(Dateline Saturday, May 17th, 1914hrs)
Yesterday, for the first time since he’s been here, I let Aqaba’s food bowl get empty. He proceeded to bat it around loudly and I instantly realized the message. When Aqaba was first brought in, I said to hell with it, and got a large bowl and filled it, and kept it filled. He would eat straight down in a cone shaped pattern. He got up to thirteen pounds up from seven, and then stabilized around eleven. I haven’t weighed Aqaba in a while, but he’s a thin kitty. I do not think he’s ever had food available when he was hungry, and I think he was used to being hungry.
Jessica has a sore shoulder from trying to get to an armadillo under the shed, and Aqaba has been staying close to her, much like he did with Lilith Anne in her last days. Aqaba seems to know when someone needs someone.
For a young cat, only three years old, there isn’t much kitten left in him, but I don’t know if there ever was. I suspect he’s spent most of his life in survival mode, and hungry.
A house close to the road as I am going to Valdosta has lost three cats in the last year to traffic. I hit one of them, a black cat with a reflective collar. I’ve seen two dead cats in front of that house since then. Aqaba’s feet will never touch the ground again.
I know people who cannot have potted plants, or fresh cut flowers in vases around their cats but Aqaba isn’t prone to batting things off edges. He doesn’t tear stuff up or eat food on the counter tops. It took three months for Aqaba to decide to come in, and honestly, he wasn’t going to make it out in the wild. I think he saw me as his last best hope, and he made up his mind to make the most of it. This might be a lot of anthropomorphism on my part, but Aqaba hasn’t done bad cat stuff like Abbigale The Cat from Hell.
Giving Abbi meds was like injecting a great white shark with a toothpick at 100 meters of ocean during a hurricane. Aqaba scarfed down his meds without hesitation.
Taking Abbi to the vet was an adventure. Aqaba didn’t so much as meow.
I’ve always wanted a cat, but never thought I would have one, and never dreamed of having a cat like Aqaba Thomas, truly, The Cat Unexpected.
Take Care,
Mike
Hmmmm, I got this sense of Deja VU
I am glad Aqaba is fitting in and winning you over.
As a kid, we let the cats roam outside and many of them met an asphalt death. Since moving away and getting my own cats, they are not allowed outside.
When I was a teenager, we had an ’80 Chevy LUV truck (what a masculine name). Driving home with a friend, a cat ran out in front of me and we heard the cat get hit.
My friend knew that of the few houses right there, an old woman had a beloved cat, so we turned around and stopped in front of the body. Our plan was to move the cat to a bucket thing that was in the truck’s bed and take it to a vet to see if it could be saved.
As we were about to move the body, the cat jumped up, looked around, and ran back toward its house. I figured I clocked the cat by hitting it with the universal joint at the rear axle and knocked it unconscious. And we didn’t have to wake up the vet in the middle of the night.