Today I sat under the tall evergreens eating my hot lunch, and scribbling blog notes on a legal pad. The picnic table being both wet and grimed with long years, I perched in my warm greatcoat on a scant layer of legal pad paper. I was knee-deep in a shoewear-related musing doubtless destined for some future article, when I had a visitor. He broke from the trees and shrubs like a small king, demanding homage.

Now, in my two months on this campus, I have seen an entire herd of deer, the tracks of a coyote, one newt of ill repute, and two distinct black cats. But no such specimen of cathood had previously crossed my path or even fled the corner of my eye. I look at him as I scrawl these words. A sleek and well-fed feline, with clear blue eyes just slightly crossed. His thick fur, impeccably clean and without scar of battle, is a dignified black and white tabby at his face, but gives way at his pricked ears to a milky white upon which stripes are etched in dusty taupe. Not merely stripes, not tabby, not “tiger-cat” stripes, but indeed tiger stripes which band his legs and give him an air of power. One patch of this dusty color streaks down his hindmost back, trailing off as it reaches his tail, which is black relieved with white sparks of thwarted banding. His legs from behind are also dark, and his underside a spotless cream. He moves with assured majesty and feral caution, and while he mewed for my attention only until my (sadly vegetarian) meal was concluded, it seemed not a cry for help but a call to worship. He never attempted the supine twine of the legs or any such base inveiglement, but contented himself with sitting just out of clear view, noting his continued presence in measured tones.

He looks at me now, wondering why I disturb his nap with the loud rustling of paper and insistent skitter of pen, and I am unsure how to deal with him, how to show my respect to this manifest spirit of the magisterial hunt, how to worship his beauty without caging it, how to offer homage without insult. And so it is, as always, to my pen I turn, to stop this moment of watchfulness and this glorious impossibility of a cat from passing beyond my sight and being lost to me in the shadowy woods.