Return of the Cheshire Cat? (a short story)

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Note: There’s a postscript at the bottom about the real cat.]

Chainsaw in hand, he eyed the fallen tree and wondered if he should tackle it first, or the one next to it that was leaning but had not yet toppled. Another storm, another downed tree. The joy of owning a wooded property.
    Placing the chainsaw on a large fallen limb, he was startled by a strange swooshing sound and spun toward it. There she stood, Cali the calico cat, matriarch of his backyard woodland for nearly 20 years. She had ruled with an iron paw, casting an uncanny organizational calm over the misfit band of feral cats who shared her realm. She had been missing for two years and he had accepted she must have died, because he had spent days searching for her and never found a sign.

Cali the calico: at 17 years of age and the
same nine pounds she has weighed
the past 15 years, and still the ruler
of all the feral cats in her domain

    Her sudden appearance shocked him. “Cali, is that you? Where have you been?”
    “Of course it’s me. What other calico cat could be as pretty as me? I did a walkabout, just came back to check on you.”
    He stared, speechless. “You can talk? How is that possible?”
    “I’ve always been smart. And amazing, of course. You know that.”
    “Yes, but talking? Cats can’t talk.”
    “Sure we can. It just takes us six lives to learn this complicated damn American alleged English language you people use. I was only on my fifth life when I lived here. It would be so much easier if everyone would just use Latin.”
    “Oh come on, you can speak Latin?”
    “Libera nos a parvis mentibus.”
    The man squinted at the cat. “I didn’t take Latin in high school. Go ahead, tell me what it means.”
    “Save us from small minds.”
    “Really?”
    “So, what foreign language did you take in high school?”
    “French.”
    “Well, that was a waste of time, now, wasn’t it?”
    Realizing he was losing a game of matching wits with a cat, the man went on the offensive. “Walkabout. Australians use that term.”

“Yes, I was in Australia”

    “Very good. Yes, I was in Australia.”
    “How on earth did you get from here to Australia?”
    “Remember that half-eaten squirrel you found? Well, I ate the rest of it. And there was something wrong with it, and I got sick. I felt like I was about to die and I was thinking about Dingo the dog when he got sick, and next thing I know, zap, life number five is shot and I’m in Australia.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “Seriously, that’s how it works. If you think you’re about to die, be careful what you think about next. Apparently, some genius somewhere in the cosmos translated my thinking about Dingo the dog into wanting to go to Australia to see real dingoes, and there I was.”
    “So, how did you get back here?”
    “Well, I was on my walkabout, and I encountered a pack of wild dingoes. As I was running for a tree I thought, ‘I haven’t run this fast since I was chasing that fat front porch cat out of my backyard,’ and zap, life number six was gone, and here I am, back in my backyard. Dingoes are damn fast compared to the coyotes around here, did you know that?”
    “Are you telling me cats really do have nine lives?”
    “Let’s hope it’s more than that. All I know is we definitely have at least six. You humans got screwed, you only get five.”
    “Five? People don’t have five lives.”
    “Of course they do. It takes three lives for most people just to survive their teen years. If people only had one life, the human race would be extinct, no one would make it past puberty.”

“What? That's crazy”

    “What? That’s crazy.”
    “When you were a kid, you jumped off the roof of your house with an umbrella, after you went to that Mary Poppins movie with your parents. You don’t think that cost you a life?”
    “I don’t remember doing that. How could you possibly know about it?”
    “Your father told Mrs. Densmore, the woman who owned that big chicken farm he ran. Her daughter moved to Texas with her husband and took the calico cat your mother gave her.”
    “Wait a minute. That calico cat. Was that my calico cat, the one my parents told me ran away?”
    “Maybe. Who knows? Anyway…their cat had kittens and told all of them about the great place she used to live at in Virginia. And I wound up with one of the kittens. And when I crashed, it all somehow connected, and that’s how I wound up here the first time.”
    The man stared at the cat, barely able to even manage a blink.
    “So, you had a calico cat when you lived here as a kid, but it ran away. Or something. Then I showed up and that way you had another one at the same house as an adult. So it worked out.”
    “This gives me a headache,” the man said, rubbing his eyes. “Wait a minute, what do you mean you crashed? You’re a cat, how did you crash?”
    “Did you ever notice how good I was at catching birds?”
    “Yes, you were phenomenal. I sometimes worried you were going to kill every bird in our little wildlife sanctuary. But what does that have to do with a crash?”

