Although my cat, Sage, is not as well traveled as the national headlines grabber, Tabitha, who was lost inside the cargo hold of a jet for a week, he has had some adventures of his own. Sage is a fifteen-year-old tabby male with intense green eyes that are underlined with perfect white stripes. He has a passion for table scraps, especially those that he can steal himself, and an aversion to the vacuum cleaner. Sage is nearing the end of a long, and at times exciting, life where he has progressed from a poor working class mouser to a Florida retiree.
Sage came to live with us from an affluent home in the Connecticut suburbs. He was the first born of a litter of three males. He spent his formative years in a series of vermin infested low-income studio apartments located in up-state New York with his college student owners. Sage worked hard for his living catching mice and leaving them proudly displayed beside our bed. Once Sage realized that we were not going to eat his offerings, but were in fact flushing them down the toilet, he decided to consume them himself, and leave only the tails beside our bed, as proof he was doing his job.
During these college years, sage's biggest hunting challenge came in the dark hours after midnight one fateful morning. I awoke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of fluttering overhead. I opened my eyes to see a bat circling the light fixture above my bed. I grabbed the sheet over my head, and frantically tried to wake my husband. Jeff is a sound sleeper. He opened one eye and murmured something about a big moth before sinking back into sleep. I kept the sheet over my head, peering up at the unwelcome visitor with one eye and wondering what to do next.
It was at this point that Sage spotted the bat. He leapt up upon the bed startling Jeff awake. Jeff said something like, "My God, Beth, it is a bat!" Sage launched himself up into the air futilely swiping at the bat. He jumped upon the dresser, the windowsill, the nightstand, circling the flying vermin as high as he could get above the floor. Frustration rose and Sage howled, hurtling himself higher and higher into the air, paws outstretched, claws glinting in the moonlight.
We had to stop the cat from waking all the neighbors, his howling rising along with the sound of his crashing into the walls and furniture in his mad attempts at levitation. Jeff and I huddled under the sheet and slowly backed out of the bedroom. We captured the cat and put him in the bathroom where he continued to shriek and claw at the door, robbed of his unique prize. Jeff dashed back into the bedroom and opened the window. Eventually the bat silently glided out into the night. Jeff and I didn't sleep for the rest of the night, adrenaline was still coursing through our veins, but Sage curled up in Jeff's lap and dreamed of mice with wings.
After college, Jeff took a job in California. We hired a moving company to pack up our household goods and drive them to the West Coast. The rest of us, Sage included, would fly out to meet the truck when it arrived ten to fourteen days later. As the last box containing the mattress and box spring was carried down the stairs, we waved good-bye to hopefully the last vermin infested student apartment we'd ever have to call home.
We called to Sage. We looked for him everywhere. With no furniture, there were few places to hide. Sadly, we came to the conclusion that the trauma of strange men tramping through his home, carting away all his belongings, was too much for Sage, and he must have run away through the door which was left open all day by the moving crew. We alerted friends to watch for Sage, feeling sure he'd show up when he was tired of eating mice. With heavy hearts, we left New York.
Ten days later, our belongings arrived in California. Terrible winter storms delayed our flight west, making it impossible to meet the moving van. Fate was on our side that day as friends and Jeff's brother, Chris, (who was on the west coast to see the Grateful Dead's New Year's Eve show in San Francisco, but that's another story), met the truck to supervise the unloading of our possessions. Everyone we knew had heard the story of our beloved cat's disappearance, and so, Chris asked the movers if they had seen a large tabby cat in the truck. The burly men laughed and said nothing could survive ten days and nights in an unheated trailer in the bitter January cold, especially without food and water.
The last thing unload from the truck was the carton containing the mattress and box spring. The awkward package was slid through the doorway and across the floor to the stairs. Chris thought he heard a sound from the box, and asked everyone to be quiet. Putting their ears against the side of the box everyone heard the faint cries of a cat. The movers tore away the cardboard as the sounds grew louder. A thin tabby cat stumbled out of the box spring onto the living room carpet, blinking his green eyes in the daylight, the first he'd seen in ten days.
Sage spent four years in the Golden State. He worked a lot less, and slipped easily into the good life, putting on a few extra pounds to make up for the ones he lost in the moving truck. Another job brought us to Florida, but this time we packed Sage in his cat carrier first, before the movers loaded the truck. Sage had an uneventful flight east, and made the adjustment to retirement living. He tried to acquire a taste for gecko lizards, but in his heart he will always prefer rodents, especially those with wings.