Mist’s tale

I’ve told this story many times before, so apologies if you’ve heard it.

It all started about 18 years ago. I thought it was 17, but Margie’s usually better at calculating dates of this sort. It was an earlier marriage, and Cheryl and I — petless at the time — were taking an evening walk around the condo complex.

We heard a small mewing at one point, and investigation uncovered a tiny kitten — too tiny to be away from his mother — down in a storm drain. Wandered and lost? Gotten rid of? No idea.  

I fished him out, and he was a mess — small and skinny and trembling and sick and flea-ridden and half-alive. We took him home, cleaned him up, and took a trip to the Vet emergency clinic. There they cleaned him up further, cauterized a major eye infection with iodine, and sent him home with us with meds and instructions and a not-very-optimistic prognosis.

He lived. And thrived. He was never a pudgy kitty, but for most of his live very active and rangy. Despite the eye, which was clouded over from the cauterization, he remained a mighty hunter, the highlight of which was his capture of a hummingbird (who made the mistake of getting down in the foliage, thus losing a lot of his maneuverability). As recently as a year-and-a-half ago, he was still catching prey. (Margie would joke that any bird caught by an aging, one-eyed, belled cat was just improving the bird gene pool.)

He was named for his color (a tigerish gray, his lurkingness, and because, at the time, I named all my cats starting with “M” (for reasons that now escape me).

Mist went through several moves in his life. I got him back in my old townhouse at Phillips Ranch. After I moved to Colorado, he lived with Margie in Pasadena for a time. When she came out here to the Love Shed, he camped out with Jim and Ginger until we had a house of our own.  He drove out with them and has been a Colorado Kitty ever since.

Mist was, for many years, the classic Anti-Social Kitty. Whenever anyone other than his family would enter the room, he’d skedaddle. Attempts to pet were usually not appreciate; even among family, petting would lead to “Attack the Hand,” pinning it with claws, giving it love bites, licking it to tenderize, then gnawing at it some more. He never completely lost that behavior, but he did largely mellow over the years, until he became more of a social kitty than Indy. 

Indy was, in many ways (including the obvious pun), Mist’s bete noir. They were classic, competitive brothers, with Mist as the aggressively alpha cat for most of Indy’s life after he arrived in ’97 or so. Only in the last year has that changed, and Indy has (generally) taken a lighter hand at ruling the cat hierarchy than Mist did.

Long around 2000 or so, Mist’s clouded “ghost” eye became cancerous (as youth-damaged eyes are wont to do in cats), and had to be removed — replaced with a small silicon ball and the eyelid sewn shut. This gave Mist his zombie look for his remaining days, but didn’t keep him from hunting, harrassing his brother, or generally getting around.

With Katherine’s arrival in 2000, Mist faced some new challenges. When she’d cry in her crib, he would often go into her room and purr loudly for her. On the other hand, he also effectively taught her not to treat cats roughly, or pester them when they didn’t want to be pestered.

Over the years, and with various tussles with local cats and other wildlife, Mist became much more of a homebody, leaving the house only to sack out on the front porch or up on the rail in back. At night, he generally slept up on the bed with (on top of, between, around) us.

The more recent cancer was, of course, not so successfully fended off. Still, he’s led a full life, longer than many cats, in a house full of love (or at least tolerance, when he’d wake us on a Saturday at 5 a.m. waiting for kitty treats, or when he decided the heater registers were much more convenient and comfortable than going out to the garage where the litter box was). Though Mist was often called “my” kitty (“Your cat is in a lot of trouble!”), he was clearly Margie’s cat, too. And Katherine has known him all her life.

He was, for all his irrascibility and demands, a good kitty. And he will be missed.

Other Mist posts of note for posterity. And Mist pics on Flickr.