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Sarah Simpson Column: Mr. Bite: The gift that will never be given away (despite my best efforts)

Timber Houdini strikes again
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I keep trying to give my cat away to Robert Barron.

Robert sits at the desk next to mine and if you read the other parts of the Citizen, you’ll know he’s a prolific writer. I can confirm that he is also an all around good guy. He’s a hard worker, has a solid sense of humour, and has a big heart to boot.

It was with great sadness that we worked alongside poor Robert a while back, during the time his own cat rapidly declined in health and eventually died. Robert was bummed, as any good person would be.

Robert had actually never sought out his cat. His feline roommate was given him to babysit for a while and then was simply never picked up. Not surprisingly, eventually the two became good pals. It’s hard not to like Robert, so I can see that the arrangement was fantastic from the cat’s point of view.

(The cat could have been horrible for all I know, because Robert never speaks ill of anyone, but according to Robert, it was the perfect companion: never any trouble, predictable in it’s routine, affectionate, and always a pleasure to come home to at the end of a long day.

Ever since my family adopted Timber (a.k.a Mr. Bite), I’ve kept my coworkers in the newsroom apprised of all the trouble the (lovable) little pest gets in.

After an appropriate mourning period, every time cats came up in the newsroom, and it seems they do a fair bit, I offer Timber to Robert.

“Oh, I miss my cat,” Robert will say.

“Well boy, do I have a deal for you!” I’ll reply. Or something to that effect. I try to sneak in the offer whenever I’m able.

It’s become a bit of a running joke.

Obviously I wouldn’t give my cat away. The kids are too attached at this point. That and I ordered a ridiculously large outdoor play pen for him because he’s an indoor cat but plays the role of escape kitty far too often to not have a safe outdoor space. We had tried (and failed) to enclose our patio area — you know, make it a ‘catio’ — but the darn thing found every single gap in the netting and once free, he made it a game to elude capture. We eventually took the netting down.

Any time a door opens, you can be sure Timber is headed straight for it.

Lucky for us, he has a fairly predictable flight path. He favours sprinting across the way and under the neighbours cars, then racing back to the side yard of the neighbour beside us, presumably looking for his “girlfriend”, which is actually a male cat that I don’t think he gets along with.

The neighbours on the block have become used to watching my family of four running back and forth in front of all of our houses chasing after a sprinting black and white cat — one of us usually carrying a long stick we use to prod him out of under vehicles with. Sometimes a kid brings a butterfly net, too.

Last weekend, however, we were out on the deck planting pepper plants we’d nurtured inside from seeds into my daughter’s new kid-sized raised planter box (thanks Grammy!). Naturally, the cat got out for the fifth time that day.

Here we go again, I thought.

I called my son over because he’s the best cat nabber in the family and he gave chase in his socks. Knowing my boy had it somewhat under control, I calmly walked through the house and into the garage and put my shoes on to join the chase.

Except this time there was no chase.

“Mom!” my son yelled from a green space alongside our house.

I turned the corner to see our Timber… in the timber. A first for all of us, the darn furball had climbed a tree.

What the heck! Was his deluxe enclosure, with a tunnel, a play pen and a three-storey tower not good enough?

No, now he had to climb a maple tree and chew on the branches and leaves, too. (I prayed he would not have any major gastrointestinal distress as a result… like last month when he got a hold of some steak we were eating…)

At just a little over a year old, Timber didn’t fully realise the extent of his predicament until he tried to come down and found it was going to be a lot harder to descend than it was to climb up.

This is when I started to feel bad for the little guy. He was panting and obviously becoming distressed. With a small ladder and 30 minutes of prodding, I was able to coax him to a spot where I could grab him and not-so-gracefully yank him out of the foliage to safety.

After some water and some time to recover indoors, he was his old self again, though he didn’t try to leave the house again for at least a few hours after that.

Robert laughs at the Timber stories we share but it’s a long game for me. I’m just buttering him up to love my cat. Because you never know, one day when he least suspects it, I may just ask him to babysit Mr. Bite for a few days…



Sarah Simpson

About the Author: Sarah Simpson

I started my time with Black Press Media as an intern, before joining the Citizen in the summer of 2004.
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