Dusty – The Wonder Cat
By: Michael G. Shanks
Following my doctors advice, I had given up all my cats and for the last couple of years I'd been living without the companionship of a pet. I'd had repetitive episodes of excessive swelling of the Uvula which is that little 'punching bag' in the back of the throat and the general medical consensus was that it was an allergic reaction. Even though I had not had any pets for the past two years, or more, the episodes had continued and it was difficult to determine an exact cause, though by now, I no longer believed that my cats had anything to do with these issues.
When it comes to cats, there is a popular theory which says we don't really pick them, they pick us. They come into our lives when we least expect it and for me, that was about to happen again on a September afternoon in 1998 when I arrived at my full time job and saw some of the employees poking around the bushes along the side of the building. They told me that a customer said they had seen a kitten in there.
I was the evening shift on the sales department phone lines. In the mornings, I headed out in my truck with my utility trailer to do yard work at a handful of properties, which I maintained on a monthly basis. In the afternoon, I went to work at the telescope company and normally, by about six-thirty pm, I was usually the only person in the building until I closed up at ten pm.
At about five pm, there was just myself and another employee, named Leanne, still in the sales dept. The President and owner of the company was also in the building. His floor to ceiling office windows looked out into the parking lot past the bushes where the kitten had been reported. I told Leanne, “I’m going out to look for that kitten one more time before you leave.” and she agreed to watch the phones.
Knowing that this was probably a feral kitten, I grabbed a leather work glove from my truck and continued looking and prodding around the bushes and just when I was about to give up, a grey blur ran from one shrub to another so fast that I wondered if I had actually seen it or if it was my imagination in the fading evening light, but then it happened again and I knew there really was a kitten in there.
Looking around the bottom of the shrubs, I spotted a small tuft of grey fur, poking out between the leaves at the base of a bush, so I plunged my gloved hand in and grabbed the little bugger! Holding him up, he was all paws and claws and hissing and spitting; pretty tough for a little guy who was not much bigger than a softball.
As I brought the kitten into the sales dept and asked Leanne if she could go and get me a box the owner of the company came down the hall saying, “You caught it!” and he commented on how small and cute the kitten was. Leanne returned with the box and once inside, the kitten started crying, loudly, but eventually quieted down. It would be a few hours before I closed the building and headed home with the box on the seat of my truck and more than once that evening, I had to explain to a customer, on the phone, what that high pitch crying sound was in the background.
Dusty became one of the most remarkable cats I ever had. For a feral kitten, he did not take long to bond to me and he was just always there, watching me, sitting on me and trying to be a part of whatever I was doing. I cannot recall him going through the 'attack' phase, like so many young cats do, in which everything is a potential adversary to be subjugated.
My best friend, Sam, upon meeting Dusty for the first time said, "Hi there little guy. There's no way you can possibly know how much your life has just changed or that now, you've got it made."
Sam stopped by pretty regularly and often brought his dog, Geordie, with him. The first time Dusty saw Geordie, he freaked out and hid from him. The next time Geordie came with Sam, Dusty was sleeping on the end of the bed and Geordie just gave him a quick look and a sniff as he walked by, as though he was thinking;
"What's this... Oh, I know him, that's just the cat, where's a tennis ball?"
Because, you know, dogs have priorities and balls are really so much more important than some dumb old cat.
Upon being poked by Geordies nose, Dusty woke up but before he could respond, Geordie had already continued on so Dusty seemed a little confused as to how he should react to this and he stayed where he was, on the bed, but kept an eye on this intrusive dog who had the nerve to be walking around his house sniffing everything.
Some days later, Sam came by again and this time, as Geordie barged his way into the apartment through the partially open door, he barely paused to give Dusty the time of day and Dusty looked at Geordie as though to say, "Oh... it's just that dumb old 'Dog' again."
There was a time when I thought Dusty was going to bring me my ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ just because there were a lot of guys running around Santa Cruz in pick-up trucks doing yard work who had their dogs with them, but I was the only one who had a cat that rode around with me.
At this time, I had been dating a woman who had been living with her father and stepmother. They had some relatives coming into town to stay for a visit so she asked if she could stay with me for "just a couple of weeks". I was reluctant to agree to it but she insisted it would only be for a couple of weeks so I gave in. It was now months later and she resisted every attempt to tell her that she had to leave. I liked my single life and enjoy a degree of personal solitude and being able to come and go as I please, doing what I want, when I want and the longer she was there, the more she was interfering with my recreation as well as my business. When I arrived home that night with Dusty in a box, she immediately complained.
