The Dog’s Cat
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
The ad on Craig’s List offers free kittens.
It’s one of those downy spring days with everything the softest shades of green and yellow under a pale blue sky. From the big woods behind my house emanates the baby powder smell that comes out of the ground when winter’s finally over.
A month earlier, before the leaves were on, I’d adopted a big, ba-rooo hound from an ad on the bulletin board in Anderson’s Market in Glen Arbor. His previous owner couldn’t keep him. The lady’s husband had had a stroke; she said she was afraid of the dog knocking him over.
She’d said the dog liked kittens.
The kitten will be a companion for the hound, I’m thinking, as I drive to an assignation point on M-37 near Grawn. The kitten woman had said it was going to be too hard for me to find her house because there were no house numbers where she lived, so I should meet her at the side of the road off M-37 where there was a house number. She described her car, a big, older model, maroon wagon.
It takes a little doing but finally we rendezvous in the horseshoe shaped driveway of a tin trailer with a mound of slab wood in front of it. She opens the boot of her car and takes out a box of kittens. At the exact same time a huge white dog starts barking ferociously at the loosely closed screen door of the trailer.
“That’s a big dog,” I say, trying to sound like I’m just making conversation.
“My boyfriend’s pit bull,” she says in a smoker’s husky voice with a hint of southern twang. “My EX-boyfriend, to tell the truth. He’s a piece of work, to tell the truth.”
“Hmmn,” I murmur sympathetically, but what I’m wondering is: the boyfriend, or the pit bull?
She is blonde, petite, and perhaps had been very beautiful but her sad, watery blue eyes tell a story of a hard life.
The dog’s barking becomes more insistent and I pick up a kitten and say, “This one’s great. Thanks so much.” I put the kitten in a carrier on the front seat, close my car door and roll down my window. “That’s great firewood. Do you know where it came from?”
“Lake Ann Hardwoods,” she says.
“I’ll give them a call,” I say. “Good information. Thanks for the kitten.”
Okay, I think. My face hasn’t been eaten by a pit bull and now I have a kitten, a miniscule ball of fluff that I suspect is much younger than six weeks.
Home in Leelanau County the downy fluffs of the poplar trees along the driveway float everywhere. It’s a downy day and my kitten is downy. She’s orange and brown and black, a tortoiseshell cat with white paws and a blaze of white on her chest and face. She’s all black around her eyes. She looks like a mime, or a geisha with heavily made-up eyes. Something in her walk and the way she moves, it’s as though she’s on geta shoes, those Japanese geisha platform sandals you can buy in the Tokyo airport. She’s a beautiful creature and she seems to know it.
She needs a bath and so I give her one. She loves the warm water. When she is all clean and dry and fluffy again, I slowly feed her some warm milk and introduce her to the hound, named before I got him, a hound-type name, “Blue.”
The hound, being a good dog, like in the Joan Baez song, “Oh, Blue, you good dog you,” makes no sudden moves. It isn’t long before the kitten has curled up next to him, enjoying his warmth; soon she’s sound asleep. Does she make him calmer? It seems so.
By the end of the first day, she has become Ono no Komachi, the famous ninth century Japanese courtesan and poet. Komachi had been the most beautiful woman in Japan, so the legend goes, and the best poet. She was described by one of her admirers as “a woman who was like a rose, if someone had never seen a rose.” She was a woman who could so mesmerize men with the subtlety of her words, her understanding of their every thought, and the profundity of her insights about them and the world that they felt they couldn’t live without her.
Blue becomes deeply attached to Komachi. He carries her in his mouth. He keeps her from going into the road. He lets her sleep with him. She likes to sleep between his hind legs, right in his crotch, which would seem to be uncomfortable for him. He looks uncomfortable. Still, he does forebear. Perhaps it is the warmest place for her. Perhaps he doesn’t want to disturb her.
Not long after Komachi’s arrival in my home, she becomes deathly ill. Perhaps she had been removed from her mother too soon and could not survive on cow’s milk and tuna. Animals can’t talk, as you’re well aware, so it’s hard to know what’s wrong. She lies so still, I surmise she’s dead. For three days she doesn’t eat or drink water. Blue sleeps next to the box where, as perhaps we both imagine, Komachi lies dying.
When Komachi is well again, Blue becomes more attached than ever. Blue begins to get better, too, more himself, more self-confident, less demanding. He patrols the property at night. There’s a soft June evening at about three in the morning when I hear a whole pack of coyotes in the woods around my house. They’re making the high-pitched scary sounds, like bagpipes only shrill, a sound that says, “We’re coming for you.”
Blue barks that night in a way I’ve never heard him bark before, and the coyotes stop their killing song and move to more likely venues. The next morning Blue is clearly proud, walking around, stiff-legged, with his head up. “I did it,” he seems to be saying. “I took care of those coyotes.”
I love all animals. All those years of traveling, in tough lonely places, I promised myself I would get a cat and a dog when I got home. In Turkey people love cats for their gracefulness and intelligence. They find them beautiful, like living art. In Romania, people love dogs for their sweet patience and loyalty, as if they were people. I agree with both views.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Arc of the Universe.
