Bobcats in Outer Space
We used to have two cats. Both my husband and I had cats as kids, but Louie was our first pet together. We adopted him from a shelter out of the Union Square PetCo about two years before our daughter was born. He was a great cat: loved to cuddle, loved to play, and was very patient when the baby became a toddler and realized how soft he was.
We left New York when our lease was up at the end of the July before last, and while we were between homes we stayed with my family for a while. When the time came for us to make our move to Raleigh, we decided to leave Louie with my parents. They had lost their own cat a year earlier, and they were ready for a new furry friend. My dad especially missed having a kitty around, I think, and he loved Louie. So we packed up the truck, and Louie stayed behind to become my dad's new BFF.
They got along swimmingly. Whenever my dad did yard work, Louie would follow him around like a puppy. Every night when my dad settled into his chair for some Jeopardy with a side ice cream, Louie would hop right into his lap, eager for some snuggles and the chance to lick the bowl.
Louie was also a very skilled hunter. My dad had been doing battle with various rodents in his garden for a long time, and Louie was just the ally he needed. Louie made quick work of the moles, mice, and chipmunks. He loved the hunt, especially since up to that point the closest he'd gotten to making a kill was chirping at the pigeons on the fire escape outside the window of our New York apartment. But now Louie was an outdoor cat, and he could feast on beasts and bugs to his heart's content.
One night, Louie went out for his usual last look around the woods before bed, but he didn't come home. This wasn't entirely unusual. While the weather was still warm enough, he would often spend the night outside under the woodshed or under cover of the hemlocks along the edge of the property. My dad thought nothing of it.When Louie hadn't returned for breakfast the following morning, my dad assumed he must have found a good meal in a chipmunk and was somewhere napping it off. But when Louie still hadn't come back at dinnertime, worry finally started to set in.
My dad walked out the to main road, praying he would not find that Louie had been hit by a car. There was no sign of him. On the walk back to the house, my dad stopped to talk to a neighbor and learned that their cat had also gone missing. In fact, they had lost no less than five cats in the last year (#redflag).
The next day, my aunt shared that she heard of a bobcat sighting in the area, remarking how unusual it was for bobcats to roam a neighborhood like that.
When Louie hadn't returned two weeks later - and the neighbors up the street confirmed that they the seen the bobcat in their very own yard - my dad finally accepted Louie's fate: the hunter had become the hunted.
This was tough news to break to our daughter. She always asked to see Louie when we FaceTimed with my parents, so she would want to know where he had gone. I debated whether to tell her at all, but recently we had been watching some nature shows as a family, so the topic of nature's cruelty had already been breached. I decided honesty was the best policy.
I explained to her that Louie had gone missing, and while we couldn't be certain, the odds were good that a bobcat had eaten him. We talked about how the bobcat wasn't trying to be mean, and didn't know that Louie was a beloved pet. Maybe it was a mama bobcat who needed to feed her hungry babies, just like those snakes on Planet Earth who ate that lizard.
We even brainstormed other possibilities for his disappearance.
"Maybe he lives in the woods now," she guessed.
I nodded. "Or maybe he found a new family to live with."
She thought for a minute. "Or maybe he went to the moon."
Several weeks later, she brought up the subject again while on our daily walk to get the mail.
"Why would a bobcat eat Louie?" she wanted to know.
I reminded her that bobcats get hungry just like we do, only they can't go to a grocery store to get their food. They have to find it themselves right where they live.
"Why aren't there grocery stores for bobcats?" she wondered. "There should be. There should be a whole bobcat city, far away from earth, so they can't eat cats."
I told her that was a pretty neat idea.
We picked up our mail and headed back to the house. "Hey, mommy!" she said to me, her eyes wide with excitement. "You should write a story about that. Write a story about a bobcat city on Neptune in outer space!"
"It's not a bad idea," I told her.
Maybe I will.