I saw one friendly approach which could have turned out disastrously for Knees. A boat was about a hundred yards out from our dock. A man and a woman were in it, fishing. Knees, after considerable racket, worked herself up to the proper pitch and took off. She could be quite a sight to an unsuspecting stranger, big white wings flapping, feet slapping the surface of the water, coming right at you, quonking furiously, moving at perhaps twenty miles an hour. While the man merely stared at the oncoming goose, the woman sprang to her feet, grabbed an oar and took aim like Mickey Mantle. Some people are afraid of birds, and some have heard that geese are dangerous, confusing them, no doubt, with swans. Knees halted ten feet short of the boat. The woman sat down. The man started the motor, and they roared away from there, and Knees came paddling thoughtfully home.
Usually, when boats did not leave, if we called to Knees she would often come chugging in, talking all the way about what she’d been doing.
When anybody went swimming, she was transported. She would go right along with them, yap into their faces, and try to stand on their shoulders. With Johnny and Anne, she would dive and circle their legs, brushing against them under water.
Best of all, Knees loved the catamaran. I had ordered it. It came in a cardboard box of suitable size to make a coffin for the Cardiff giant. The detailed instructions said the average twelve-year-old could put it together in an afternoon. It took me three days, plus considerable help the final afternoon from Dorothy’s brother. Under sail, the people sit on a canvas sling, about eight feet square, not unlike a trampolin, laced to a frame elevated six inches above the twin hulls.
We had only to start rigging the sail, and Knees would come out of a sound sleep and come paddling around the headland toward the other bay, quonking with expectant pleasure.
Not long before Labor Day, Dorothy and I took Knees on her final sail of the summer. We crossed the lake and ran slowly before a light breeze down the row of camps on the other side, about sixty feet off shore. By then Knees was a celebrity bird all over that lake.
We would hear child voices yell from shore. “Hey! There’s Knees! Hi, Knees. Hey, Knees!” And that bird would respond, each time, by gathering herself and giving out with such huge honks, they resonated and echoed off the hills and deafened us and delighted a whole lake shore of children.
Our nephew, John Prentiss, visited us one day last summer and brought Kristin to meet us, the girl he is now married to. Kristin has lovely long hair, a natural strawberry blond shade. They sat down by the dock, and Knees circled Kristin, gabbling with excited approval. And finally she began to preen Kristin’s long hair, strand by strand, working her way around the girl’s head, uncannily gentle, making her small pleasure sounds for the entire fifteen minutes it took.
I used the incident in a short story which This Week Magazine published in November 1963.
The goose was the good thing last summer, and Grey was the bad thing. He had grown into a large and handsome cat and, I am afraid, a bold and reckless cat. The second trip Johnny and Anne took, they left Grey with us too. He was happy and busy. He despised Knees, probably resenting the attention she got. When he learned how afraid she was of any subtle rustling in the brush, he would torment her in the evening by stalking her, sometimes sending her in a wild honking dash out to where she would float beside her buoy, reluctant to return.
It was his habit in the evening to go in and out through the window a half dozen times after dark, before we went to bed. One night he went out just before dark. He didn’t return during the evening. We went out and called him. He did not return all night. Had he returned, he would have made himself evident. He had a curious trick. He didn’t sleep with the people, but when he decided it was time they should get up, he didn’t holler. He merely walked across them, stomping. He would step lightly at other times. In the early morning he would deliberately stomp. There is no other word to describe it.
For days we walked and searched and called. Had he been in the area and alive, he certainly could have found his way back by the periodic daytime QUONK of Miss Knees. Maybe something got him. Possibly, on the other hand, somebody picked him up. He was a handsome cat with a perfect confidence that all people bore him good will. He would have gone up to anyone who spoke to him.
It is a miserable experience to lose someone else’s cat. Johnny and Anne were all too tolerant about it, though very saddened to lose him so soon after losing Jaymie. After all the years and all the cats, the odds ran out last summer.
Sixteen
They took Knees back to Michigan. She had made some casual attempts to build a nest in the grass near the Piseco dock. Back in Michigan, each night, they put her on a small screened porch. She built a nest at the foot of the porch steps at one side. One morning Anne found Knees running back and forth in front of the screen door in considerable agitation. It was a cold morning. Anne opened the door, Knees ran out, plumped herself into her grass nest and stood up moments later to reveal a large, steaming goose egg. One has eggs on the nest, not on the porch.
They came down to visit us last Christmas. They boarded Knees with a very sympathetic veterinarian they know, and by Christmas they had replaced Jaymie and Grey with five cats and brought them all along.
I shall not go into the characters, habits, traumas, and inter-personal relationships of Lisa, Gimli, Abishag, and group, except to say that I would rather burn bamboo under my fingernails than drive three thousand miles with five cats.
It is too bad Roger was in sorry shape while they were there. The minor athletics of the water hole had become too much for him, and he had settled for a yellow water dish under the bathroom lavatory, which he kept conning one or the other of us to empty and refill with fresh. He slept a great deal, had difficulty getting onto his feet, walked like an old, old man, and was not interested in going outdoors even in the daytime. No Flying Red Horse. Meager appetite.
As far as appetite is concerned, Roger never hollered for his food. During Geoff’s lifetime he never had to. Geoff hollered for two. After Geoff died, Roger’s procedure was to go to his kitchen corner when Dorothy was getting a meal and merely sit and stare up at her with a total, fixed, placid expectancy. Every time she glanced down, he was looking into her face. Unlike Geoff and most other animals, Roger has never been reluctant to stare you right in the eye. And, if there is a face on his level, as when he is atop the bar, he likes to tuck his chin under, purr, and press his furry forehead against yours.
During this past year Roger has added one new little trick to a lifetime of improvisation. Dorothy almost always wears barefoot sandals. When she is at the sink and has not noticed him for what he considers too long a period, he moves closer to sit with one front paw resting on the top of her foot. It is a trusting and gentle reminder. Here is your cat. It is not something which could be an accident. It is too consistent. It establishes physical contact and, as such, is related to affection. For an old cat it seems that the food relationship becomes somewhat ceremonial, with a customary pattern of asking and receiving, even when it ends with but one small mouthful and the plodding return to the soft couch.