Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. Also, a purported murderer of cats.

Given that we’re in the middle of the woods, and that I’ve already spoken at some length about critters noodling around in these woods, if I were to tell you that bipeds are not the only residents here, you’d roll your eyes and go read a celebrity twitter feed or something. And I know that writing about one’s pets is one step away from disclosing the finer details of my digestive operations, but let me remind you that we live in a sixteen-foot camper. With a cat and a dog, and sometimes a boy. Things get messy around here.

When I moved up from the city with these pampered city beasts, I’d considered myself the great liberator, bringing them to a milk-and-honey place of abundant roaming and foraging and a return to the truth and violence of animalia. The domesticated quadruped equivalent of the Nearings, is what I was thinking, except with a little Lord-of-the-Flies-style blood on the fur after a good day of play. No time for sex with Krishnamurti in these wilds.

Of course, when we first moved up, we had no dwelling at all. We lived in hammocks for some months. And I couldn’t be responsible for my beasts becoming coyote sushi, nor could I house them elsewhere. So S. did what anybody with skills and an anxiety-riddled mate would do. Which was not “loading her full of mind-altering and mouth-shuttering substances” or “popping her one that she probably deserves.”

He built a pen for them. He did! He built a bestial hammock shack on the hill, so to speak. He covered it up with a tarp to keep them dry, even.

We put the dog and the cat inside, then went on a walk our first day living here, to see if it’d hold. We made it all the way to the back of our property, many acres away, when guess who came tearing through the trees and bounded right up to us, proud of herself for having chewed right through the fencing without slicing through any major arteries?

The dog, that’s who! No city leash-borne oppression here! This dog was liberated. And when I ran back up the hill at top-speed to save the cat from being next seen in an owl pellet, I found her contented and cool in a corner of the pen, likely glad to have the place to herself.

So, the dog’s home was downgraded to a chain tied to a tree, the damage was repaired, and the pen became a Cat Palace. Friends came up to visit and snapped zoo-like photos, and read all about her on a panel display, and laughed at us.

The only problem here was that the Cat Palace, also, did not work. Every night, when we went to the hammocks and the cat got curious, she’d scale a corner and disappear for hours into the thick of fisher cats and coyotes and owls and to this day I don’t know how she didn’t get plucked off. She’s old and slow and spent the bulk of her years inside city apartments, and her senescence to-date basking under a woodstove. I suppose she’s probably pretty gamey by now. Maybe animals can sense this of one another?

Come to think of it, I should have brought the cat with me all those times I went to cheap chinese food joints in the city, to let her warn me of escherichia attack. (Oh, man, I am sitting on my hands to keep myself from making a joke about cheap chinese food and cat meat, but even I’m not that monstrously insensitive.)

This went on for a few nights, until one day the guilt was too much for me, or my expression of this guilt was too much for S., so he rebuilt the Palace with a chain-link escape-free roof. Now, when night came, instead of me staying awake all night worrying about the cat, the cat would climb to the top of the fence, realize she had no way out, and howl all night to keep everyone awake.

By the time we got the Cramper installed, I was a blood-eyed day away from serving her up as Moo Shu to the quartet of barred owls who’d taken up residence by the hammocks.

DITCH CONTEST UPDATE: To-date, we are holding steady at 4 trips to the ditch. However, we’ve got, maybe, another two or three months of winter here, before it becomes “next winter,” so you can still chip your chad.