Elvis Has Left The Building
The first time I saw him he was a blur of black in the corner of my eye. Coming home from work I saw him at the side of the house. January, 2005, bitter cold for Independence, MO – maybe 10 degrees – and when I got inside a voice in my head told me to put some food out for him, so I put a small bowl of dry cat food and a bowl of water at the corner of the house.
Next morning the food was gone, and the water was frozen, so I repeated the process, then moved the food to the foot of the front steps leading up to the stone porch, then to the porch itself. Now we had a relationship. Every morning and evening I put out fresh water and a food dish with wet and dry cat food. At night I’d sit in a wicker rocker, watching him eat and getting to know him.
He had shiny long black hair, tufts of hair in his ears and his paws and a thick plumed tail. A smallish Maine coon cat, I reckoned, probably 2-3 three years old. He was graceful and quick, although still a little skittish. He reminded me of Elvis Presley when he did his return from the army concert in black leather, so Mary and I named him Elvis.
Elvis & the Raccoons. The first thing we learned about Elvis was …… he had a posse. After Elvis had the first shot at food, he would step aside and a troop of raccoons would finish the meal. It became clear Elvis was the designated hunter for the group, he would catch mice or moles or chipmunks and share with them. One morning the biggest raccoon was a bit hasty – he started eating while Elvis was still working on the wet food – and Elvis whacked him on the snout resoundingly. The raccoon – three times bigger than Elvis – backed off and apologized.
For the first year, Elvis lived outside 100%, showing up every morning and evening for breakfast and dinner. Evenings I would sit on the stone porch and watch him eat, and after about a year, one evening he jumped up on my lap and let me pet him. During the second year, that was our schedule. Evenings after I fed him then afterwards he would sit with me and let me pet him or try to work the bigger mats out of his furry undercoat.
Then one evening, when I got up and went back inside he followed me into the house. In the living room were two other cats, Peaches & Loretta, and our dog, Teddy. Elvis looked around, spied an open chair, hopped up and was part of the family. Not a bark or a hiss. Elvis and Loretta peacefully co-existed, Peaches, who had been observing Elvis through the windows for a year or so, insisted on grooming him, and they often chased each other and wrestled around the house, with Elvis never using his superior strength and weight to overpower Peaches.
Elvis & the 6’ Fence. I was home one day working in the privacy fence enclosed backyard when I heard a dog barking, then a snarl, then more dog barking and pounding paws on the driveway. I looked up just in time to see Elvis clearing the 6’ privacy fence in a single bound, and almost simultaneously, a large dog crashing headfirst into the fence. I swear Elvis was laughing when he heard the THUD!
Elvis Makes Supervisor. Every morning and evening, I walked our dog, Teddy, through the neighborhood. At some point, and I can’t recall exactly when, Elvis started accompanying us on our walks, always keeping to the underbrush but occasionally popping into view as we walked. After Teddy died, he continued the practice with our new dog, Cleopatra. Clearly he was the supervisor, because he was the only one of the three of us that wasn’t on one end of the leash or the other.
Elvis & the Sunset Tree. There was an alley running behind the houses on our street, and I was walking Cleo down the alley one evening when she paused and started showing unusual interest in a tree. The day was cold, and the sun low in the southern sky, already far enough down that the ground was in deep shadow, but as I looked up the tree, there was Elvis, fifteen feet up, lying back in the crotch of a branch like he was sitting in a La-Z-Boy, bathed in sunlight, his thick black coat soaking up radiant heat, totally the master of his environment.
In addition to the raccoons, Elvis had some other friends in the neighborhood. A couple houses down the street lived a black and white tuxedo cat we nicknamed 007, and he and Elvis would hang around in the front yard like fishing buddies. Then there was a gregarious cat we called Fred Friendly, a 20 lb. gray tabby cat from across the street. Elvis got along okay with Fred, but Fred’s similarly sized orange tabby brother was on Elvis’s persona non grata list. If the orange cat as much as crossed the street Elvis would be on him like a heat-seeking missile.
Elvis Moves to Ohio. In 2013, we moved to Ohio, and Elvis was thrust into a new environment. He became visibly depressed. He didn’t want to go outside, and for almost an entire year he sat in the basement, depression eating and getting to look an awful lot like “fat Elvis”. The following spring he surprised me one morning by standing by the back door and patiently waiting, so I let him out and he re-commenced his life outdoors. He began going on early morning walks with Cleo and actually learned a new trick: our neighborhood has an abundance of bunnies, and Elvis learned how to go into the bushes and flush them out for Cleo to chase.
Elvis Does Downeast. In 2014, Mary and I found a summer house in Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the US, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Getting us and our animals from Ohio to Maine was a complicated logistical proposition. Mary took two cats in her car, and I took 65-lb Cleo and Elvis in my little Subaru BRZ. We found old-fashioned animal friendly Serenity Motel outside Bennington, VT - almost exactly half way - and always stayed in Cabin 7, so the animals grew accustomed to the place.
Elvis enjoyed summers in Maine. Our house sits on a hill in Lubec, facing the ocean and protected by a chain of Norway maples on the hill behind us. Every morning at 4:00 he accompanied Cleo and me on our morning walks in the fog, and would also supervise our last walk on the evening once darkness fell. During the day he foraged in the knotweed and wild raspberries and on the rocky promontory across the street. If he was still outside when it was time to go to bed, I’d simply go out on the deck and play guitar for a few minutes and Elvis would appear under my Adirondack chair.
Elvis became a bit of a local celebrity in Lubec, as our early morning ambulations around town did not go unnoticed: largish dog and me, accompanied by a Maine coon cat, looked like a Disney movie. My favorite memory of Elvis in Lubec was his practice of letting Cleo and I get almost all the way down the School Street hill and then pounding down after us at full gallop, his plumed tail in the air.
Elvis and the Skunk. No, this doesn’t end the way you might expect. Lubec has an abundance of skunks, and Elvis seems able to impersonate a skunk well enough to get along with them. But in this particular incident, I was coming back down Church Street hill with Cleo on her leash, when I saw a skunk coming up the hill in the middle of the street. Normally I can restrain Cleo, but we were on the steepest part of the hill and I couldn’t get enough leverage to hold her back. Catastrophe loomed, when out of the darkness appeared Elvis, walking directly up to the skunk and leading it to the side of the road so Cleo and I could pass unsprayed.
Last summer, Elvis’s abdomen swelled alarmingly, and I made an emergency drive back to Ohio for treatment. One of his kidneys had stopped working and was leaking, filling his peritoneal membrane with fluid. We removed the kidney and he did pretty well for a year, until the remaining kidney began to fail, and the time every pet owner dreads had come.
The jaunty little dude who used to follow me around the house and yard, climb up on the recliner with me and sit patiently while I played guitar or watched TV, the fiercely efficient rodent hunter, the wild but sweet cat who never intentionally bit or scratched me, even at the end when I had to poke him with needles and force medication on him, is gone, solid gone.
Elvis was the smartest animal I’ve ever known; my closest confidante, constant companion and inspiration for 15 years. If I were as good a human as Elvis was a feline, I would have an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and most probably a Nobel Prize for curing cancer.
Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Special thanks to Dean Maxwell, DVM, who cared for Elvis in Kansas City and called him “the most confident cat I ever saw”, and to Bogdan Klinkosz, DVM and his staff at Lakeland Animal Clinic, who treated him with great tenderness and skill.
