The Cat Who Walked Home

Things have been quiet on the stationhouse front lately — quiet in that particular way that only means the chaos has moved indoors. We’re having the kitchen renovated, you see, which sounds very grand and civilised until you realise what it actually means in practice: we are currently washing the dishes in the bathroom sink and eating anything that doesn’t require the application of heat. Salads. Cheese and crackers. Bread with things on it. The occasional triumphant assembly of a sandwich so architecturally ambitious it deserves its own blog post.

We do have the microwave, of course, still faithfully humming away in the corner like the last soldier at a forgotten post. Whether what it does to a bowl of leftovers counts as cooking or merely irradiating remains a matter of some philosophical debate in this household. I lean towards the latter. The food comes out hot in some places, glacial in others, and vaguely resentful throughout. But it’s warm-ish, and at this point warm-ish is a luxury we take gratefully.

In the evenings, with the kitchen a construction site and the ambitions of the day duly lowered, we’ve been making our steady way through Supernatural. We’ve reached season thirteen now, which is a genuine achievement of endurance for all parties involved — us and, one imagines, the writers. The production quality is still holding up beautifully, I’ll give them that. But the stories. Oh, the stories are getting weird. And I say that as someone who signed up for a show about two brothers who hunt demons in a muscle car. When the premise is already that unhinged and the plots still manage to make you tilt your head and go “…sorry, what?” — well. You know you’ve come a long way.

But the real news of the week, the thing I actually sat down to tell you about, is this: Bullwinkle came home.

Some of you may remember Bullwinkle. About eight months ago we made the difficult decision to rehome him. He came to us the way so many of ours do — born to a feral little half-Bombay who arrived at our rescue already pregnant, and we kept him ourselves because even though he had a wild streak a mile wide, he loved us. Or rather, to be perfectly honest, he loved Jo. I was tolerated. Jo was worshipped.

Back when we were up in Queensland, Bullwinkle was a happy boy. He spent his daylight hours out in the paddocks, living his best life among the cows, playing at being a very small and slightly deranged member of the herd. But when we moved down here to the stationhouse, something in him wanted out. He became a furred Houdini. A door only had to open the barest sliver and he was gone. We’d be walking out ourselves and he’d come rocketing between our ankles, a small determined missile intent on tripping us into an early grave. It wasn’t safe — not for him, not for our necks.

So we gave him to a young lad who’d often visited us and whom Bullwinkle adored. That boy could not so much as stand still without Bullwinkle wrapping himself devotedly around his legs. The lad had property. Room to roam. Cows, even, I think. It seemed like the kindest thing we could do for our adventurous little man — send him somewhere he could be as free as he so clearly needed to be.

And then life did what life does. The young lad was sent to live with his mum down in Victoria. And ever since, we’ve been quietly trying to work out how to get Bullwinkle back home where he belongs.

Turns out we needn’t have troubled ourselves. Bullwinkle 41

Khad his own plans.

He arrived home on Monday.

Now, I want you to sit with the geography of this for a moment, because I’ve had all week and I still can’t quite get my head around it. He travelled twenty-five kilometres. He crossed a major highway. He crossed two main feeder roads. He navigated country he’d been driven through, not walked, and only the once. And he did all of it, every single perilous kilometre of it, and turned up on our doorstep looking as sleek and handsome and infuriatingly pleased with himself as the day he left. Not a scratch on him. Not a hair out of place. Just Bullwinkle, home, as though he’d only popped out for the afternoon and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how any of them do the things they do. But I know that some part of that small feral heart had decided where home was, and no highway, no distance, no sensible odds were going to argue him out of it.

There was, of course, one small complication in all of this. Jo — the sun around which Bullwinkle’s entire universe orbits — is up in Queensland at the moment. So, the grand reunion happened over FaceTime, which is a sentence I never imagined typing about a semi-feral cat. I held up the phone, Bullwinkle stared into it with those unblinking eyes, and Jo cried. Properly cried. And I’ll admit I got a bit wobbly myself, though I’ll deny it if pressed. Whether Bullwinkle understood that the small glowing rectangle contained his beloved I couldn’t tell you, but he sat there and listened to her voice, tail twitching, and that was enough for both of us.

He’s asleep as I write this, one paw over his nose, the whole twenty-five kilometres already forgotten. Fifteen-odd cats in this house and somehow there’s always room for one more — especially when he’s gone to that much trouble to be counted.

But here’s the thing that’s really got me, the part that turns a happy story into something that sits right down in your chest. Because as much as this is Jo getting her Bullwinkle back, it’s more than that. It’s Chookie getting her brother back.

You have to understand — there were three of them, once. Three kittens who grew up together at the same time: Chookie, Bullwinkle, and Rocky. None from the same litter, but littermates in their hearts. And Rocky. Oh, Rocky. He was born with cat flu and had a stroke when he was still tiny, and I bottle-fed that little scrap of a thing, taught him how to use the litter box, carried him around tucked into my bra for the first three months of his life like I’d sprouted a third boob. He was mine in the way the fragile ones always are. We lost him not long after we moved down here, and there’s a Rocky-shaped hole in this house that never quite closed over.

So when we gave Bullwinkle away, Chookie lost the last of her real brothers. And she’s been lonely ever since — that flat, quiet kind of lonely you can see in an animal if you’re paying attention. She had us, she had the crowd of other cats, but she didn’t have her people, if you know what I mean.

The first night Bullwinkle was back, the two of them curled up together and slept like the last eight months had never happened. Like no highway had ever separated them. And now they both have their friend again — the one who remembers Rocky, the one who came from the same beginning.

Welcome home, Bullwinkle. You mad, magnificent creature. We won’t be opening any doors too wide for a while — and we’ll have you and Jo in the same room again soon enough. But I think Chookie’s the one who was waiting for you all along.