Of treed cats and masked killers
I heard the noise for the first time while I was outside weeding in the flowerbed. It sounded like a meow, but no matter where I walked around my house, I couldn’t pinpoint its location. I wasn’t sure it was even a cat, so I went back to work. Then, after talking to my sister, we decided it could have been a mockingbird, whose cry can sound like a meow. I promptly forgot about it until dark.
When I went to call my cats inside for bed, only one came. My 6-year-old orange male, Simon, was MIA. But then I heard the meowing sound again. I walked to the top of my sidewalk, and it got louder. I stepped off the sidewalk into the grass, noticing how damp the grass was to my sock-feet, and kept walking toward the now-insistent meowing.
As it got louder, I quickened my steps, sure now that it was a cat. The sound led me to the property line between mine and my neighbor’s fields. I stepped across the border and continued toward the meowing.
Briars and thorns scratched at my feet and ankles, but I kept going. Finally, the sound was right in front of me and I looked up – way up – into a tree and saw the outline of a cat in the dim light. Insistent meowing now. I looked at the cat and called for it to come down.
I noticed that the cat seemed to have a bushy tail. My Simon is a short-haired cat, so that seemed odd. Then it dawned on me that Simon doesn’t meow.
Suddenly, I was stricken by the thought that I was the stereotypical girl from the horror movies. I was in the middle of the woods, on the neighbor’s property, in my sock feet, in the middle of the night, peering up at what may or may not be my cat. And then I knew: I was mere seconds from being slashed to death by a man in a crazy mask. Irrational fear took hold, and I sprinted back to my house.
I locked all the doors and first-floor windows and tried to calm my pounding heart. Then, to be on the safe side, I walked through each room with a baseball bat in one hand and a can of wasp spray in the other. Finally satisfied that I wasn’t going to be killed, I went to bed, assuming that the cat would be gone by morning.
At 1 a.m., I was awakened by the sound of a howling coyote. It sounded as though it was right outside my back door. I did the only intelligent thing that a person who so recently avoided death could do. I covered my head with a blanket and prayed for dawn. It finally came, and I had survived.
I did walk back up to the tree where the cat still remained and, to my surprise, it was Simon. Apparently, he is CAPABLE of meowing, he just chooses not to. I left him there, assuming he would come down when he was ready.
Tune in next week to find out how wrong I was about that.
Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.