When we first brought Onyx into the house, he was very curious but wary. We couldn’t understand his language well, but his actions seemed to say, “Ok, I was good with coming into your house for some food, but I think I’ll be going now.”

It was easy to tell that he hadn’t been kept in a home for any length of time. I don’t remember where we fixed him a place to sleep the first night, but I believe we decided that he had spent much of the night exploring the house, which seemed fairly normal. During the day, he still wanted to be outside, doing what outside cats do: hunt. He seemed contented with our attention and affection but yearned for the outside. It was like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a nice, docile house cat or a barn cat.

For those who aren’t familiar with barn cats, they’re common on farms. They generally find a place in a barn to call their own and are natural predators of the rats and mice that are attracted by the grain and feed for the horses and cows. You can’t pet most barn cats. They have very little interaction with humans and will run away if confronted by one. They aren’t pets, and I’ve never heard of anyone taming a barn cat, although it’s probably been done. I’m sure some people feed their barn cats some, but they were born and raised to be predators; they love to hunt and don’t like humans much.

Onyx wasn’t a barn cat, but he sure had/has a lot of those traits. He would come to one of us, crying and rubbing against a leg, like we were the greatest thing in the universe – this immediately followed him darting away from us if we tried to pet him. Within a couple of days, he began to warm up to us gradually. We bought him a bed, but he mostly chose to sleep at the foot of the bed, until he decided that nighttime was a perfect time to snoop around the house more deeply as we slept.

I should stop and say that Stacy and I hadn’t lived full-time in this house for very long, considering the two years we spent in Bangladesh. We had been working hard to get the house updated and comfortable, but really … we didn’t know the house well yet.

At the start, we weren’t accustomed to making sure the cat didn’t get out. We decided that if we were having a cat in the house – it had to just be an inside cat, for several reasons. The biggest reasons were fleas, ticks, coyotes, foxes, and loose dogs. There are more woods where we live than houses. As Spring unfolds, I can no longer see the homes of neighbors which are visible in late fall and winter. More woods means more critters of all kinds, and there’s no freedom to choose which critters you deal with. We weren’t as worried about the foxes and coyotes as we were about ticks and fleas. Yes, even though flea collars are available. Anyone who has stepped into a flea-infested house should understand. Needless to say, within the first week – AFTER we’d bought food, bedding, and toilet – Onyx escaped.

I was outside doing something and went back in the house for a tool. The living room was somewhat dark and Onyx was somewhat black. I didn’t see him squatted down beside the door as I opened it and he darted outside. We tried to catch him for quite a while, but it was apparent that he was in “barn-cat” mode and got away into the woods. Although we had likely had him less than a week, we were sad, worried, and disappointed. I went through a short phase of thinking – “Why couldn’t he have done that before we bought all this crap?” – but worried more about the foxes that I saw regularly. We went to bed worried about the little guy.

The following day as I worked inside the house, I passed by the living room window in time to see one of our neighbors – who walked her dog down the road each day – had passed the house and was almost out of sight. Trotting along behind Lynn the neighbor, and Rocky the dog was Onyx. I was a bit sad to come to the conclusion that he must have come from her house, which is about two hundred yards down the road. He must have belonged to Lynn, especially since I knew he came through the woods from the direction of her house. I prepared to tell Stacy about it all when she got home. At least he was apparently in a good home; Lynn and Rocky seemed to be good beings.

I’m pretty sure that before Stacy got home, Onyx showed back up. Apparently, he had just followed Lynn and Rocky, hoping she would feed him something. In the end, he was relegated to returning to the house where the humans weren’t so tuned into cats. He seemed a little glad to see us, but it may have been because he was hungry and settled for us.

There were a few more successful escape attempts as we learned how to enter and exit our home, however, we learned that it didn’t pay for a man my age to be chasing a youthful cat, and besides that, he sensed my aggravation. It was better to let him get pretty thirsty and hungry and lure him in with food. It seemed that the escape issue was being solved and all was well once again – until …

One night after supper, Stacy and I went to the bedroom to watch a little TV before Stacy went to bed. When we left the living room, Onyx was faffing around in the kitchen. Our current behavior issue was with him getting on the kitchen counters and the table. We were on the brink of recognizing it as a losing battle. If we walked into the kitchen, he’d jump down, but he was defiant about our rules on countertop strolls. On top of that, he was still in a mode of inspecting every inch of household, and its highest places. This is how I left him in the kitchen as we transitioned to the bedroom.

