My Little Black Friends

Till recently, with my wife absent for long periods to attend to family affairs in Florida, for days at a time the only half-way human being that I got to see and to talk to was a short-haired male black cat with golden eyes, named Beauty. At about 18 Beauty may be even farther along in years than I am, but he is still strong, agile, and clear-eyed. Though his conversational skills are limited, he is still good company. He tolerates all my delays, and he humors all the crazy remarks I address to him as well as being picked up and the other such indignities that he has to suffer at my hands. He never hides intentionally, and he usually answers to his name if he isn't asleep.

Beauty is an outdoors cat, as have been all that we've had, though he loves to clamor and scratch to come into the house. Once inside, one of his favorite activities is to stroll through the kitchen while noting any interesting changes in the surroundings, especially a just-filled food tray, before exiting the house again by another door.

Yet he is not the cat that we would have wished to be the last surviving from the wonderful family of eight that we had as recently as four years ago. In fact he would've been among the last two choices. Instead my wife would have liked that last-standing to have been another short-haired black male named Magic, an affection junkie that she spoiled rotten during his early years, while my choice would have been a more poised long-haired gray female named Fuzzy, who from the start had singled me out as being worthy of special regard.

But two years ago Magic fell victim to terminal illness, while one morning a little later I found Fuzzy moaning, bleeding, and jammed up into a corner amid some drums and boxes, unable to move and having been badly mauled by one of the various beasts, wild and domestic, that occasionally pass through here. Meanwhile that same morning I couldn't find her near twin, another gray female named Lilith.

Coyotes are believed to be in the area, because they seem to be in all the states. I have never seen or heard one, but a neighbor who claims to have seen the carcass of one plus to have spotted another crossing our road thinks that species is the prime suspect for Fuzzy's undoing.

With enormous sadness I had to relieve Fuzzy of her pain and suffering with a firearm, just as I had had to do with Magic earlier, and I never found any trace of Lilith.

In contrast to all three, Beauty had always been one of the most standoffish of the cats and the one most liable to snag you with a claw if you reached out to him a petting hand. But cats can amaze by how quickly they can adapt while still being creatures of habit. As soon as he realized that he had been left with only the two-legged beings around, he adjusted his personality and seemed to take on a lot of the attributes of his more naturally personable but now forever departed kinfolk.

My other little black friends around here are the crows. Because right now I don't grow things that they would want to pull up and eat, I can say that I love them. Crows are so absolute, in the deep, unalloyed saturation of their color, in the certainty with which they can be identified (forget ravens), and in the ease with which they can be seen. I even like to hear their outcries, though that can get to be a real racket in the warmer months. I think they are ineffably stately and graceful birds, soaring through the air and among the tree trunks with a radar system that any flyer in an F-18 would love to have, and alighting with the gentlest of touches on the tops of fence posts. .

Sometimes I hold debates with them, when they are close enough up there in the trees and grow too contentious with their statements that they must think are irrefutable. When I point out to them the errors of their positions, , they grow quiet and look at me with wonder, but, as with humans, I don't think I've ever convinced them of anything.

Still, I especially enjoy seeing crows walking around on the ground. Then they remind me of oldtime, stuffy, big-butted, beady-eyed English barristers, waddling ahead with authority and with their beaks thrust out as if to say, "What it is!"

My friend and neighbor, H., a hunter, tells me that there is a season on crows, meaning they can be shot only at certain times of the year, and he resents that. He has lots of guns, along with a mandate that he feels he has gotten from somewhere, instructing him to kill a wide range of animals large and small, and crows are second only to snakes on his list of favorite targets.

In most other ways H. is all right, but it's good that he lives on the other side of the river, a mile and a half away. But I know there's always that expression, "as the crow flies."