Champ in MontaukA Cat’s Tale

By Maxine Harris

Champ was quite an old cat when he came to Montauk. Champ was a city cat, and he had spent all his life in Manhattan.

He drove up to Montauk in style, in an old Cadillac, with his head hidden in my son Morgan’s armpit, because he really disliked driving in cars.

It was the end of summer. The leaves were falling off the oaks. The grackles were fl ying through the trees and har-vesting the acorns and berries when he arrived. I thought

he would be scared of so many birds, but he came when I called him, tramping up through them, apparently uncon-cerned.

Champ had longish bushy fur in subtle grays, with spots on his belly, like a trout. The spots showed when he lay on his back. He also snored. His paws were very small, which made him look as though he was walking on tip toes, or in high heels. He was not a big cat, but he was

heavy on his feet and his tail always curled to the right. I had shared space with many cats in my life, but Champ communicated the most, as he always let you know what he felt. Being heavy on his paws, he often fooled me into thinking there was someone in the house, and he had an unnerving way of coming up behind me when I was on the computer. He would stand up on his hind legs and place his paw on my shoulder, which usually made me jump, because he really felt like a person.

I started to look at the Hither Hills through Champ’s eyes. We lived a few blocks from the ocean, up in the oak trees that housed many birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and lots of deer. Luckily champ was not much interested in the birds, but the chipmunks were another question, so he spent many hours hole-watching.

For a cat that had spent all his life in the city, Champ adjusted to all the animals and country life very quickly. He found his favorite spot up on the deck ledge near the kitchen window, and from there he could look down the path to the house and over the oaks to the ocean.

At fi rst he tried to stake out his territory and would circle the house and scratch on the trees, I would see his paw prints in the snow in the morning. Raccoons and possums lived on the western side of the house, where the sun set, and at night, if you went out and looked with a fl ashlight, you could see the raccoons up in the tree looking down at you with their glinting eyes. In the winter they would drag the garbage out into the snow. From his favorite spot, Champ would watch the long lines of geese with their wonderful goose calls as they headed south, and back again north, as the year warmed up.

In the spring, the deer had two fawns in the long grass at the back of the house. The woods came alive around us with numerous birds, some of them coming from far away, and some passing through on their way to other distant regions of the Americas. Some liked to stay, like the sand swallows, who came from Africa to spend the summer in their round clay homes high in the cliffs above the ocean. They would swoop over the beach catching insects. The robins, with their fat red breasts, were here all winter, and would come out in full force in the spring, fl ipping the

old leaves over as they looked for insects. The wood doves’ cooing would echo through the woods and over the hills, and the land came alive around us. Hawks wheeled high in the sky, making their high-pitched calls, and the ravens in the high pines cast black shad-ows as they fl ew over the house. As they did this, the blue jays would call out, warning the surrounding life. My favorite birds were the chickadees, which before Champ came, used to fl y onto the house and sit on the tree we had there and go for walks with us in the woods, and the chipmunks, which used to come into the house and knew where we kept the chips in the cupboard.

Champ continued his hole-watching, but the holes were many, with chipmunks popping up and down constantly. He did not know which ones to watch and eventually gave it up. So far Champ sounds like a sweet cat, but he wasn’t — he was an old curmudgeon. There was a dark side to champ; he would insist that you that you be aware of him and be in the moment, and he would lash out or hiss if he thought you were not suffi ciently aware. He also demanded re-spect. Respect was very important to Champ.

Not long after Champ arrived, he went off into the woods. As he went, he looked back up at me in the window and he did not come back. Morgan and I went crazy looking everywhere, putting up notices all over Montauk, but there was no response.

After nine agonizing days, watching for him all the time, we received a phone call. Champ had no tag around his neck to identify him, but he did have a cloth collar and Morgan had written our phone number on it with a pen. Someone had seen it and called. He had gotten part way to Amagansett, fi ve miles away, and was on the Nepeague strip in a hotel on the beach. Strangely enough, Morgan had been in this room a while before to visit a friend, and Champ must have picked up on it, because he had scratched on the door to be let in.

It was great to have Champ back again, even though he was quite skinny. We got him a tag with his name and phone numbers, but he never again went too far from home.

Written and illustrated by Maxine Harris

Montauk Pause Press2011