It didn’t take me long to understand that around this simple love of cats was a whole culture I knew nothing about and would have to master before cats could become fully rewarding. I needed to know about their sanitary needs; I needed to know about litter trays. I needed to know about their food. There was a gadget here that claimed to divide a cat’s food for the day into four portions, keeping all the portions refrigerated and at a fixed time releasing one chilled portion for a lucky cat.
If we had known more about cats, we might have spared him some of those lives, or we might at any rate have helped to lengthen some of them. We would not, if we had known, have entrusted him to the care of a kindly person who knew as little about cats as we did. She, who had taken over Augustus from us for a few days, very soon found herself in the position we had been in. She had to go away and didn’t quite know what to do with Augustus. What followed was awful.
We had over the years developed the painful idea—not with us at the beginning—that Augustus, as a cat, for all the beauty of his bearing, lived close to the dangers that we had got to know about from living with him: prowling farm cats, prowling foxes and wild animals. But Augustus, when things were going well with him, appeared not to share our anxiety. He seemed instead then willing to provoke trouble. He liked walking up to the farm and considering the farm cats from a safe distance.
The vet came the next day and gave Augustus two injections, one to deal with his pain, the other to boost his strength. The effect was marvellous. Augustus bounded up the staircase in a way he hadn’t done for years. It was as though he had shed his arthritis, and had become a kitten again. It was too good to last, and it didn’t. The injection wore off in a day and Augustus was again limping up the stairs, step by step.
We spoke to the vet on the telephone on Friday. He promised to come on Monday morning at nine. I would have liked him to come sooner. But the weekend was the weekend, and I couldn’t press. Augustus was now supine and forlorn, still not eating, and I wondered how he would manage till Monday. With his old instinct to hide and die he had crept below a bed, but having got below the bed, and feeling protected by it, he didn’t know what else to do. He remained standing; it looked odd.
We told him that Augustus hadn’t eaten for two days. He considered that and then appeared to consider poor, wasted Augustus again. He said, and his words sounded brutal, “He’s living off his tissue.” It was awful to think that while he was with us, and nibbling at his litter, this had happened to him.
Gosh in his verbose story-teller way, he describes the phases beautifully and precisely.
Thanks; I needed that this morning, the first after our geriatric dog died in a convulsion of vomit and urine. I’m the first of the household to awaken, and she’s not here to greet me. But: The screen door in this photo obscures a black cat, Junior, who now sits with me.
Loved his way of writing and philosophical interjections in both A Bend in the River (fiction) and in The Loss of El Dorado (non fiction). These r his best imho.
100% agree
Truth
“It’s dangerous to go alone.” •sharpie on toilet paper roll (2020)
Very true but frightening all the same… grief is inescapable. V_S_Naipaul has a way with words; ‘A Bend in the River’ is still one of my all time favorite novels.
BasharatPeer Just curious, why you stopped tweeting Kashmir?
Grief is love with no place to go
Horrific story for cat lovers. I could only read up to the second cat murder before I stopped
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