Cat's Paw

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Harold N Walters
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Cat's Paw

Post by Harold N Walters »

“It’s for your own good, Pepper,” said Festus.

Then he brought down the axe.

Two weeks earlier, Pepper, Festus’ valiant black and grey she-cat fought a lynx in the woods behind the barn. Fought and lost.

Festus had heard cats yowling in the night but had paid it no mind; cats by their nocturnal nature prowl and howl in the night.

Next morning he found Pepper lying wounded on the porch. Her face and body were raked by long scratches, none of which appeared to be killers, not at a glance anyway. Pepper’s left front paw showed the most serious injury. It was mangled as if its bones had been chewed bloody.

“Reckon you run into a lynx or a damn big tom,” Festus said while kneeling to examine Pepper’s wounds.

Lifting her gently and trying to ignore her piteous maroawing, Festus carried Pepper to the barn and fixed her a bed on a sack of hay.

Because Festus lived in a time and place where folks mostly administered to their ailing animals as best they could manage, he settled her as comfortably as he could and left to fetch some things to tend her injuries.

Festus returned with liniments, ointments, and bandage cloths he had sterilized on the stove top. Despite Pepper’s moaning, throaty growl, he doctored her damaged paw and wrapped it with the scorched gauze and cotton.

“It’s not looking good, Pepper,” he said. “We can only hope for the best.”

The next day when he peeled the bandage from Pepper’s wound Festus grimaced and reflexively turned his head aside from the foul smell rising from the cat’s festering paw.

“Phew,” he said, then swabbed the wound clean, applied fresh unguents and fastened a new dressing.
Pepper offered a feeble mew.

Festus left Pepper with a bowl of watery milk into which he had stirred some alcohol-laced tonic on the off chance that it would be of some medicinal value.

“I’ll have another look at it tomorrow,” he said and left, praying Pepper was tough enough to fight off the infection.

Daily, Pepper’s paw worsened, despite Festus’ regular attention. And daily through the slits of her feverish eyes Pepper watched Festus clean and wrap her paw.

Even though she lapped feebly at the saucer of milk she lost weight; her body pined away.

At the beginning of Pepper’s second week of misery, Festus feared there was no hope for her recovery. Increased swelling in the mauled paw led Festus to believe blood poisoning was likely to spread up her leg. The still weeping wound continued to stink of putrefying flesh.

“Gangrene, I reckon.” Festus whispered as if Pepper knew the meaning of the word.

By the end of the week, Festus knew he must decide Pepper’s fate. Would he continue to nurse the sick cat, or, as much as he hated to see the suffering cat dead, put her out of her misery?

Traditionally, folks in Pelican Cove simply drowned unwanted cats. Yet Festus smote his forehead as if thumping his brain to discover a better means of despatching Pepper.

He sat on the hay beside Pepper, gently scratching between her ears as he had so often done when she jumped into his lap while he savoured his after supper smoke.

Through the barn’s opened door Festus could look across his yard to his woodpile and see his heaviest wood-cleaving axe wedged, like the gnomon of a sundial, deep into the top of the stump he used as a chopping block. Beyond the woodpile he saw the bucket of pitch he recently had used to patch a leak in his woodshed’s roof.

After studying and sorting his thoughts, Festus sighed.

“That might actually work, Pepper,” he said. “It’s certainly worth a try.”

Hauling himself to his feet, Festus left Pepper’s sick bed, strode across the yard, hoisted the pitch bucket and entered the woodshed.

Soon the hiss of a blowtorch filled the woodshed.

When Festus stepped back outside carrying the bucket of pitch, he wore a pair of thick leather gloves, ones he used to protect his hands when working with extremely hot liquids like the molten lead he sometimes used to seal cast iron pipes—or to handle heated tar.

He set the steaming bucket of pitch on the ground to the left of his chopping block.

He wiggled the axe loose and lodged it flat on top of the block.

Turning, he headed for the barn.

Inside the barn, Festus lifted Pepper and cradled her as carefully as he could in the palms of the heavy gloves.

Grimly, he set out for the chopping block.

Within a minute, because imminent harshness, like lancing a boil with one smooth scalpel stroke, should be swift, Festus said, “It’s for your own good, Pepper.”

Then he brought down the axe.

At noon of a sunny day almost four weeks after Pepper fought the lynx, Festus stood spraddle-legged at his chopping block splitting large junks of birch as he had been doing all morning. No evidence of Pepper’s blood remained in the diced top of the block.

Festus whistled while he worked. Sweat darkened his hat band.

Resting in the shade beneath the woodshed’s eave, Pepper licked at the remaining scabs of tar that Festus had used to cauterize and seal the stump of her leg a split second after he had brought down the axe.

Pepper watched Festus intently, her face as inscrutable as the face of an Egyptian cat idol; as inscrutable as the face of a Nubian queen watching a toiling slave who had violated her body to save her life.

End
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