Mon, 23 Jan 2006

Elmer

Well, sad news to report: our senior barn cat, Elmer, has traveled to Folkvanger - which is Freyja's hall. For my non-Heathen readers, Freyja is (among other things) the Goddess of Cats. And she has gained a mighty mouser, indeed.

We 'inherited' Elmer from Kevyn, at whose home he lived his first few years as an indoor house cat. But then Elmer decided that the furniture needed marking, despite being neutered, and would not desist. Since Kevyn had more than enough barn cats at the time, and we were short handed in the mousing department, Elmer made the trip to Hammerstead. That was almost three years ago - he had to have been at least five and maybe as many as seven years old. Which is a pretty good life span for a barn cat.

He had the most annoying habit of treating people like trees, and climbing them, perching on shoulders as often as he was allowed. His favorite spot to catch some rays was on the roof of the mud porch, braced against a vent.

How he died, I'm not sure. I found the body in the back lot at the evening feeding - our sole remaining barn cat, Yeti, was going slightly crazy, and I saw Elmer laying the mud. Not a good thing. He wasn't quite stiff yet, so he hadn't been gone long, but there were no obvious marks of trauma - if he'd been stepped on by a cow he would've been buried in place, as the back lot is exceptionally muddy right now. He didn't have any apparent broken bones - who knows? Perhaps it was just his time to go, and so he went. He was a bit overweight - rare for a barn cat, but he was a truly prolific rodent eating machine.

He certainly wasn't a pet, but he was a friend, and he will be missed. Except by the mice in the barn ...

/Home | 4 writebacks | permanent link

On 1/24/2006 00:47:49
Kathryn wrote

On 1/24/2006 07:36:25
Arwin wrote

On 1/24/2006 08:29:31
Steven wrote

On 1/24/2006 19:47:05
Walter Jeffries wrote

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time