The wife and I took off after dinner tonight to meet up with some friends for a pint. Before we left we let our oldest cat out. We never wanted an indoor/outdoor cat, she just insisted on it, and she’d never gotten hurt while outside, so we became OK with it.
Coming home tonight we see a black and white cat flat out dead in the middle of the road in front of our house. “That’s not my cat, that’s not my cat!” is the first thing the wife says upon seeing it. We park the car, I get a flashlight from the house, and head back into the road. Black on top, white on bottom. Sorta looks like our cat. Hard to tell with the head not being properly shaped. No heart beat. Is that brain in the ear I see? It’s warm. I’m not a doctor or anything but I’m quite certain she’s dead.
I pick her up, flashlight on her, trying to figure out if this is our cat or not. It’s not that I don’t know our cats, it’s just that I’ve never seen one under an LED flashlight in the dark. It’s not how we interact. Plus the cat in question abhors human contact. While walking back to the house I hear the wife shriek a bit. “Oh God, this must be Bogey” I’m thinking. She KNOWS her cat is dead now and isn’t liking it.
I get closer and the wife didn’t shriek because I picked up the cat. It’s because Bogey came running up to her and did her little “me-me-me?!” chirp.
Our cat was fine. The one in my hand wasn’t. I asked for a 2nd opinion on the “dead” thing and the wife confirmed it. It was pretty obvious but I wanted to make sure.
The wife held the light as I dug the hole out near our shed. As we thought about it we realized this is the 3rd cat we’ve seen on our road that was of the same coloring in the last 2 months. Probably barn cats, not exactly pets but not really feral either. I took a bit of comfort in knowing that it was highly unlikely that a child wouldn’t be missing the critter come morning.
Still, it was pretty sad.
