A Friend in High Places
illustration by Nina Judson Crespo
A Friend in High Places by George N Wallace
Pete is a barn cat -a part-time barn cat that is, inhabiting one of two hay barns depending on the ebb and flow of farm activities. He’s a barn cat until haystacks shrink from front to back and then in stature and no longer afford his realm a certain level of dignity including a safe, lofty view in several cardinal directions and a reasonable population of Field Mice which waxes and wanes in the course of each barn year.
With changing conditions, he considers his options. He may go to the utility shed to see if the back window of the 4430 John Deer happens to still be locked open so he can scramble up the lift arms, through the five-inch gap and onto the sheepskin seat pad, which apart from being real comfortable, provides a southern panorama and is an excellent control tower for Starling traffic.
A closely related alternative course of action in his semi-wild feline playbook, is to squeeze through the hydraulic hose passageway into the sunroom of the backhoe cab which lives outside and provides an unprecedented 360-degree command post from which to formulate plans regarding the baby rabbits that frequent the nearby gated pipe or fence post piles.
Later, when cold and wind prevail, and most bird watching has gone south, he may choose the upper ledge in the carport attached to the bunkhouse shop. There, a hybrid electric vehicle is plugged in overnight which ladders him up and allows the inner artist to create elegant muddy paw print patterns on the car’s roof, not to mention the ledge’s fine easterly view for dog defense and easy access to the shop’s cat door.
Now if it turns real sub-zero cold and/or the snow is deep, Pete has been sighted inside the bunkhouse shop, where above the workbench out of canine range, near a cat food bowl, a pad has been placed by the thoughtful humans that co-habit the realm for just such emergencies. During normal fluctuations in the biosphere, the only way they know he goes in there is that some mornings, the level of cat food in the bowl has mysteriously dropped?
Pete who doesn’t really need humans until he does, will on a windy, still bitter but sunny Spring morning, climb up to the warm lee found on a second story bedroom porch, above the bird feeders hanging from Wild Plum and Chokecherry branches below, a spot further shielded from the wind by a five-row windbreak, where he settles onto the serape covered chair cushion.
As the constantly moving birds below are not vulnerable like a shivering Mountain Bluebird forced down into the loafing shed by a wet blizzard, because he eats and hunts at night, and since the porch offers up a marvelous Northeast to South sweep across Dry Creek Reservoir, valley, and wetlands to the Eastern hay fields,
it may be that he just likes the view.