PanningForGold

In my twentieth post I said I couldn’t write about anything I was unable/unwilling to part with.  I’ve thought about posting this when I first contemplated blogging, forty-seven posts later, it has finally arrived.  If I have to be honest, I’m still not sure about how I feel about sharing this, and I don’t know why.

I can’t quite remember when or how Dorian entered our lives but my wife and I won’t forget him.  Dorian was a big grey monster of a cat.  My wife thought he was ugly, I thought of him more as a bruiser. He never came inside, he would allow you to pet him, but picking him up was out of the question. He would disappear for weeks at a time and just when you thought he was gone for good he would show up on the doorstep waiting for his plate of food.  We suspected (and years later confirmed) he belonged to a neighbor, but except for forcing him to come indoors we considered him one of ours.

Dorian had no front claws, but despite this disadvantage he was king of the roost.  Truth be told, the world belonged to Dorian, the rest of us just live here.  Sequoia, our 60 pound prey driven, animal hating husky treated Dorian with all due respect.  Often Sequoia would be on our porch (secured by her zipline) ‘asleep’ in her chair and Dorian would saunter up the porch.  Normally if a bird so much as lands on the rail Sequoia would be trying to snap at it.  Slow chipmunks/squirrels don’t survive Sequoia, other dogs, cats, possums, skunks, raccoons, turkeys (you name it) that tread on land that Sequoia thinks is hers (any property within her line of sight belongs to Sequoia) will suffer her wrath.  Dorian however was a slightly different matter.  Sequoia would pretend to be asleep as Dorian sashayed within easy reach but once he reached the door which just happens to be out of Sequoia’s zipline range, Sequoia would leap into action, fur standing on end, ears back, teeth bared, growling, snarling, straining at the end of her leash.  This happened too many times for it to be coincidence and more than once I caught Sequoia feigning sleep (one eye open watching Dorian) only to leap into action once the cat was out of range. Dorian on his part would look at Sequoia without a care in the world.

When Dorian showed up one evening limping, with an open wound on his leg we risked life and limb and shoved him snarling into a carrier and took him to the vet.  After we described the problem and the cat, the vet and vet tech put on the Kevlar gloves subdued Dorian and secured a muzzle in place which Dorian promptly bit through.  

Dorian supervised a great deal of our animal releases.  He would follow us into the woods, sit well back while we released our charges and then walked back to the house with us.  Dorian, secure in his position as King of the world was at heart, a gentle soul.

One day my wife was standing in front of the house watching Dorian walk away, when he reached the top of the driveway he stopped looked back at my wife and then moved on.  My wife told me that this was the last time we were going to see Dorian.  At the time I didn’t think much about it, of course we never saw him again.  We later learned that he did indeed live across the street.  His name was actually Smokey and he came home one day and for the first time stuck around the owner said Smokey was obviously ‘feeling his age’ then one day he left home and never came back.

I choose to believe that Dorian found a quiet spot in the woods, went to sleep peacefully and never woke up.  It would be just like him, making his own decisions in his own time and in his own way.  Whatever his finals days were I certainly miss that big ole’ bruiser.