It’s 10:00 p.m. The cat’s outside in the darkness, solstice-mad, and I want to take a bath.
My wife is asleep. If I climb into the bathtub before retrieving the cat—assuming I could—she’ll wake up just as I’m about to experience another life-changing revelation the way I do, and call out asking if Callie is in. I won’t be able to hear exactly what she says, although any idiot could figure it out and I just did, so I’ll yell back and say, “WHAT??” and there goes my epiphany. One wants an uninterrupted soaking, obviously, so out I go, into the breezy dark strangeness of a sagebrush- and cactus-covered hillside on the second night of summer in the terrible high desert…
It’s actually too cold to be outside in shorts and T-shirt—summer in the Rockies—but that means the cat might show some sense. Amazingly, I spot her in the back yard with my flashlight: “Gooooood kitty…” I lie softly, creeping slowly toward her, and she promptly bolts. At this rate, I’ll still be smelly in the morning.
10:35 p.m. – I grab the spotlight this time and walk around the house. A surprisingly cold wind stirs the chamisa and the waist-high grass on the dark side of the old adobe. The battered umbrella on the WalMart patio table flaps a little in the gusts. Lightning, that’s what we need! A good crack of thunder would send the animal running for the open door, but I can see stars overhead. Too bad: this kind of agitation in the air just makes them wilder. I give up and head back into the house.
10:46 p.m. – My wife emerges from the bedroom: “Well, this is certainly ruining my night,” she announces.
“Hnnh,” I grunt quietly in acknowledgement. More would be unwise.
She takes a flashlight and goes back to the bedroom. I hear her push the balky screen door open. “I see her!” she calls back to me. “She’s over by the chipmunk table!” [A low decorative platform 18 inches off the ground I built out of old boards and cinder blocks. The cat sits there stalking chipmunks. We hardly ever have to give her any food.]
“I’ll walk around the front and try to chase her back this way,” I holler from the living room. No answer. I have my spotlight in my hand. “Okay, here I go!” I shout, because I want her to be there holding the back door open, in case this works. Reluctantly, because I know by now it isn’t going to work, I move to open the front door. My hand is on the knob.
“SHE’S IN!!!”
(Not because of any step I took, obviously.)
Millions of people must do things like this. The herding instinct is in the genes. Most of us don’t have domestic livestock, but we think we can grab a stupid cat in the middle of the night because we’re people. And didn’t great-uncle Herbert have a cow?
Well, then.
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Why can’t she just stay out all night? In the summer, our cat is nowhere to be found once its dark. She loves it. Of course, you may have cat eating critters there that we don’t have here in the city.
Well, that’s an interesting question. I suppose the answer is, “Because we’ve always done it that way,” and because the kitty sleeping on the bed with us is so damned cute. The main danger for cats where we live is coyotes, of course, which are numerous. Our neighbors, who let their cats come and go as they please, lose one every once in a while. I guess it just makes us feel better.