Failure

Despite all our efforts to contain our wayward cat, Pluto, we have failed. First, Tom stapled chicken wire at the top of our backyard fence; then, this weekend, he put in an electric wire on the fence. After Pluto scaled that (he was shocked, sat crying for a while, and then skedaddled into the yard of the neighbor who wants nothing to do with cats), Tom made further amendments to the wiring where Pluto has been escaping. We kept him indoors at night, closing the cat door with the wooden piece that slides into place over the cat door. Then, this morning, when Tom wasn't looking, one of the cats managed to force that wooden piece up and gain access to the cat flap. Pluto was gone in a flash. It's noon now, and I haven't seen him all morning. We've searched the backyard, but the cat is gone.

In 2003, Pluto wandered up to our house in Harris County, Georgia, on our 24-acre property that I called Wild Ginger Woods, in the middle of the night, in the middle of our daughter's going-away slumber party. (We would be moving back to Texas; my husband had already moved and had begun his new job.) I was wakened by highly excited 6th graders; they heard a kitten mewing by our front door, and they were afraid our dog was going to kill it. I got out of bed and rescued the tiny kitten, feeding it milk in a bowl and being amused by the girls who thought I had somehow arranged this experience for their entertainment. We took the kitten with us when we moved. Pluto's been the most recalcitrant of cats since.

We tame animals and think we own them. Those we thoroughly subject, we eat. But every once in a while we get a reminder, even from our tamed and affectionate pets, that animals have wills of their own. Their dreams are not our dreams. They march to a different drummer, every one.