He is a real cat

I live on the small farm I grew up on, and for the majority of the last forty-some years, we’ve had barn cats.  Basically, we feed them, but we hope they supplement their cat food with mice.  Well, our last cat had died and we’d gone without a barn cat for a year or so, when one night two or three years ago our dog was barking up a tree.  With my flashlight I saw a strange cat up the tree.  I took our dog in and told my dad there was a cat around.  Over the next few weeks we saw it a couple more times, so we started leaving food out for it.  And over a couple of months, it got used to us enough that we could pet it.  My dad managed to pick it up and see it was a boy cat, so my mom gave him the name Tommy.

We don’t know where he came from.  It’s possible someone didn’t want to him anymore so they dumped out in the country, it’s hard to say.  He is friendly, and will rub up against our legs, or our dog, but other times he’ll be real skittish. 

At first, we fed him in the barn, but we eventually moved to feeding him in one of our sheds.  It’s closer to the house and easier to get to in bad weather, not to mention far less drafty than our old barn.  He has some boxes and old pillows to sleep.  We also keep some chicken feed in the shed, and we hoped he’d keep mice out of it, but it turns out he isn’t much of a mouser.

Anyway, around last summer he started disappearing for a day or two.  I figured he was just trying to find a girlfriend.  These disappearances happened maybe once a month or so, and usually only a day or two.  Back around the beginning of December, he was away for three or four days.  I was starting to get a bit worried, when one night I went to get some chicken feed and he was back, but with a bit of a limp.  So I gave him extra food, and hoped he’d stay where it was dry and warm and heal up, especially since we were supposed to get a storm that night.  But the next morning he was gone. 

Some two weeks later, without seeing him at all, I feared the worse.  Well, I think it might have been December 31st, I went to feed our chickens.  But we were very low on chicken feed, and I figured I could stretch it out a couple days with this quarter of a bag of cat food we had no use for.  I got a full scoop of the cat food and went out.  The chickens all gathered around me, so I sprinkled a bit out, then went to throw some potato skins into our compost pile.  When I came back a minute later to put the rest of the cat food in for the chickens, there was Tommy walking across our driveway, without any limp.  I called him and he came running, and I put the food in for him.  As he ate, I told him he must be a real cat: he found out I was giving away his food so he came back.

Later, I found out that my dad had seen him a couple of times in those two weeks.  We don’t know if someone else was feeding him, because he seems a bit fatter, but for some reason he must prefer staying on our farm.

A black and white cat sleeping on a sunny day in the fall.