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August 4, 2024
by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Pubisher
Seven days ago (July 14), on a Sunday morning, when the last load of my possessions was all packed into or tied up onto the top of my VW Crossfox, I put my cat, Fellini, inside a milk crate, its bottom padded by a folded sheet, put a board over the crate, wedged it into the back seat of the car, put a box on top of the board, and drove away from my home of 12 years.
My daughter and my friend Veronica, both told me that cats can be weird about moving. Both advised me to keep Fellini locked in a room for a few days until he learned that this was his new home. I followed their advice, more or less. A very free soul, completely at odds with confinement, on the second day, I let him explore the house. A bold animal, he did so, downstairs and up, returning the sonorous welcome my housemate's two cats gave him, but otherwise ignoring them.
In the process of this exploration, repeated several times, punctuated by retreats to his lair in the bedroom closet, Fellini noted the cat door built into the house's front door. However, he was wary of the large white German Shepherd, a good-natured lug, on the other side of that portal. The dog doesn't give a hoot about cats. He spends virtually all his time on the large front patio, usually waiting for me to throw his ball. Late at night or when it rains hard, through a doggie door, he comes into my office, a room separate from the rest of the house, where he has a bed.
On our third day in the new house, after locking the big white dog in my office, I twice took Fellini out to explore the yard. Both times, at my urging, he walked around, but only gingerly and briefly. On the second outing he looked up, studying a tree that gives the other cats egress, first to the neighbor's roof and then, via another tree, down to the street. On the morning of our fourth day, he was gone.
Epigenetics shows that the experiences of our recent ancestors color our perception. The offspring of the mouse who learns to run the maze, themselves learn to run the maze more quickly. If your grandparents went through a famine, then your body holds onto calories more greedily. Everything is a lot more complicated than Materialists or Darwinists would have it.
Fellini never was a house cat. A feisty little savage, he has the nervous system of a Mexican street cat. For him the house was a place to get out of the rain, the cold or the heat. He came and went as he pleased, many times a day (and always after dinner) through a "cat door," a hole in the wall opening onto the patio garden at the old house.
He is an acrobat. Without effort or pause he would climb to the roof of my neighbor's three-storey house, using only the bars over their windows, a ledge or two and a waterspout to make his ascent. So, our patio wall, the route to or from the outside world, was no obstacle for him.
Fellini's outside world, at our old house, chiefly consisted of our little dead end: neighbor's rooftops and yards and especially the empty lot next door on. It also included other places to which his wall-walking took him. The tops of those walls between properties, all interconnected on that broad block behind the church of San Antonio, are, quite literally, a cat highway.
Our third evening here, the night he escaped, after dinner, Fellini cried, quite piteously, wanting to go out. Standing on the ledge below the rear bedroom window, stretching himself up tall so that he could just look out the window (ignoring the more comfortable tabletop perch I had arranged for him), he begged, longing for that great expanse of outdoors behind our new house.
A long way from our former urban dead end, he was one pane of glass away from a hunter's paradise, the countryside like he had never imagined, filled with very edible little birds and mice.
A cat door out through the back wall would have been perfect, but I hadn't been resident long enough to start knocking holes in walls or cutting window screens. I comforted myself, listening to his captive pleadings for freedom, with the thought that in a day or two more he would follow the other cats over the front wall. But I underestimated the call of the wild.
In my own defense, the bedroom door was closed when I went to bed, but the other two cats must have pushed it open, and he escaped.
Fellini was (and, we hope, somewhere still is) a wildcat. Domestic charms: cans of tuna, a soft, warm place to sleep and human caresses, could not compete with his hunter's instincts. We comfort ourselves that we have tamed or bridled nature, but we can't stand in its way.
When I told her, Veronica, whose cat he had originally been nine years ago, worried that he was trying to make his way across town, back to the old house; a horrible journey.
But, my romantic version, of a cat returning to the wilds, seems to have proven correct. My housemate, walking the white Shepherd, this morning saw Fellini in the empty lot, one door down, a lot that communicates with the wilderness behind the house. (Why my housemate didn't immediately come back and tell me about his sighting is another question.)
I've taken to going out: rattling a yogurt container loosely filled with kibble (which always worked before), calling his name and making kissing noises, a can of tuna ready in my back pocket. Periodically I make the same noises out my back window, but all to no avail.
In his outdoor mode, even in tame colonia San Antonio, he was terrifically independent, regularly scampering away from me, as if I were a threat. And, it may very well be that now, after holding him captive in this bedroom, I have given him a reason, as I never did before, to avoid me.
With all this rain, Fellini has had plenty to drink. (There is water, a creek and a dammed pool out across the field by the abandoned hacienda, but I will leave out some in a container.) Even with all this rain, I bet he's found himself a dry place to sleep. Then, as my housemate correctly pointed out, if he knew how to get out, then he knows how to get back in.
The happiest ending would be, one morning when I open my bedroom door, to find him returned, curled up on a kitchen chair, like the two other, more domesticated, cats... soon.
