New(Ish) Member of the Midnight Chorus

We have a cat named Zip. He's getting to be kind of an ol' geezer. He's... eighteen? Nineteen? Something like that. It's hard to know for sure because he was a stray who slinked into the yard of a family friend. When he was young and strong and king of the forest, no other cats were allowed in our yard. In fact, no living things other than the family dog and small delicious rodents were allowed in the yard in those days.

(I have seen this cat hunt down turkeys and take swipes at koyotes and we were the only yard without seasonal bears for a long time.)

Our first family dog then passed away and Zip took that hard. After a while, we adopted a kitten named Sammy.

(I swear to god, this is the only photo I can find of Sammy.)



Zip is an indoor/outdoor cat. He goes where he pleases. Sammy was an indoor cat because we got him when he was too small to go outside on his own. Once he hit his adolescence, he got curious about the outside and we started letting him out. He went off on a spirit quest not long after that.

(When asked, we said he was eaten by bears because we have those and saw some not far from our house at the same time. Also, I was in college/getting into Real Life Jobs at the time. People who don't live in small, woodland towns make the greatest faces when you tell them that you think your cat was eaten by a bear.)


Since Zip is getting on in years and more houses have been built around us, he's started making friends. Or keeping his enemies close. It's hard to say. He's always the boss, though, because he's the grizzled old vet and all the other neighborhood cats cower before him. It started out with the Fat Orange Cat lurking around. The Big Fluffy One was around for a while, but he moved on. The Little Orange one started hanging out and participating in the 2:30 AM chorus outside my bedroom window.

And this handsome fella starting hanging around last year:





He's been rather elusive and shy of the bipeds, but he finally allowed me to snap some photos of him. He almost let me pet him, but then the corgi pup jumped up into the window and started losing her mind. He doesn't have a collar, he looks around the right age, and he and Zip have started taking to cuddling in the bushes.

It makes one wonder.




Also, have a photo of Zip because he was jealous that I was taking photos of another cat: