Pal
Some time in winter 1985 I saw from a second story deck off the back of my house, a large gray cat below in my back yard. The cat was stretched for maximum exposure in the meager mid-day sun, and in rolling away from encroaching shadows, revealed his gender and a right rear leg that ended half way down from his hip in a cross-section of raw flesh, splintery bone and tattered fur. Some noise from me made him look up in fright, and his struggle to right himself and hobble under the house next door told of the wounded in flight, maimed and aching, determined not to be wounded again. I thought he might like a meal. I went down stairs and put some cat food in a bowl in the back yard. I went back in the house to spy on the food and when I looked out the window the food was gone. This disappearance was managed with total silence and amazing brevity. I imagine that the instant I turned my back and walked away from the food, he was edging proportionally toward it, ever keeping a distance that would insure escape if things went awry. He must have inhaled it.
I continued this back yard feeding and at the end of several weeks I was able to watch this ragged characters' cautious approach to his now twice daily meals. He was disheveled and seedy. His wariness brought an air of comical mock criminality to his dining. He would approach his dish in a crouch while looking side to side as if a daring theft was in the works, but when he reached the dish he abandoned his cautiousness and methodically engulfed dinner for two. He would then revert to commando mode and steal back to his lair. It didn't take long for my presence to become associated with food, and the physical distance that he would tolerate between us at feeding time got smaller and smaller until one day I was able to reach toward him and, at maximum arms extension, touch his nose. In its own scale of things, as monumental an event as God touching Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He sniffed my finger and lost interest in favor of the food.
It was time to give this guy a name. I was drawn to something that was ironically opposite his threadbare appearance: Maurice, Marcel, Nigel, Rupert, Percy, Colin, Raoul, Montague? None were quite right. I finally decided that Pal was a fittingly wry name for my new friend. In sappy kids movies there was always the precocious mutt with a name like Lad or Rex . One syllable. A guileless agent of simple-minded virtue, slavishly devoted to a human master. Like Pal. Wasn't.
Pals' terrible wound healed slowly. It was an affliction of biblical dimensions. He could move around slowly, always taking a step and discovering with a lurch that there was nothing there to support him. It affected his ability to sit on his haunches Castile. He would pause, sit, and pitch to his right and catch himself. The simplest acts were skewed and arduous for him. My other cats gained access to the second floor deck where I first spied Pal on two steep and precarious catwalks. I built each catwalk out of long pieces of one-by-four, with small cleats running cross-ways every six inches or so, strong enough for a cat, but not tempting for a person. They deflected slightly as my cats trotted deftly up the forty five degree incline from the yard to the roof of a shed attached to the back of the first floor, and from that roof to the second floor deck. Pals eventual scaling of these inclines was harrowing to watch. He crept on his stomach, trying to minimize the asymmetry of his gait, and by the time he reached the middle of the catwalk it was oscillating steadily from someone of his bulk lurching for traction and balance. At the end of the perilous ascent Pal was rewarded with the multiple wonders of at least two kinds of cat food, sometimes including exotic table scraps, and a secure elevated perch for serious loafing. A hilarious look into the mechanics of Pals' world was provided by his reaction to my sudden appearance on the deck: he would flee to the small hole I had cut in the wall of the deck for access to the cat walk and step half in and half out of the deck. To Pal he was "gone" from the intruded upon space, in the open canyon of space between the deck and the yard, the interloper banished, when in fact his hind quarters were still protruding onto the deck. I never had the nerve to reach down and pull his tail.
