Nate H. 5/25/06 – 6/24/09 Nate didn’t meow a lot. He’d rather catch your eye and motion in the direction of his command. After all, he was Nate, King of the Jungle (aka our house and yard) and meowing was for beggars, not royalty.

I am a cat person. Throughout my life I’ve had numerous cats and couldn’t imagine life without a cat companion. But in 1993 at the age of 37, I gave birth to the first of four children who would be allergic to cats, dogs, bunnies, basically any choice of a fuzzy, cuddly pet. Our old dog and old cat both passed away soon after the birth of my daughter before the birth of my triplet sons who were born 20 months later. It was sad to be without a cat and dog, but having four children in 20 months kept us busy enough to not dwell on it much.

In 2001, a white and black spotted domestic bunny adopted us. She’d been abandoned in the small woods behind our house and we brought her in to save her from the coyotes. Two weeks later she gave birth and then we had two bunnies. We were careful to keep kids and bunnies apart and wash-up thoroughly after they made contact. Eventually the kid’s allergies to bunnies, at one time pretty severe, curbed to a reasonable level. Similarly, a friend of the family said she was allergic to cats but after adopting a very young kitten and raising it to adult hood, she was able to desensitize her allergies, much like having allergy shots. It worked for her, so we thought we’d give it a try.
We first adopted a 12 week old female beagle because the kids were pining for a dog. We named her Marlee, a twist between our family’s favorite book character and my husband’s sister. Then we got the cat, because if we were going to have a dog, I was sure going to have my cat! The allergy desensitization theory worked (luckily) and now all four of my children are largely un-allergic, at least to our animals.

Other cats and dogs sometimes cause minor reactions, but they are for the most part unaffected by our animals. The cat we chose was not the cat we were seeking. I wanted a calico female to match the beagle. Instead we fell head over heels for a fluffy orange male tabby named Nate. He stole our hearts when he batted at my son, Sam every time Sam jumped up to see Nate in the upper cage. Nate beseeched our family to get him out of exile in the cages of the SW Washington Humane Society so he could rightly rule his kingdom. We complied with his request.

The SWHS won’t allow a non-altered cat to leave their premises, so our 12 week old 3 lb. underweight and underfed Nate had to undergo surgery. We kept him in the master bathroom for 2 weeks to heal before introducing him to the beagle. The family spent a lot of time on the bathroom floor in those two weeks being entertained by the cutest, funniest little fluff ball imaginable. It was clear he wasn’t quite sure what use people were in his world, except we were there to entertain him at his will (we didn’t tell him that he was really our entertainment).
Marlee the beagle and Nate the kitten soon became best friends. They would begin and end each day chasing each other around the house. The pair was inseparable and always looking for mischief. Nate eventually got used to living with humans and enjoyed his life of ruling his domain and would often perch high above his kingdom in the tree-house or on the fence to make sure his kingdom was safe and his subjects were obeying as expected. He would sleep at my feet at night and wake up early with my husband, stretching and purring ready to be served breakfast and pampered as required.

One day when Nate was in his tree-house perch, the tree-men I had hired came to take down a dead tree next to the tree-house. I remembered that the tree-men would be there, only after I heard the buzz of the chain saw and ran outside to find out what was making all the noise. My heart dropped when I found Nate was nowhere to be seen. Out front, the tree-men were busy grinding the limbs and branches of the tree thereby making all kinds of racket both front and back yards.

It was useless to search for Nate with all the racket occurring so as soon as the tree-men left, we searched high and low and called and whistled for Nate, to no avail. For three days we looked for Nate calling from early in the morning until late into the night, searching through the woods behind us, up trees, under houses, everywhere we could imagine. After the third night we felt we probably wouldn’t see Nate again. If he were OK, he would have been at home. He had never spent even one night away from home so chances were after three nights he must not be able to come home anymore. The kids went to sleep heartbroken.

Though I thought it was futile, I kept calling Nate late into the night. At about 1:15 in the morning I thought I heard a faint response to my whistle. I whistled and called again and though very faint, thought I heard a meow in reply. What cat would respond to my call other than Nate? I thought I was hearing things so I got my daughter out of bed and made her listen. She heard it too! We went across the street and into the backyards of our sleeping neighbors and the meowing answers got louder and closer. We ran home and woke my husband to help us in our search. It didn’t take but another 15 minutes or so for him to locate Nate more than 30’ up in a fir tree in our neighbor’s back yard. They have two large dogs and Nate must have made his way into their yard looking for refuge from the tree-men only to be frightened by the dogs. So up the tree he went and stayed for the next few days.