A bit later I went back into the kitchen for something and didn’t see him in there. I peeked into a couple of his favorite spots to hide and didn’t see him, but I wasn’t greatly concerned because he was a cat. Cats are curious and sometimes hide in curious spaces. It wasn’t too unusual to lose track of him from time to time, so I returned to the bedroom to finish watching our show of the day. We were engrossed in the show and it hadn’t dawned on us that we hadn’t seen Onyx in an hour or more. We looked in all the hiding places we knew he liked, but he was nowhere to be found.

We looked again and still didn’t find him. Neither of us had been outside which might have allowed him to escape. We called for him, but he never came out. It looked like Onyx was gone – like he’d vanished into thin air. Our house wasn’t that big, and we had hunted for him again and again. As Stacy went back to the kitchen to recheck all the cabinets, she called out, “Come here! I think I hear him.” As I joined her and listened, I heard nothing. “It sounded like he’s in the attic,” Stacy said. “That’s not even possible!” I replied. Then I heard him too, and Stacy was right (go figure) – he was in the attic.

I opened the attic and climbed up there with a flashlight to try and spot him. He would come near me and the attic entrance, but he wouldn’t come close enough for me to catch him. There was no chance of me being able to chase him up there. The peak of the roof isn’t very tall, which makes the attic very tricky to navigate unless a person is thirty-six inches tall. The best thing we could think to do was to open one of those little “soup” treats that he had been so addicted to, and leave it on the ladder. I was finally able to get close enough to grab him and get him down.

The cat was out of the attic, safe and sound and we felt relief – until I wondered how he got up there. I began searching places, especially in the sunroom, because there was a loose panel up there. It wasn’t big enough for a cat to get through, but there was nowhere else with clear access to the attic. I climbed up in the tops of each closet to see if there might be a hole up where no one could see. Nothing. It didn’t make a bit of sense; there had to be a hole big enough for a small cat somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. It just didn’t make any sense at all.

The next day passed without incident, as I tried to keep a close eye on Onyx, hoping to discover his secret passage to the attic. Nothing happened during the day. When Stacy got home, we both looked around again with no luck. After supper, I was taking some clothes from the dryer into the bedroom and as I passed the kitchen, I spotted Onyx on the counter. I think I have already stated that we had resigned ourselves to the fact that it was nearly impossible to keep a cat from getting on countertops and tables. If they aren’t doing it in front of your face, they’re doing it when you’re sleeping. I paused and fussed at him, but he didn’t feel too threatened since I had an armload of clothes.

I helped put the clothes away and hurried back into the kitchen to get Onyx off the counter, but he wasn’t on the counter. In fact, he wasn’t in the kitchen. I stepped out into the sunroom to see if he’d gone out there. There were places for him to hide out there, so I wasn’t too alarmed. Stacy and I went on about our business and realized that we hadn’t seen Onyx in a while. Stacy called for him, and then we heard it. A faint meow was coming from above the kitchen. We were stunned. We’d both been over the house multiple times trying to find his access to the attic. We got him down again, fairly easily because he was hungry.

As we ate supper, I noticed Onyx jump back onto the counter and made him jump back down, but as soon as I turned my head, he jumped right back up there. It wasn’t the counter where there was any food, and I couldn’t figure out why he was so attracted to that corner of the counter. I turned and said something to Stacy about it, and when we looked back into the kitchen, all we could see was Onyx’s tail disappearing through the bottom of the cabinets.

We looked at each other, puzzled at what we’d seen. I jumped up and looked underneath the cabinets to find that the corner cabinets were butted together at the joining corner, leaving a one-foot space up between the cabinets. Our cabinets don’t go to the ceiling, and instead of using that space for something, someone ran paneling around the edge of the cabinets and up to the ceiling. The hole they had cut in the sheetrock for the pipe had a broken edge, leaving just enough room for a small, curious kitty to squeeze through. Once again we coaxed him down and I blocked the access, so he couldn’t do it again.

Of course, Onyx was not happy. He seemed to have looked at it like it was a game, and I had wrecked the gameboard. He was able to tear down my first attempt at blocking the passage because I only had two staples in my staple gun. I was finally able to fix the issue, and I think he’s forgotten all about it by now. One of the things I have learned in this pathway to being a “Cat Daddy” is that cats always feel the need to conquer the high places in their environment.

Another thing I’ve learned is that you can’t make a cat do anything they don’t want to do. They don’t always feel the obligation to please, like a dog often does. I’ve seen videos of cats who were trained to do incredible tricks and I’m amazed until I come to the conclusion that some sort of witchcraft or magic must have been done on those cats. I might be called a Cat Daddy, but I won’t do that. I’ll just settle for the fact that the only time Onyx gets on the counter (that I know of) is when he is unhappy about something, and demonstrating his feelings in rebellion. It’s safe to conclude by saying that, not only have I become a Cat Daddy of sorts but am apparently “payin’ for my raisin’!”