing up several times a day to be fed primarily and to be petted. I went to all of her hiding spots but haven’t found her. My neighbour said some cats disappear when their time has come to die. It’s hard not to know but it is a lot harder to find one’s lifeless cat.
Here is the story of how she came into our life, along with selected pictures I took since then. She was a beauty. Not very friendly, but not obnoxious. Her meows were horrible and I called her “gracious” as a joke, but when you got her to purr, everything was forgotten and forgiven.
There she was on a fine chilly early February day in 2019. I had met her the previous week at the house of my ex’s grandfather who had passed away at a very old age and whose house was being cleared out.
He had not really adopted that cat. Rather, the cat had elected at some point to hang out around his house and chosen to be taken care of there. They thought the cat to be male and had named him Minou. But with this amount of colours in the fur, it was a female cat.
I called her Jack due to the black patch around her eye, her left front elbow once broken that had solidified into a perpetual hook and made her limp, and her calico fur, which reminded me of the pirate name Calico Jack.
I found her rather friendly for a cat that lived in the wild. In the wild but-close-to-humans! I don’t know much about her life. I know how she was injured though. A drunkard then related to the family by marriage once shot lead bullets at the cat and hit her at the elbow. Yeah, appalling. I suppose she escaped to the nearby woods for a while to heal.
I drove her home. Probably the second worst time of her life after being shot at! The 25-minute drive on the highway made her miserable and made me feel horribly helpless. She probably had never been on the road in a car before. She cried all the time and in the last 5 minutes of the trip she had an unfortunate diarrhea incident, true to the idiom “scared shitless”.
Jack spent the next several days hiding in the toilets. behind or next to the porcelain seat. Very occasionally she would accept to be coaxed (with food, mostly) outside but only in the corridor adjacent to the loo and only by me and only if I was crouched or kneeling. Please enjoy these few seconds of petting as I and her did then. The taming lasted days and weeks. My dad or my then 11 year old boy approaching would send her into hiding.
By the end of her first week with us she relocated from the toilet room to the adjacent kitchen. She occupied the visible space between the rubbish bin and the cabinets, which was like her at a balcony. Or the nook behind connected to the cabinet at the left, where she hid most of the time for another week. She was extremely quiet then. She had not graced us of her horrible wailing and anguished or demanding meows yet.
By the end of the second week, she moved from the nook to the kitchen stools. Lunch and dinner were her favourite times of the day. She was so food-driven that feeding her was the only way for us to connect with her. And she would eat anything apparently. Even cake, even potatoes, even pasta. We had to be careful that she would not try to eat our fingers, thinking the pink round appendages were part of the offerings!
At this point she started to show a wee bit less fear of the other humans in the house. And since she had not visited the house beyond the entrance hallway and the kitchen, she had yet to meet the dog! And the other cat knew better than to get close to the strange pheromones that Jack probably emitted.
By the third week she ventured out of the kitchen, into the living room. I used to work from the living room then. I would either sit on the armchair at the corner of the room, or the couch. She liked the latter best because she could then sit next to me on the other side of the couch. And I would pet her every now and then.
Fast forward to the end of the third week. Jack knew there were other animals. I’ve got to say that neither Gizmo the yellow Labrador nor Jedi the female rescue tabby cat were bullies to Jack. They looked at her with curiosity and from a distance.
At the beginning of the fourth week at home, it was time for Jack to be let out to explore the garden and the surroundings of the house: the meadow, the woods, the neighbours’ gardens. It’s always a milestone when adopting a cat: either the cat comes back or doesn’t and then it’s the end. She came back. Yay!
A month and a half after we adopted her, Jack was comfortable to be on my son’s lap and Adrien, who was then 11 years old was delighted that she liked him enough to bestow her entire slim lightweight self on his warm gamer lap.
November 2019. A well-brushed pretty trophy cat poses on my bed while looking at me. I remember that she would stay in the house the first half of the nights and would below to be let out between 2am and 4am. Every night. My dad‘s room became her night spot. He did not mind getting up to let her out. Good man. After a couple years, though she hardly ever stepped into the house. Probably after we adopted a male adult Siberian Cat, Mickey-Raccoon.
September 2020. Another perfect cat pose. She always stayed nearby, as far as I know (and I work from home, so I’m around to notice). Either in or out the garden at various spots. Starting in 2022, she was regularly found in my neighbour’s garden, in particular around the times of her meals on her terrace 🙂
Late May 2022. Occupying the step leading to the end of the garden in the front of the house, enjoying the heat of the spring sun, looking cute.
Late August 2024. One of the last pictures I took of her, because she was with our other animals, looking like she was the tired leader of a lazy posse! She was the feared old animal clan matriarch, which that photo hints at. Farewell, Gracious. You had a good life and you made your mark in ours.
