Beowulf

Beowulf: the middle black & white cat. Waiting for rain to subside.

I’ve written about Beowulf before. Some years ago, my sister Mary took him in with his two feral brothers. For years, Beo and his bros lived in Mary and Neal’s massive cellar (in Georgia,) where there are windows and eaves and furniture. They were terrified of people. But in 2020, when I visited her during during Covid, she asked me to adopt one of these guys. So down into the cellar I went.

The cats were hidden. I found a container of treats and shook it. “Hey, guys, who wants to move to Florida?”

A gorgeous black and white cat peered out at me from behind a couch. I crouched and shook some treats into my hand and set them on the floor. The cat looked interested but wary. Yet, he strutted out and butted his head against my knee as if to ask, Hey, you a friend?

I stroked him, then he went over to the treats and gobbled them up. When he was finished, he returned to me for another head butt, then off he went into the secrets of the cellar. I snapped a photo of him and texted it to Mary.

I want him.
That’s Beowulf!

She joined me in the cellar and he came out to greet her and she nodded. “I’ll drive him to Orlando in a couple weeks. Can you meet me there?”

So that’s what we did. And I called him Beo, for short.

He hated the carrier and complained about it for three hours during my drive back to South  Florida the next day. As soon as I brought him into the house and released him, he took off and spent the next 10 days under a bed. Once he saw open doors and windows and realized he had the freedom to go out into the backyard, it was his favorite place to be. Eventually he got braver and ventured to the front yard, the driveway.

Now, more than  four years later, he’s still the most vocal cat I’ve ever had. When he has been in the house too long, he lets you know it and moves from room to room, complaining. If the weather is too hot or too cold or too wet, I keep him in. Or try to. But he’s a crafty guy and will dart through an open door before you even notice the breeze caused by his passage.

No cats or dogs or coyotes roam this neighborhood at night. There’s no traffic. I don’t think he goes far. I suspect he sits in our front yard or our neighbor’s backyard, curled up somewhere in his freedom, and watches the light of the moon and stars. I may get him a GPS just to find out for sure.

His name is interesting and I don’t know why Mary named him Beowulf. I never thought to ask. Here’s what wikipedia says:

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature.

Recently, Beo suffered congestive heart failure. Good vets and meds have him back up and doing his usual stuff. But he sort of avoids me now because I’m the one who gives him the meds. Chicken-flavored liquid diuretics (3 of them) and a blood thinner because he has a clot in his heart.

The vet told me he eventually would die of heart failure and advised me to keep him indoors from now on. But knowing his history, as a cellar cat to a free cat, I felt that would be cruel. He does sleep inside at night, especially now when there’s so much rain, and is the first out in the morning.

And just so we’re clear, J.D. Vance, I’m not a childless cat lady.