A boss cat with one ball

He kind of looks like George Kennedy

A few evenings ago I opened the back laundry door of our house to have a smoke, and a sizable creature bolted into the bushes. It was so dark outside I only caught a glimpse of matted fur. It scared the shit out of me.

I closed the door quickly and waited about an hour to try again. Next time I went to the door it was fine…no creature.

I thought what was that. A coon? A weasel or a baby boar?

I’ve learned that we are in the patrol zone of Bob. That’s the name I’ve given him at least. Bob is a grizzled old cat that walks our dusty roads—he seems responsible for a village perimeter maybe a half-mile wide.

He looks like he once was a tabby of some sort before he… grizzled. He’s now dirty brown and greying but I could imagine a spry Bob having been orange and white with a few healthy stripes. I’d say he’s late middle age, definitely on the way to long in the tooth. But Bob looks tough yet. If I was an area cat or dog or even a tusked boar I’d think twice about messing with Bob.

This is not Bob. The demeanor however is.

This cat is well fed. He’s not fat by any means, but he has heft you take note of. Maybe bouncer like? I think he looks something like the 1970s actor George Kennedy.

Nothing hideous, but Bob has a few good scars on his face. Makes sense for a boss cat on our pretty empty crossroads.

Bob might have a few homes he stops into around our village for meals left out for him. But I prefer to believe he simply hunts down animals lower on the food chain. Who needs ‘Nyah Nyah’ Nibbles from the humans, right? This village is a supermarket of rodents, reptiles, and flying things. Bob can just swipe and dine. I’m sure he knows it.

I find him sunning himself on our deck chairs out on the patio some mornings. We have a toasty, unimpeded sunrise out there, and he takes the chair that faces straight into the light as it strengthens.

Those occasions can be startling. I open the living room blinds and there is Bob five inches away other side of the glass. I jump and say, “Oh, Jesus, hi.” He slowly turns his big head from the sun and through the glass looks at me, incredibly unimpressed. Bob never says hi back. He just lazily returns to sunning his face. “Go to town, Jack, show me what you’re made of,” he seems to say. “We all know you ain’t gonna do a goddamn thing.”

I bet he laughs at our environmentally controlled home.

Bob has one ball. I saw that once when he was strutting ahead of me and Tera down the road. He could of course have two balls and one of them just never dropped into place, but I like to think he lost a ball in a vicious fight with a boar one night.

Of course he won and the boar ran off into the hills squealing, never to try his foraging luck in our village again. Bob simply licked his ripped nutsack and returned to patrol.

I’ve never petted him by the way. It’s in my nature to try, but Bob and I both know he’s so not into that. I also don’t want to get ringworm or something worse from him.

Bob is uninterested in the existence even of Terashima-kun. He actually turns his back to our girly dog.

Like me, Tera also seems to accept that this is Bob’s hood. I think he smelled Bob on day one, long before the humans caught on, and a clear pecking order has been decided. It’s great—I don’t need dog/cat territorial throwdowns going on particularly in a place I still feel an outsider.

I talk to Bob when he’s hanging at Frog’s Glen. Like with Tera, I tell him about my day or about what I’m doing in the garden. I sometimes ask him for advice on things like the bugs and grasshoppers. It’s not that I’m lonely, I just want Bob to yeah think of our house as one of his responsibilities. We aren’t out here every day, so having a third pair of eyes on patrol can be of value.