Pal became a regular. He became robust. He was always deferential to the other cats, allowing them to eat first and giving ground if approached, and wary of me if I moved suddenly in his presence. In the spring and summer he would diminish slightly in size due to the thinning of his fur and the rigors of "Pal patrol", his sometimes two-week long hormone driven odysseys. Stealth was out for a three-legged cat of this size. Though walking was slow and clumsy he learned to run swiftly and with assurance on his three legs. His chest broadened and his hips narrowed in compensation for the missing leg, and when he was in full pursuit putting pretenders to rout, he seemed like a demonic Egyptian milking stool. His return from patrol would be heralded first by frantic scratching for traction to gain access to a hole at the top of the backyard fence, then an alarming thud as he belly flopped in the yard, then more grappling for traction up the catwalks and finally emergence on the deck, sometimes sporting a new notch chewed in his ear, sometimes something worse. He was amenable to human contact if the human brought food, or nearly as important, if the human scratched the areas of his head , shoulder and back that could not be scratched because of his missing leg. He became a squirming mass of crusty feline gratitude when unreachable itches were scratched. The remains of his missing leg would chug frantically to establish harmony with the splendor of his gratification. He seemed transformed one day when, after a particularly vigorous orgy of scratching he sat sated in the afternoon sun, front paws close together, chest out, head erect, territorial boundaries secure, all pretenders at bay, eyes blissfully closed. A wave of contentment and knowing seemed to pass over him. He attained a Boddisatvas' venerability, then lost his balance and lurched to his right.
Pal was around for about five years, an incredible tenure for a creature handicapped the way he was in his down and dirty world of feral competition. I have wondered about the skirmishes and the mysterious decorum of animal territorial and reproductive imperatives that seemed hard-wired into these creatures. I think of a scene I saw years ago where two male cats were engaged in a fight over what they fight over, facing each other, lunging, transformed into that yowling cartoon spherical dervish of legs and flying fur, coming to rest and engaging again. During one of their regrouping face-offs, one of the cats was possessed by a sudden itch, and he completely broke with the tense confrontation to chew on the flea, to deal with the itch high on his back, and his opponent waited for him, rather than exploit the lapse of attention as an opportunity to attack. High protocol, with each so resolute in his conviction that the other required an ass kicking. The fundamental truth of a being like Pal confronting his like-wired mirror image in the unquestioned equation of survival, his phantom leg irrelevant to what's in the heart and blood, humbles forces like self-conscious complexity and social judgment.
Pal experienced a rapid decline in the last few months of his life. He seemed to be moving with some pain. When I picked him up he groaned and finally he seemed uninterested in food. I didn't intervene in these events any more than I had in the rest of Pals' life. No neutering, no flea collar, no car rides to the vet. Our lives were parallel, occasionally tangent, but never intertwined. I gave him support in the form of food, scratching, and chicken soup when he was hurt. He gave me a crusty three legged microcosm of existence where pain, fear, sustenance, gratification and triumph came and went without anticipation or regret. On a sunny morning sometime in 1990, Pal sniffed his chicken soup, wasn't interested, hobbled painfully under the house next door and I never saw him again.
© 1994 Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
I continued this back yard feeding and at the end of several weeks I was able to watch this ragged characters' cautious approach to his now twice daily meals. He was disheveled and seedy. His wariness brought an air of comical mock criminality to his dining. He would approach his dish in a crouch while looking side to side as if a daring theft was in the works, but when he reached the dish he abandoned his cautiousness and methodically engulfed dinner for two. He would then revert to commando mode and steal back to his lair. It didn't take long for my presence to become associated with food, and the physical distance that he would tolerate between us at feeding time got smaller and smaller until one day I was able to reach toward him and, at maximum arms extension, touch his nose. In its own scale of things, as monumental an event as God touching Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He sniffed my finger and lost interest in favor of the food.
It was time to give this guy a name. I was drawn to something that was ironically opposite his threadbare appearance: Maurice, Marcel, Nigel, Rupert, Percy, Colin, Raoul, Montague? None were quite right. I finally decided that Pal was a fittingly wry name for my new friend. In sappy kids movies there was always the precocious mutt with a name like Lad or Rex . One syllable. A guileless agent of simple-minded virtue, slavishly devoted to a human master. Like Pal. Wasn't.
