Daily Excerpt: Intrepid: Fearless Immigrant from Jordan to America (Leaver & Leaver) - A Real Home and Food

 

Excerpt

A Real Home and Food

For the first time, Intrepid had a limitless supply of food and water. He understood that he could eat whatever and however much he wanted. He did not understand the limitlessness of the supply. So, he hunkered down beside the cat food bowl in the kitchen, never leaving it except to use the litter box. 

 How he knew to use the litter box was an enigma. Perhaps he saw the other cats using it. Perhaps something about it came to him instinctively. From the very first day, he was always a clean cat. 

Ultimately, after a number of weeks, he realized that the food would not disappear, and he ventured out to explore our other rooms, all of them very large: two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, and a closed-in sunroom. One by one, he explored them all. 

In the living room, he discovered tall plants. Somehow, he discovered that though the plants were five and six feet tall, if he could get a running start, he could take a kamikaze leap from half-way across the living room, land on the plant stalk, and tip it off, dumping dirt on our floor. We got taller plants; he still kamikazed them. We got bigger, heavier pots with more, heavier dirt, even using rocks at the bottom. He still successfully kamikazed them. That is when he got his name: Intrepid. (Not that it did not take a fair amount of intrepidity for him to have made it as far as our house.) 

He also discovered the large crawl space above the refrigerator in the kitchen, and he and most of the other cats liked to sleep there. It was quiet, dry, warm. They could, in a sense, next together. In this, he lived up to his name. The jumps from floor to counter, counter to refrigerator, refrigerator to crawl space ranged from three feet to five feet. None of these jumps fazed Intrepid. When he reached adulthood, he began jumping from the floor to the tops of the cupboards at least eight feet up, if not more. 

One day, as we were putting away the groceries from a shopping trip, Intrepid’s little nose sniffed out a packet of ham in a plastic package. While we had our backs turned, he leapt onto the counter, grabbed the ham with his teeth, quickly scooted across the stove, and pranced along the windowsill with tail straight up, as became his habit whenever he smelled food being dispense from afar. We caught him just as he was reaching the end of the windowsill and was scrunching down for the big leap to the crawl space with a great treasure in his mouth. We very much disappointed his plan for a tasty cache. 

At night, Murjan, the alpha cat of our group of now four cats, took on the function of caretaker and missing mother. He would gather Intrepid into his arms and sleep with him in this protective position all night. As Intrepid grew, the protective attitude continued, expressed as a one-paw cuddle.

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