That first night, She and I slept in a tiny bathroom inside Sky Blue.
A bunch of my cat friends lived in bathrooms at Cat House, so I’ve seen it before.
I slept back behind the claw foot tub, where it was darker, and easier to hide.
Once I was feral and bold. But now I was a scaredy-cat, a house cat. That first night in the old farmhouse was terrifying, without the other 24 kitties hanging around.
She slept on the hard wood floor next to the tub and kept turning and tossing all night.
This was all new. New never meant anything good, when you come from the wild. New was when a coyote ate my mom when I was a kitten. The other kittens just disappeared. I was all alone.
That’s what happens here in the country. Wild animals don’t live in cages, we do! Inside the house so we don’t get eaten!
Did I mention that we live in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area? Where eagles fly overhead and plunge down and splash for salmon in streams behind our house? Eagles and owls and cougars and bears and coyotes and bobcats roam around our cliffs. I heard somewhere that wolves and condors are starting to live here again, too.
Wolves? Gulp.
Point is, it’s a big, scary world out there.
So there I was, behind the claw foot tub on my first night in my own home. That moment I was waiting for. And afraid of, at the same time.
Elvis was whining outside the bathroom door.
We were in here trying to sleep on the floor and he was out there, scratching on the door, trying to get in.
I’d only been here a few hours, and already he missed me. That helped.
I heard later that Elvis was adopted by the world’s first surfing basset hound – Howdy. Elvis learned to surf in California – of course. He was the world’s second surfing basset hound. There can’t have been many surfing bassets back in the 90’s. Or today, maybe.
After the first Surf Dog Diaries basset hound went to heaven, Elvis was new #1. But he was lonely. So he adopted a smaller basset mix, Little Dude, from Best Friends Animal Society. They met in a parking lot.
And Dude became surfing basset #3.