We woke the boys up. They were overjoyed even though it was now past 2AM. We woke our neighbors up just to let them know we’d be in their back yard (they were not quite as overjoyed). We then got out the extension ladder, and went to work to get Nate down. It took more than an hour, a can of tuna and my husband hanging precariously from limbs above the top rung of the ladder, but we finally got our kitty back. I have never been so happy to see any animal in my life! The family and I fed and watered and brushed Nate until he collapsed into the first sleep he probably was able to get in the three-plus day ordeal.

Nate loved the winter and snow. He would play for hours, jumping at the flakes and scooting through the piles of snow until he would have to come in and commandeer my husband’s recliner to recuperate.

The summer following Nate’s tree-man fiasco, he became ill with some unidentifiable ailment. The vet thought it might be FIP, which is an untreatable, fatal ailment, but she gave us treatments to administer, just in case. My husband was taught to hydrate our kitty using an IV bag and needle and infusing liquid into his back muscles. The boys and my daughter were taught how to water down some high-caloric cat foot and force feed him with a syringe. He was given shots and came home with oral med’s and we worked with Nate day and night for a couple of weeks before he snapped out of it and began eating and pooping again. I was never so happy to see (and smell) stinky cat litter! The vet thought it couldn’t possibly have been FIP since that disease is 100% fatal, and assumed he must have just picked up a really bad virus. My son Joe volunteers at the Humane Society so there was a possibility that he brought home some nasty bug. We were so very grateful for Nate’s recovery and figured he had used up three of his lives by then (his rescue from the shelter might have been considered the first).

Once Nate was out of the woods and completely recovered, we adopted a calico female we named Mia (we now had Marlee and Mia). Though Nate wasn’t happy with the adoption, he was gentle and accepting of the adorable (annoying to him) new member of the family. Mia thought Nate was her mom, but then again she also thought the beagle was her mom, so she pestered Nate and Marlee pretty much constantly.

The following spring I noticed that Nate was holding his head at an odd angle. He looked like a circus horse with too-tight reigns that force the horse’s heads to look like an upside down “J”. I also noticed that he’d stumble at the top of the stairs a lot of the time. He’d not quite leap high enough to make the top stair and would crash his nose into the riser of the next stair. I mentioned it to the family but the signs were very subtle and nobody thought there was a problem except me. I was glad to be able to brush it off as my over-protective motherly doting and nothing more. Except it kept getting worse, until the family began to agree there was something wrong with Nate. I took him to the vet with a heavy heart knowing that these symptoms weren’t going to be easy to treat.

The vet thought Nate had the neurological form of FIP but said that it was impossible to know for sure except post-mortem. We kept hope that the vet was wrong about the diagnosis since we were able to overcome the same diagnosis last summer. But Nate couldn’t walk straight after a while and he seemed to be losing a bit of his peripheral vision. We took him to a second vet for another opinion and received the same diagnosis with the possibility that he could have a very rare parasite infection. Because we had nothing to lose, we put him on antibiotics for the possible infection and he seemed to respond well. Before we knew it, he was jumping on the fence and eating again. But the remission was short lived. He began to lose the ability to walk up the stairs, jump down from the bed, and eventually couldn’t make it over the sides of his litter box. We replaced the litter box with a paint pan and sand (he didn’t like the hard litter on his feet any longer) and made up various beds in many places which he’d sleep in head first, bottom sticking out of the bedding. He eventually got to the point where he was walking on his front ‘elbows” instead of his feet and he had trouble eating and swallowing. But he was still happy. Every time he’d see me he would stand up and greet me with happiness. And every time I’d pet his head he’d purr and climb into my lap or next to me just to be close. Some people questioned keeping “a cat” alive who was obviously so sick, but he was happy. I couldn’t see ending his life just because it wasn’t what others thought it should be. As long as he purred and seemed happy to see me, I felt he had enough quality of life to keep living.

I would get up every night at least once or twice to check in on Nate. He would rather have been sleeping with me but toward the end it was impossible to keep him free of urine and sand, though I’d clean him several times a day. You could smell him when you walked into the room, which was pretty sad for a formerly spotless King. But he was still happy; he was dirty and stinky, walking on elbows and unable to jump up into his perches, but still happy to see me and the family and still happy to sit near or on us and receive his loving.

One night in late June, I was up twice to check on Nate and he purred and sat close to me both times, just like every night. But when I got up in the morning, he was no longer with us. His nervous system must have stopped working that night. He was curled on his favorite bed (we called it his memory bed since he had slept in it from the day he arrived at our home). It was a sad, sad day for our family. We had lost both bunnies by that time but to lose Nate was overwhelmingly heart-wrenching. Two months later we still miss him and talk about how wonderful he was.

Nate worked his way into the hearts of our family in a rare way that won’t be duplicated. His beauty, his intelligence, and his happiness with life can never be replaced. We still have Marlee and Mia but our hearts ache for that fluffy orange kitten Nate, King of the Jungle.

Penni H.