Sometimes scary things happen...and sometimes things happen that are just too embarrassing to talk about, but maybe I should start at the beginning...and by the way, this post is not about goats.
Those who know me well may realize that while I care for (and care for) Emerson and Elliot, my heart belongs to someone else. For the past nine years, Benny has been so much more than a pet - he is joy and affection and love and companionship all rolled up into fourteen pounds of unfathomably soft fur and the light of my life. Born in a wishing well and abandoned by his feral cat mother, he was bottle-raised almost since birth and will snuggle up with us like no other cat I've known. (And for anyone who is wondering, no, I do not still give him a daily bottle). Benny is gentle, quiet and unassuming, which explains how he came in last evening from his nightly foray into the yard and lower fields and sat silently in the corner of the kitchen, dripping red all over the floor and waiting patiently for someone to notice that his entire chest was covered in blood.
Frantic, Emily and I tried to clean him up, to find the source of all this bleeding, to know what to do. It took me less than three minutes to realize that we needed to put in an emergency call to the vet. Several years ago Benny was attacked by a hawk, barely surviving the deep puncture wounds of the predator's sharp talons. Another time, a nasty respiratory virus kept him hospitalized for a week. As we bundled him into a fleece blanket and sped the two miles to our local veterinary clinic, I wondered what could have done this to him. My husband had seen a red fox in the field last month, and owls and hawks populate the woods below our house - what fierce creature had harmed our gentle cat this time?
Antiseptic irrigations, injections of antibiotics and painkillers, and the most humiliating shaving of most of the fur from his chest and shoulder, I was finally able to bring him home this afternoon. I spoke to the vet (whom we have trusted with our pets these last twenty-some years and whose veterinary knowledge seems limitless) and I asked him what animal could have caused these grievous injuries. Gravely, he showed me each site, describing tissue depth and wound patterns, explaining how, although the bleeding had been profuse and the area extensive, the cuts were not deep enough to be blamed on a hawk, not large enough to attribute to even another cat. Based on all the forensic evidence and decades of experience, his professional opinion was that our beloved Benny had been bested by...a mouse.
A desperate mouse, to be sure, probably a mouse scrabbling and kicking in Benny's paws and fighting for its life, and possibly even a large mouse, but definitely still...a mouse.
First, the unilateral baldness and awful scabs, then the humiliation of being sat on to have a pill forced down his throat twice a day for a week...the embarrassment of admitting his foe is almost too much to bear. If you believe in the beasts known as ROUS* which terrorized Wesley and Buttercup in The Princess Bride, stick to that story. We have decided to tell people it was a fierce wolf, a herd of vicious possums, a mountain lion perhaps. He fought off a pack of wild dogs to save a newborn kittten...please help me keep his secret!
*ROUS - Rodents of Unusual Size (read the book or watch the movie!)
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