Seven Lives Left

We do not have child safety gear on our windows. It's not that we don't know that kids fall through them, it's that our kid is not tall enough, mobile enough, or unsupervised enough to have dealt with it yet. Our cats, however, are like toddlers who can jump and yet get left to their own devices all day.

This morning we couldn't find Moki anywhere. Moki is not a subtle roommate. He's a very big, galumphing, doofball of a tiger kitty who follows me around and plays with Lyra all day. Moki wasn't anywhere. Finally I dared yell "Are the screens intact??!" No. I went running into the backyard in a flash of adrenaline. I saw no sign of him. Suddenly there was a yowling.

I'd heard this yowl only one time before. Moki slipped past me once and I closed the front door without knowing it and he was faced with OUTSIDE. He backed into the stoop and yowled in terror until I heard him and opened the door.

This morning he was crouched against the corner of our house behind our grill, about five feet from where he must have landed. Once back inside he was strutting about, eating, drinking, pawing at things he's not allowed to have, letting Lyra clumsily pet him, staring at the backyard through the door, trying to catch a fly in the house, and busting open the bathroom door to use his litter box upstairs. He fell a story and a half and was fine.

Over breakfast we realized that both of us had noticed our other cat, Luna, in the window Moki fell from both times we'd passed by looking for Moki. Was she sitting there looking down at him sticking her tongue out? Was he down there telling her to just jump, it's not so bad?

We ticked one of the nine allotted lives off both cats for whatever they survived between before and during the shelter where we got them at three months old. Moki fell at least fifteen feet and landed on small rocks. He's lost another life. It's also worth wondering if besides being able to deliver my kayaking boots up four stories of stairs, play in the shower, play happily with a human baby, open latches, and other funny tricks...he can fly?

Don't try this at home. I think he and we got very, very, very lucky.