Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Whatever Happened to Graybelle, Anyway?

[This post originally appeared on my now vanishing Weebly. Weebly posts have to be short, so this was one of a series; click back to read what came led up to this.]

Graybelle no longer lives at the Cat Sanctuary, but what did become of her? I'm not sure.

As an oversized Manx-Persian crossbreed, Graybelle did look a bit like the gray bobcats at the Bays Mountain wildlife park. I had some doubts about the advisability of letting her roam, but I'd promised Her Human. If I'd said that she was a large, alarming-looking animal, he would have said that he is a large, alarming-looking man, and did I want him locked up for that reason?

When I last saw Graybelle, she was almost a year old and weighed ten or twelve pounds. She looked like something that would weigh twice that much, but she was still mostly fur. She didn't trust me to pick her up (she didn't like heights), but she would call me and tell me when she wanted her coat brushed.

One evening she'd called me, I hadn't gone out in time, and when I went out and called her she'd disappeared. Then I heard two shots on the other side of the mountain. Graybelle never came home. I went looking for her, and a landowner on the other side of the mountain said, "You'd better keep your cats inside! I saw a bobcat last week...wounded it, but it may still be alive!"

So I thought he'd probably killed Graybelle. She had kittens. Would she have left kittens, if she'd been alive?

Well, maybe. Last year Her Human told me that he'd seen a cat that looked like Graybelle, at a house in town, about two miles away. Its humans were strangers to him, but it had looked at him as if he were an old friend.

Could there be two cats like that within one cat-lifetime? Probably not. Probably Graybelle needed to be an indoor pet, and now she is one. I hope so.

(A lot of cats' faces look like Graybelle's. You'd think Amazon would have a book jacket showing one of them; it was a classic grey Persian cat face, not the flat "doll face" that's actually a disability for the cat but flatter than most cats' faces, an iconic image found on book jackets and T-shirts everywhere. No such luck. Amazon undoubtedly has books about gray cats, Persian cats, long-haired cats, fluffy cats, with cover pictures that look reasonably like Graybelle's, but Amazon won't show them until I've ploughed through more than ten pages of almost completely irrelevant results. Clue for Amazon: stop trying to second-guess which of your unsold mistakes you might be able to push in shoppers' faces, and just show what we're looking for. In other words, leave out of the algorithm the fact that I recently looked at a novel so I might be looking for novels whose authors use "Cat" as a given name--I'm not--and eliminate the wretched "Grayscale coloring books" when people search for "gray," not "grayscale." Here, to commemorate Graybelle, is the type of hairbrush she preferred.)

Wet Brush Pro Detangle Hair Brush, Metallic Purple

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