Life On The Outside

After he loses his master he has to find a new place to live.

     The smallish black cat lays on top of the dark manhole cover warming his body on the forest green metal that has absorbed some of the winter sun’s rays. He once thought he wanted to be inside the house but he slipped in there one time when the lady wasn’t looking, she didn’t notice he was on her heels, when she opened the door and was greeted with extreme hostility from the cats and dogs that already lived in the house.

     He tried hiding in the entryway between the kitchen and the bedroom behind the door with a small hole in the bottom just the right size for a cat to go through. He got to lay there in the warm air coming from the wall for a couple of hours before the male cat who lived in the house noticed he was there and started growling and howling from the other side of the door.

     Eventually the dogs came over to see what the cat was having such a fit about and started to whine at him. This brought the lady of the house over to see what the problem was and she discovered the small fluffy black cat with light brown fringe huddling behind the door and she gently shooed him outside to obtain peace in the house again. He had been hiding out at her little farm for several years. She wanted him to leave, and had tried to get him to by not feeding him. She had been told by a neighbor that he belonged to another neighbor who lived on the other side but this kitty wasn’t going to go home.

     His owner had gotten in a bad car wreck three years earlier and was gone for a long time and so he had to start finding his own food. At first he started out by sneaking over to the neighbor who fed his cats outside of the house on the porch where he could steal some of the food when the cats were elsewhere. Unfortunately the man also had two dogs, they were not kept in a fence like the lady whose place he moved on to, and they would chase him and threaten to bite him until he climbed up high. That was when he ventured on to the place off the road which had a barn and a nice field to hunt mice in and he became a very good hunter. He rarely went hungry.

     After two years of hoping the little cat would leave the lady felt sorry for him, even though he didn’t ever seem to be skinny, and after a big snow one winter she started feeding him food outside the house in a small bowl. That was when he started living under her front porch so he could hear whenever she came to the door. He always greeted her and then ate half of the food she gave him and saved the rest for later in the day. If she left in the car he would save some for when she got home so he could be eating it when she came back in the house. She would stroke his fur when she walked by him eating and that felt good. After two years of being on his own he finally had place to sleep and eat again. He tried to go home once to his first house but the man no longer came outside and fed him anymore so he went back to his new place. At least he felt safe and loved in a way. It was better than it had been before he came to live outside her house.