Where The Wild Things Are

My humans were talking the other day about how the neighborhood has changed. Mom mourned the loss of the local livestock and what she called “the blight of stacked housing developments.” (Frankly, I don’t know why she objects to stacked housing – our five-tier stacked kitty tree is excellent!) She said that once a drive to the store meant “passing farmers on tractors and fields of contented cows.” (I wonder: are cows always contented, or is that simply a human myth?) Anyway, to hear her tell it, the drive these days is more likely to involve construction signs and backed-up traffic.

But perhaps she mourned too soon. For in fact, the truth is out there—outside our back door. The area is not fully urbanized yet!

You know of Little Buddy, and his frequent visits to our home, in part to play, in part to consume the morsels and tidbits that our dutiful humans put outside for him. It appears we now have a Big Buddy, too.

It all started last night. I was napping in the kitty hammock; Win was curled up near Mom on the sofa. The television was on. (She’s watching another bloomin’ British mystery series? Good grief!) Suddenly, we heard a loud “thump” outside the house. Mom looked outside the downstairs drapes but saw nothing. Then, murmuring that the sound seemed to have come from somewhere above, she went upstairs and looked out on the deck.

“Hey,” Mom said, when she came back downstairs, “it’s a raccoon, boys. Come look!”

We hurried to the curtains and slowly, clumsily making his way down the post of the deck was a large quadrapedal creature—grey and black—with black-tipped ears and a dashing facial feature covering his eyes. Said feature was not unlike my own, though he lacked the full facial coverage—eyes and snoot—that makes my breed so extraordinarily handsome.

Win and I did a little window pawing, and the creature responded by doing a bit of seeming-friendly window action of his own. Mom hurried for a camera and snapped one shot, but she says it’s hardly worth my including it here, as it wasn’t “flash” (whatever that means) and “it’s pretty blurry.”

Franklin, Winston, and their new friend

The point is, though, that with the raucous crows in the alders, with squirrels that taunt us from the hemlocks, and now with Big Buddy, we’re closer to where the wild things are than we had ever thought!