"It's Cutter!" I yelled. "He's hurt. We've got to take him to emergency." Luckily, we live in a large city, luckily there's an emergency vet.
Carefully, oh God, so carefully, I slid a bath towel under him and, between the two of us, my husband and I got him inside, and laid him gently on the floor. "Stay with us, boy," my husband whispered, while I ran to the computer to get the clinic's address and phone number. My husband called to me, "I'm going to put my clothes on."
But when we returned and bent to him, Cutter gave a last long tremor and slipped away from us: something he had never done in life.
We think he fell from the roof, a straight drop to the concrete back step. As I wound him carefully in the towel, I realized his neck was broken. Like my husband and myself, he didn't view himself as being older and heavier. He still hunted, chased off other cats, and jumped to his favorite window sill. But he was 68 in human years and I had to begun to notice that sometimes he fell.
He was the last kitten born to our tiny cat Lola, nearly a kitten herself. She had three kittens in her one and only litter, all males. I watched as the first two were born, and then, figuring she was done, I went to bed as she purred and licked her two scraps of orange and black fur. I had just laid down when I heard her calling and ran back in. Another black kitten squirmed beside her, infinitesimal and mewling.
That was how we met, Cutter and me.
My husband named him. That year he was working in Houston; the week the kittens were born, he drove home to inspect them. He squatted down by the nest I'd made in the knee-hole of my desk. His eyes lighted on the lively short-haired black kitten, blind and deaf, like all newborn cats, but still he shoved and rooted more energetically than the other two. "He's a cutter," my husband noted approvingly, "he'll be Cutter Bob."
Like all our cats, he wound up with many names: Cutter Bob, Bob, C-Bob, and The Man, and he answered to all of them. From the very beginning, he was curious about The World, his world, the one contained by our yard. When we first brought him outside with the other two kittens, he scuttled about wildly, sniffing the grass, batting at twigs, feeling the wind, tasting leaves, all the time making his wild strange bird-like cry.
"Look at him!" my husband laughed, "he doesn't know what to do first." And Cutter didn't. He wanted to eat, smell, and feel the entire earth all at once. He was like that his entire life, always quivering in excitement, crying sharply to be let out. Then, once outdoors, he rolled in the dirt ecstatically, shoved toads with his nose to make them jump, explored our climbing ivy, raced across the roof and caught rats with a ferocity that made me gasp.
Despite their miniature mom, all the kittens grew to be big cats. Cutter was a sleek and shining black, with golden eyes. At night he was hard to see. At twilight, before I turned on the lights, more than once I nearly sat on him as he lay curled in my desk chair. He loved to lie length-wise on my legs, facing towards my ankles, and occasionally gnaw on my feet gently--something he considered the height of hilarity. He'd glance back at me, his jaw slightly dropped, and give me a cat grin. In return, I sang him Elvis songs since he always seemed like an Elvis-type cat to me.
Besides Elvis tunes and dirt baths, he delighted in patrolling his yard, kicking the ass of any cat who wandered through it, and catching lizards. Recently he had lost his two upper fangs, and I concluded he'd give up hunting, since he couldn't deliver the killing bite. Then, last weekend as I was walking to the car, I heard a rustling in the ivy and Cutter emerged triumphant, his mouth stuffed with leaves. I watched as he dumped the leaves on the ground, and put his paw carefully on the newly-caught lizard.
When he was not quite a year old, he shinnied up our neighbor's tree and couldn't get down. Miserably, he wailed for us. My husband, Cutter's mother, and I trooped over to the tree, stared up at him, and called but nothing worked. We stayed for over an hour, trying to coax him, but maddeningly he retreated to even higher branches. We left, figuring that he'd make his way down, but the next morning he was still there, still yowling. Calling animal rescue and the fire department only elicited jocular remarks about no cat skeletons left in trees, he'd find his way down etc. And so, after my husband had gone to work, I climbed up the tree, holding a five pound bag of dry cat food, which I shook at him temptingly. Still, he backed away from me, mewing pitiously. I sat in the tree until 5:00 without success, and the next morning I sat in the tree for another eight hours. On the third morning, a neighbor stopped by, said, "I thought this only happened in cartoons," then ran up the tree like the country boy he was, scruffed Cutter, and handed him to me.
I don't know the point of that story. Maybe it's that he was a cat you'd sit in a tree for and feel like an idiot, even for eight hours at a whack. He was special.
Cutter Bob was our friend, our life's companion, and he delighted in every day of his life.
Now I have to say goodbye to him. I'm not sure I can.
Run free, my boy. My best boy.
Run free.
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