Scroungy, ancient, graying, half-blind, cranky and still just a cutie pie. That's Badger Ottamus, the boy kitty I fell in love with when I met my husband. In those days he was a tough little black cat, brawny and known to hook a bird out of mid-air with a single claw. Sometimes I think I fell more in love with the cat than the man. Nine years are a lifetime for a cat, and each shows on ol' Badger.
He's put up with being moved from a house complete with a pond and goldfish, to an apartment where soon me, my son and a Queensland red heeler joined them (oh how he missed her when she died two years later). He rejoiced in the move from there to a house with an irrigation ditch and an acre to amble. He made quite well known his distress when Clara and Chantilly, my older son's cats, moved in for need of a home. He was beside himself with indignation when I fell for a fat old labrador retriever at the pet store and adopted her. I thought he was going to walk when older son needed a home for a Chesapeake Bay retriever, all of fifteen months old and totally unaware that walking is an option over bouncing. Badger managed to adapt. He's a gracious cat, after all. Chantilly, a fluffy with severe skittishness, loved him and he was good to her. She ran off one evening when the menfolk were brawling, never to return. Badger looked all over house and yard to no avail but soon had something else to concern his graying whiskers.
We bought a tract home. Another move. His gruntle was seriously dissed. We put the house on lock-down to avoid a senior-cat at large. Slowly, slowly, we introduced him to the largish yard with a massive central elm and he once again adapted. Clara showed him the birding opportunities outside, she's even brought him sparrows, but Badger seems to have retired. He now wanders out pluckishly now and again, claws up a tree trunk or two, sits in the sun, then retires to the comfort of the house.
When we brought my deceased father's cat, Mr. Chievous, in, he was outraged. He is still outraged, occasionally, but mostly tolerant. Cheeves knows to watch his manners around the ancient one as he's familiar with the fair slapping the old cat can still apply in reaction to an infraction.
Ol' Badger's fur is speckled with gray, and although he eats more food than you'd ever imagine a three pound cat could consume, he's bone-thin. The fine, velvety black fur of before is now a scruffy affair with reddish leopard-like spots if you catch it just right. Most of his teeth are gone, but new lower incisors are growing back in. All the whiskers are white. Sometimes my heart breaks for the ravages of age, but then he does something incredibly athletic, like leaping from table top to wooden floor or from arm of chair to arm of sofa. Badger Ottamus is old, but he's alright. When he's ready to go, he will. Until then, he's still the King of the House.