"Why did you have to bring home a kitten?" she whined, saying that after I leave in the morning, to go do my gardening work, the kitten would get in her face and keep her from sleeping. I finally told her to quit worrying about it because I would take him with me.
With a small litter box on the passenger side floor, along with a small bowl of water and food, it became a daily routine to capture my little feral kitten and put him in the cab of the truck while the engine warmed up and I loaded whatever tools I would need for the day. It did not take long for Dusty to get used to this routine and by the time he had grown into a young adolescence, I no longer had to find him, capture him and carry him out to the truck in the morning. He would be ready and anxious to go and would bolt outside when I opened the door, running to the truck and jumping up onto it. He would climb around on the toolbox behind the cab and on the roof while the truck was warming up and I would be loading the equipment.
His favorite riding position was behind my head on the back of the seat with his front paws hanging over my left shoulder. This way he could see straight ahead and also look out the side window and I soon noticed the number of early morning commuters who would pass me on the freeway, looking at me with big smiles on their faces.
Eventually, I was able to just leave the truck door open while I was working at the various properties that I took care of and allow Dusty to run around. He became a very social cat and I often had people ask me, “Did I see a cat get out of your truck with you this morning?”
Occasionally, I even took Dusty with me on 'paintball Sundays', out to the field where my friends and I engaged in recreational combat. He might do a little exploring around the bivouac area but he would return to the truck to sleep and hang out.
Because of my yard maintenance work, I would have to make regular trips to the landfill to empty the yard waste from my truck and the folks at the gate booth, where I paid the dumping fee, became familiar with Dusty's little face looking at them from where he was sitting on my lap, though I would hold him with my right hand as I rolled the window down to pay them, just to make sure he didn't get the sudden urge to visit with them.
One day there was two lines of vehicles and only one booth open so the two lines had to merge as they approached to pay. There was a guy in a truck just ahead of me, in the right lane, who looked back over his shoulder as the line ahead of me moved up. When I signaled him to move in, I noticed he had a small Chihuahua dog sitting on his lap, looking out of the open vent window. After he merged into the line, he turned to give me a wave and say "Thanks!", and he did a double-take upon seeing Dusty looking back at him from my vent window and then he got a big grin on his face.
As time went on, I expected that someday, a news van from one of the local Monterey Bay TV stations would pull into where I was working to do a story about the gardener with the traveling cat. I honestly thought Dusty was going to be my fifteen minutes of fame until one evening, near the end of a weeks vacation from my full time job, a neighbor knocked on my door to tell me that he thought he had seen Dusty get hit by a car on the street around the corner. Rushing over there, we found Dusty lying on the side of the road but still breathing. I carried him home and sat on the open tailgate of my truck. As I debated whether or not I could get him to a vet in time or if it was already too late, I felt him die in my arms.
One of my yard maintenance accounts was the company where I worked full time and since I had caught Dusty there as a feral kitten, all of the employees knew him and I knew that I would not be able to go into work and explain what had happened, so I wrote the following obituary and emailed it to my boss, asking him to resend it to ‘all’ in the company.
*****
DUSTY-THE WONDER CAT
Aug 1998 - Feb 21, 1999
I regret to announce the death of Dusty the Cat at about 6:50pm on Sunday, February 21, 1999. The cause of his demise was due to automotive impact on Brommer Street near Thompson Avenue in Santa Cruz, Ca.
Due to the fact that neighbors were on the scene almost instantly and his body still warm when he was carried home, it has been determined that Dusty’s death was swift.
Dusty was first found as a kitten under some bushes at Orion Telescopes and Binoculars in Watsonville, California on September 21, 1998. His age at the time was estimated to be six or seven weeks and he grew up riding on the dashboard of my truck, going to different gardening jobs where he could run and climb trees. He seemed to have no fear of power tools such as blowers and lawnmowers and liked to chase extension cords. Whenever he got tired he would return to the truck and sleep until it was time to leave. Often after a long weekend day, he would lie across my lap, draping himself over my legs and be so tired upon arriving at home that he would wait to be carried into the house.
One of his favorite games at home was fetch with a small ball of aluminum foil which he would frantically chase and after an appropriate amount of abuse, pick it up and come trotting back to drop it in front of me to throw again.
Dusty liked to be held, and often curled up in my arm and lay on his back purring, while occasionally reaching up with a paw to touch my face while I sat at my computer. Sometimes he would lie there and just watch the cursor move around on the screen. Other times he would lay on top of the monitor and watch me write or play games. During his short life, Dusty had become an almost constant companion and friend.
He will be missed.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
