The Great Escape

Sunday was a pretty good day. Nick and I took it very easy, having gone to Marchigue the day before for the fair, which is an hour's drive plus standing around in hay most of the time. It was cold, but we curled up by the fire for a good portion of it, and made a nice dinner together. At bed time, we went through the usual routine of locking up the farm house. Just after I pulled all of the keys out of the doors (they lock automatically), I remembered that I thought the porch light was still on, so I opened the door a crack to look and to turn it off. Mister appeared suddenly at my feet and tried to slither out the door, so I grabbed his tail hard, terrified of him slipping into the darkness. Unfortunately he is very smooth and shiny, and he slipped right through my hands, and bounding off into the black night. I screamed after him and the last thing I remember of that moment is his bunny-like body escaping from the dim light of the porch into god-knows-where.

The night here is very dark without a full moon. Once off the porch, screaming my head off for Nick and a headlamp, I couldn't see more than directly at my feet. I panicked, and Nick came running out in his boxer shorts and a quickly-aquired sweater with the headlamp that barely illuminated a 3-foot space in front of me. He slammed the door in fright, as scared as I was. Mister is his favorite cat. I feel bad saying it, but it's not as though Shady might read this blog, I suppose. And as we don't have children, we pour all of the love a couple normally reserves for offspring into our cats. We really do love them.

Nick chased Mister around the house. Mister's greatest faults are that he is easily tempted by fields and fields of grass (and what is the farm right now but miles of grass?) and is prone to running when he is scared. At a few moments, I thought I had him when he ran back onto the porch, but he's very slippy and the porch has lots of escape hatches. Finally I got the idea that he might come back for his food, so I headed inside to get his bowl to rattle so he'd hear it. Only.. wait.. the door... was locked. We were Locked Out. In the black, cold darkness with our cat probably running to Argentina by now.

I thought I had been freaking out before, but the real freakout started now. I started hyperventilating. My stomach churned. I became hot and tears streamed from my eyes and nose. Nick was like an atom bomb, loaded onto a plane and ready to drop. I didn't know how we could get back inside. Nick informed me that Juan, the main stockman, had a spare key, and he went off into the black with the headlamp and in his shorts to find him. I felt awful. My cat was gone. Nick had to get up in 4 hours for the round-up, and now he was locked out with only thin cotton shorts and had to go wake the only neighbor in the middle of the night to half let us out of my stupid predicament.

At this point the only thing I could do was stand on the porch and hope that Mister felt like coming back. I tried to listen--the night is so quiet here you could hear a pin drop, but I couldn't hear a single rustle of a lithe cat slipping through the brush. I was positive that he had run so quickly and so far that he was in open grass and I'd never hear him. He was never coming back. It was a cruel blow just three weeks into my life here, and my mind began to race: with images of his black and white body bounding away, with worries of wild dogs, wilder cats, barbed fences and other farm terrors, with the thought that maybe Mister had always wanted to leave us. In between my hyperventilating breaths, I let out whimpering cries of "Mister...Mister...Oh God, Mister, come back..."

It took nearly twenty minutes for Nick to get the key and return, the farm being even bigger and more widely spaced when you can't see in front of you. Mirages of Mister had crossed my eyes while he was gone, but no sign of the real thing. He came onto the porch and grabbed my shoulders and told me to get it together, that we had to act together to find him. I firmly resolved then to stay up all night looking for Mister, until the sun could elucidate possibly hiding spots under the porch, the bushes, the scrub.

I pushed my head up and we went inside quickly for our provisions. Mister's food, more dim flashlights, clothes. As quickly as I could, I ran back out and shook the plastic bowl of kibble into the darkness. A shadow. I shook again. The shadow moved. He was on the deck! Still in the darkness, but I could SEE him. He hadn't run to Argentina yet! But he also wasn't in my arms.

I kept shaking, and thank heavens he was hungry. He thought food was a fantastic idea, having not found anything worth eating in the bushes in the last hour (and there really isn't anything). I put the bowl down and silently pleaded him to come to it. He did. I jumped. I snatched him into my arms and faster than a mother leopard had him in the house. He Was Home.

I collapsed on the bed with him, visions of his demise still dancing in my head, he crying from being held, maybe from fright as well. It was ok. I hadn't lost one of my only pillars here (for although they are just cats, they are the only thing that really define my own space right now... wherever the cats are is home). But something had changed about the darkness. Before when I went into it and watched the twinkling stars, I could drink it in, a refreshing emptiness that didn't exist back in Ohio. A blank palette onto which I could project any dream, thought, wish. But now it had been soiled in some way. It was a cruel envelope, waiting to steal things I love, hiding monstrous enemies in its shroud. I hope that the change is temporary, but I can't go out right now without pictures of Mister slipping away flashing through my mind.

Which reminds me of my other thought. Has he always been wanting to go? Am I cruel for keeping him in here? He does have a warm place and enough to eat and drink, but would he be somehow more fulfilled outside? The logic of my mind says no, but my heart can't erase him running off into the brush...