A Cat's Tale

I am an animal and plant lover. Over the years I have lived in many places, but the one place that really stands out from the rest is in when I lived in Little Rock Arkansas. It was the mid 1970s when my former husband was accepted at the Arkansas School for the Deaf and Blind as a Media Specialist for the Handicapped. Those years spent in the south were quite an experience. We were from Massachusetts.

We managed to rent a house about 10 miles outside of the city that sat on an acre of land cut from the corner of a huge pasture of a large farm. The House was surrounded by a 4 foot high chain link fence that supposedly kept the cattle and horses out of the yard. Before we moved to this location, we had rented an apartment in a complex within the city limits. It was here that we adopted two adult cats from neighbors that were looking to find a home for them. One was a Himalayan brown point female we named Priscilla (the highly intelligent one) and the other was an all white yellow-eyed male named Streak. Now I am not one who is usually prejudiced about differences but Streak was the most stupid cat I ever had the pleasure of having as a part of my family. I will explain why.

Streak was about a year old when we took him in. He had a crushed-in pelvis that looked as if he had been hit when very young, and a huge knot at the base of his rump from which the tail emerged. It came out at a 90 degree angle from his body and ran straight for a bit until it angled another 90 degrees back toward the front from another knot. He was a sad sight to see. I guess that is why I fell in love with him. He was scrawny looking with short fur that covered his rather bony frame. But his purr would melt the heart. Priscilla was one of the smartest cat's I have know and she tried to teach Streak all about life. I guess he just had trouble getting it to sink in.

Back in the 1970s, many of the houses that were built in Little Rock had no foundations. The main joices were held up off the ground by cinder blocks at the four corners and centers of the outside walls. Between the cinder blocks the space was open, which led to freezing of the water pipes in winter. After the pipes broke several times and had to be repaired at our expense, we decided to place a small space heater close to them to prevent freezing on the coldest nights. It was not very large and the heating elements were covered by a wire grill. Streak would spend many nights outside because he loved the outdoors and only came in when time to eat.

Well, one morning I gazed out my huge picture window that faced the back yard and saw Streak run across the grass with his side smoldering and black stripes running along his side. It seems that he fell asleep against the space heater under the house and only awoke when his fur started to burn. I rushed outside and gathered him in my arms. The smoke had subsided and he was just frightened. Luckily, his fur was a bit scorched but the skin was not burned. It took months for the black fur to fall and off his color return to the normal white. I don't think he ever slept near the heater again!

On another occasion, we were walking out in the far part of the yard along the fence line that separated the bull and a few cows that the farmer was trying to mate. Well, if you think that only a red flag will make a bull charge, guess again. For some unfathomable reason, Streak, who had accompanied us during this walk, decided to check out the greener side of the fence and jumped to the other side. He walked along for a bit and then sat to groom a itch. The movement caught the bull's eye. We began calling Streak as we noticed the fore legs of the bull begin to scrape the ground with his head low and bent forward. Streak, on the other hand, completely ignored our warning calls and continued to play with the grass as it waved about in the breeze, pouncing here and there. The bull charged, we yelled and Streak flew into the air as he noticed the oncoming animal. He jumped straight up about four feet, did a 180 degree turn in mid air and flew back over the fence, landing about three feet from us. He never stopped running until he was inside, flew under the bed and did not come out until dinner! I don't think he ever went over the fence again.

Priscilla had come with us on this occasion and just watched the whole affair with head shaking. She saw the bull right away and remained very quiet as it gazed in our direction. She had seen Streak go over the fence and just watched as he was almost stampeded buy a huge bull. After he ran to the house, she looked at us, sighed and walked back along the fence. We had begun to make a hasty retreat from the area when the bull charged, and luckily that 4 foot fence was deterrent enough to stop the bull dead. We never entered that back area again when the bull was out in that pasture!