Catness came flying up the stairs from the lower level of our ranch home. I was standing at the top of that set of stairs and at the bottom of the stairs to the upper level. Catness stopped his dash, looked up at me with wild eyes, put his ears back, and bounded up the upper stairs at full speed. “Catness is wound,” I announced to Meredith.

Catness was our long-haired black and white kitty who amused us for the last ten years. He first got on our radar when he started living under the trailers in back of CVCA, the school where we both work. My first memory of Catness was I saw him across the grass near the building, I called to him, and he came bounding eagerly over to me and purred up a storm when I started petting him. I picked him up and showed him to Meredith through her classroom window, which was nearby.

In 2012, the Hunger Games movie had just come out, and since Catness had long hair, the students of the school assumed he was a girl and started calling him Katniss, after the hero of the book/movie. Most of the kids liked “Katniss,” but in a large school with students as young as eleven, there were bound to be a few who didn’t like cats, and Mer saw him get kicked one day. From that point, she was determined to find him a home. We already had five cats, so I encouraged her to find him a home with a student.

I forget the exact sequence now, but I think Mer found a student who took him home, but then the family dog didn’t like that, so Catness ended up somehow at a vet’s office waiting to be adopted. Mer was going on senior trip, and she let me know when she left that she “wanted THAT kitty.” My recollection is that the vet seemed suspicious of me until an assistant saw the cat stickers in our car’s window, and so Catness came home with me.

“Katniss” became Catness through my incompetent name memory. When we verified that “Katniss” was a boy, Mer wanted to change his name. I couldn’t remember what the name was, and Mer kept associating Katniss with the girl hero of The Hunger Games, so we came up with Catness instead. We figured Catness was the embodiment of being a cat – the essential nature of a cat. And I could remember his name.

Catness fit in well at home. He wasn’t chummy with any of our other cats, but they didn’t fight either. Catness turned out to be a superb athlete kitty, racing around the house and being flexible enough to fall asleep with his back paws in one direction and his front paws twisted 180 degrees in another direction. Catness very quickly discovered the “catwalk” – the top of the wall that separates our kitchen from our living room; it’s a standard wall, but we have a cathedral ceiling, so there is a six-inch-wide top to the wall that Catness enjoyed walking or sitting on. He would jump from the floor to the counter to the refrigerator to the catwalk. Other cats have done that as well, but Catness was up there quite often.

Catness never lost his outdoor nature. We had to watch for him when we went in and out of the house because he would try to sneak out in his younger years. I think he succeeded twice, and each time I caught him when he stopped to sniff at a plant. He would also sharpen his claws on anything – furniture, wood trim, and even metal heating registers. We expect some cat-related destruction in our home and are okay with that, but when Catness started making grooves in the wood in our music room, we knew we had to do something. We said we would never declaw a cat since we were okay with occasional claw pricks showing on the couches, but we had never had a cat starting to destroy parts of the actual house. We either had to get Catness declawed or give him up. So we reluctantly got him declawed. He seemed unfazed by that, and for most of his life he still tried to sharpen his now-missing claws on various parts of the house. The only downside we saw was the other cats eventually figured out that Catness couldn’t defend himself the same way as the other cats, so they would occasionally pick on him by chasing him around. Happily, that didn’t happen often, and Catness would usually just flee to something high in the house.

Catness was clearly the smartest cat we had ever had. Not only did he manage to escape a couple of times, but he was good at problem solving. Once, Mer made a pork roast in the oven, and because we had a house full of meat-loving animals, she pushed it to the back of the hot oven and left the door cracked about four inches to let the oven cool down some while she went to use the bathroom. She was gone for a couple of minutes, and when she came back, she found Catness with three paws on the open oven door, one paw on the oven, and a large chunk of pork in his mouth. We never figured out how he managed that in a hot oven, but he was a clever kitty.

Catness also loved chicken. Anytime I made chicken, he would come running into the kitchen and paw at my butt until I gave him some. I left a bowl of shredded chicken on the counter, wrapped in foil with a plate over the bowl. When I came back in to the kitchen, Catness was on the counter, had gotten the plate off the bowl without making any sound, and had peeled back the foil. Again, he was quite bright.

Catness liked me, but he loved Meredith. He liked to sit on her grading table for many of the hours she graded, and he would sleep near her on the bed. Sometimes he would wrap himself around her head, but that was fairly rare. He usually waited until Meredith moved in the morning, and she would stretch out an arm, and he would come and settle next to her with his head resting on her arm. It was very cute.

Catness was a joy to have around the house for nine years. When we got back from our summer trip to Iceland in 2021, we found he was hunched under the bed and had pooped on the bedroom floor in several places. Thus began a year of Catness finding new places he felt conformable – the bedroom, the corner of the office, the bathroom sink, and so on. Wherever he went, he would stay there for two or three weeks and then find somewhere new. In each place, he would find a corner to go to the bathroom in, so we started putting two litter boxes wherever he was. I still don’t know if the behavior shift was because we had introduced a new year-old female cat to the house (he was fine with her for two full months before we left for Iceland), or if he was beginning to feel poorly, or both. In the spring of this year (2022), Catness was finally diagnosed with some kidney issues and maybe a blood issue, so we put him on special food. He still would snuggle some with Meredith and even on rare occasions join us on the couch.

We took a summer trip to England this year in June, and left the cat sitter instructions on how to care for Catness. When we got home, Catness hadn’t touched his food from earlier in the day, so I gave him some fresh food. He sniffed at it and curled back up without eating. I left it with him all night and he didn’t eat it. I tried giving him another different food, and he wouldn’t eat that either, even when I put a little on my finger. We knew the time had come – he was very sick. The vet said his kidneys and his blood disease were fighting each other, and we were doing the right thing. So, on the day after we got home from England, on Wednesday, June 29th, we said goodbye to our clever, athletic snuggle baby.

I expect that Catness came flying up to St. Peter, looked at him with wild eyes, put his ears back, and bounded up to Meredith’s future heavenly mansion to wait for her outstretched arm to come to him. I’m sure Peter announced, “Catness is wound!”