Pals' terrible wound healed slowly. It was an affliction of biblical dimensions. He could move around slowly, always taking a step and discovering with a lurch that there was nothing there to support him. It affected his ability to sit on his haunches Castile. He would pause, sit, and pitch to his right and catch himself. The simplest acts were skewed and arduous for him. My other cats gained access to the second floor deck where I first spied Pal on two steep and precarious catwalks. I built each catwalk out of long pieces of one-by-four, with small cleats running cross-ways every six inches or so, strong enough for a cat, but not tempting for a person. They deflected slightly as my cats trotted deftly up the forty five degree incline from the yard to the roof of a shed attached to the back of the first floor, and from that roof to the second floor deck. Pals eventual scaling of these inclines was harrowing to watch. He crept on his stomach, trying to minimize the asymmetry of his gait, and by the time he reached the middle of the catwalk it was oscillating steadily from someone of his bulk lurching for traction and balance. At the end of the perilous ascent Pal was rewarded with the multiple wonders of at least two kinds of cat food, sometimes including exotic table scraps, and a secure elevated perch for serious loafing. A hilarious look into the mechanics of Pals' world was provided by his reaction to my sudden appearance on the deck: he would flee to the small hole I had cut in the wall of the deck for access to the cat walk and step half in and half out of the deck. To Pal he was "gone" from the intruded upon space, in the open canyon of space between the deck and the yard, the interloper banished, when in fact his hind quarters were still protruding onto the deck. I never had the nerve to reach down and pull his tail.
Pal became a regular. He became robust. He was always deferential to the other cats, allowing them to eat first and giving ground if approached, and wary of me if I moved suddenly in his presence. In the spring and summer he would diminish slightly in size due to the thinning of his fur and the rigors of "Pal patrol", his sometimes two-week long hormone driven odysseys. Stealth was out for a three-legged cat of this size. Though walking was slow and clumsy he learned to run swiftly and with assurance on his three legs. His chest broadened and his hips narrowed in compensation for the missing leg, and when he was in full pursuit putting pretenders to rout, he seemed like a demonic Egyptian milking stool. His return from patrol would be heralded first by frantic scratching for traction to gain access to a hole at the top of the backyard fence, then an alarming thud as he belly flopped in the yard, then more grappling for traction up the catwalks and finally emergence on the deck, sometimes sporting a new notch chewed in his ear, sometimes something worse. He was amenable to human contact if the human brought food, or nearly as important, if the human scratched the areas of his head , shoulder and back that could not be scratched because of his missing leg. He became a squirming mass of crusty feline gratitude when unreachable itches were scratched. The remains of his missing leg would chug frantically to establish harmony with the splendor of his gratification. He seemed transformed one day when, after a particularly vigorous orgy of scratching he sat sated in the afternoon sun, front paws close together, chest out, head erect, territorial boundaries secure, all pretenders at bay, eyes blissfully closed. A wave of contentment and knowing seemed to pass over him. He attained a Boddisatvas' venerability, then lost his balance and lurched to his right.
Pal was around for about five years, an incredible tenure for a creature handicapped the way he was in his down and dirty world of feral competition. I have wondered about the skirmishes and the mysterious decorum of animal territorial and reproductive imperatives that seemed hard-wired into these creatures. I think of a scene I saw years ago where two male cats were engaged in a fight over what they fight over, facing each other, lunging, transformed into that yowling cartoon spherical dervish of legs and flying fur, coming to rest and engaging again. During one of their regrouping face-offs, one of the cats was possessed by a sudden itch, and he completely broke with the tense confrontation to chew on the flea, to deal with the itch high on his back, and his opponent waited for him, rather than exploit the lapse of attention as an opportunity to attack. High protocol, with each so resolute in his conviction that the other required an ass kicking. The fundamental truth of a being like Pal confronting his like-wired mirror image in the unquestioned equation of survival, his phantom leg irrelevant to what's in the heart and blood, humbles forces like self-conscious complexity and social judgment.
Pal experienced a rapid decline in the last few months of his life. He seemed to be moving with some pain. When I picked him up he groaned and finally he seemed uninterested in food. I didn't intervene in these events any more than I had in the rest of Pals' life. No neutering, no flea collar, no car rides to the vet. Our lives were parallel, occasionally tangent, but never intertwined. I gave him support in the form of food, scratching, and chicken soup when he was hurt. He gave me a crusty three legged microcosm of existence where pain, fear, sustenance, gratification and triumph came and went without anticipation or regret. On a sunny morning sometime in 1990, Pal sniffed his chicken soup, wasn't interested, hobbled painfully under the house next door and I never saw him again.
© 1994 Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.