“I was a test pilot”

    “I was a test pilot. Chuck Yeager and I were pals. So, I learned about vectors and angles of lift and all that. That’s why I was so good at catching birds.”
    The man didn’t even want to ask the question, but he knew he had to.
    “You were a human test pilot? And you became a calico cat living in my backyard? That’s somehow possible?”
    “Sure. Chuck and all of us lived like crazy cowboys back then, pretty much did what we wanted, the way we wanted, when we wanted. On easy days, those ‘nothing could go wrong’ days, I took my cat up in the plane with me. Had a little flight suit and leather helmet for her. She loved it.”
    The man felt his head swelling. He just stared.
    “Anyway, I was on an easy dive, one of those ‘nothing ever goes wrong’ dives, and the left elevator jammed, and the plane spun like a drill as it headed down. Nothing I could do, and I started thinking, ‘Oh no, sorry about that, cat. At least it was fun while it lasted.’ Next thing I know, as I’m about to hit a patch of rock hard desert, I see grass with a little creek flowing through it. And zap! I’m living in your backyard. Like I said, if you think you’re about to die, be careful what you think about.
    “By the way, you could have tried harder on the name, you know? Cali, for a calico cat, not much of an effort. I always hoped you would call me Top Gun.”
    “Sorry about that. Next time I will try harder. But how did you go from human pilot to calico cat. That just can’t be possible.”
    The calico gave him its usual dismissive, yet at the same time judgmental, look. “When you get your chance, ask the cosmos. I’ve been asking for years, no answer yet.”
    The man could barely speak. “I think my brain is melting.”
    “It’s probably going to feel that way for a while. That was a hell of a whack that limb gave you.”
    “What? What limb?”
    “You’ll figure it out. You really need to be more careful, you know; you have only two lives left.”
    “Only two lives left? What? Two?”

The man woke to a cat licking his face

    The man woke to a cat licking his face. “What the hell?” he muttered. Pushing it away and opening his eyes, he squinted into a bright blue sky and a brilliant beam of sunlight. He realized he was lying on his back, and felt like his brain might explode. At first he feared he was paralyzed, but discovered it was just the weight of a tree limb across his chest.
    Squirming out from under the limb, he rolled onto his stomach and finally managed to get on his hands and knees. Looking around, he saw no sign of a cat. Eventually he staggered into the house, flipped on the bathroom light, and stared into the mirror.
    A stain of blood covered much of his forehead, and a gash at his hairline showed the point of impact.
    “Well, I guess this is concussion number seven,” he grunted. “At least I’m used to them. But what a bizarre dream. I need to make some notes on that. It’s always crazy what the brain comes up with when it takes a hit, but that was really crazy.”
    Washing off the blood, he was pondering how to hide the cut and the bruise before his wife came home, when he noticed something caught under the chest-pocket button of his lucky tree-cutting shirt. Plucking it from the shirt and holding it to the light, he could clearly see the brown and white and yellow fibers of a tuft of fur from a calico cat.
_______________
Postscript: I started writing this story as a tribute to Cali when she disappeared a few months ago, after being a daily feature in my yard for 15 years. I looked everywhere I could for her, and feared she had been killed and eaten by a raccoon or coyote, when she showed up one day acting as if she had never left. That was the same day I was knocked down by a stout limb; thus, the story.
    Her age is just an estimate: she could be 17 – or 27 – for all we know. She showed up here 15 years ago as a youngish adult with feral kittens, and quickly showed her mettle by fighting off two raccoons that were trying to attack her kittens where she had hidden them in a brush pile. Since then she has survived attacks by a neighbor’s K9 trained Malinois, a great horned owl, and a coyote. To say nothing of countless battles with other feral cats trying to dethrone her.

Cali asleep on her favorite log,
from which she has on many
occasions snatched birds out
of the air as they fly along
the creek bed

    Great horned owls are lethal cat killers, so that escape was miraculous. I happened to be outside with a powerful flashlight when the owl swooped at her. Cali ducked the attack, but instead of fleeing as most cats would, she went on the attack and plucked quite a few owl feathers during the battle. I was finally able to get between the two and give the owl a chance to take flight. Until then, every time the owl tried to fly, Cali attacked its back. I have to wonder who would have won the fight if I hadn’t been there. I also wonder if the beam of my light affected the owl's usually infallible night vision enough to make it barely miss its mark.
    I plan to stock bobwhite (quail) here, a bird of my youth that disappeared around here four decades ago. We tried a small stocking three years ago, but Cali got fat killing and eating all of them. In a way, she’s a nuisance, but she’s been here so long I don’t have the heart to trap and remove her. I don’t think she could stand living indoors, and at her age, animal control would euthanize her rather than try to find her a home anyway. So, she rules the place, and we’re all her subjects, until her time inevitably comes – unless our time comes first. Based on her luck – and reflexes – to date, that could play out either way.
    A Ring video of Cali chasing a rat: 17 years old and still the ruler of what we’ve always called her realm of “the quick and the dead”:

    Another Ring video, this one of Cali resting by her pond when she was stalked by a raccoon twice her size. It retreated quickly after she had her famous “mess with me and I will rip your lungs out” chat with it:

Copyright © 2022 by Paul Clark