We lived in one of those townhouse complexes in which our back door faced someone else’s front doors. There were two units behind us: an Hispanic family, and an older couple.
The older couple were a continuously unfolding tragedy. She was dying of cancer and didn’t have much time left, and he was declining into dementia. The State hadn’t taken away his driver’s license yet, and he was always driving off somewhere in his big pickup truck, and getting lost.
One day he came home from their mini-storage unit with a large thing that looked like a large upright freezer lying on its side, and he began dragging it from the pickup to his front door. He told me that it was a “baseball machine” that he had invented many years ago, and that some famous pitcher, I can’t remember who, had bought one from him and practiced with it. I gathered that it threw baseballs for batting practice or something, but never asked. Anyway, it wouldn’t fit in his door, and it lay there on the sidewalk between our back door and his front door for some days.
I remember seeing his poor wife standing in her door, looking at it and sighing.
One night, my lady went out to look at it out of curiosity and heard mewing coming from inside it! So she reached in, picked up the kitten and brought it into the house, declaring “Look what I found!”
“Don’t feed it,” I said as I turned around to see that she had already set down a saucer of milk for it, which it wolfed down. Poor little thing was hungry. And then she opened a can of tuna. “Well, that’s that,” I said to myself. “We have a cat now.”
We of course did the usual inspection: Male. He was dirty. I noticed glitter in his tail. He clearly wasn’t getting good care. She of course wanted to keep him. I pointed out the glitter in his tail and said, “Somewhere, there is a little girl missing her kitty.”
She went to the store and bought cat food.
The little girl’s mommy, the Hispanic lady who lived next door to the old couple, showed up two days later. “I heard that you have our kitten here.”
“Well, there is a cat that just showed up…” and about that time Mr. Kitty came running toward us. She called it by a girl’s name, scooped it up, and took it back home.
My lady was heartbroken. I was secretly glad that a little girl had gotten her kitty back. “He’ll be back,” I confidently predicted. I knew cats well enough to know that once you feed one, it’s yours. Especially when that first meal was tuna.
He was back within a day. And the neighbor came and took him home again. And he kept coming back.
Cats choose their owners, you know. And the little girl, six years old with metal teeth (they weren’t taking good care of her either) lost interest after we told her that he was a boy kitty, not a girl.
One weekend, they locked him in the house with their upstairs bedroom window open, and were gone for days. Every time he heard my voice drifting up from our back patio, he threw himself against that window screen, meowing pathetically. It tore up my heart. There was nothing, legally, that we could do. When they finally got home, he of course escaped and came back to us. They began spreading a story around the apartment complex that we were “stealing” their cat.
My lady absolutely loved that cat, and he loved her. She named him Midas, after a character in an Ayn Rand novel. Here is the first shot I took of him, months later. This is a snapshot, not intended to be a professional photo, because in those days I had deemed him too ugly for professional work. For some reason, his hairy ears horrified me!
He was quirky. He would proudly carry in things that he found outside, such as a pine cone or an old taco. We lived next to a dirty urban stream where he liked to go play in the water. Yes, Norwegian Forest Cats like to play in water. He would come home with leeches attached to his belly! My son, who was finishing college after studying abroad, lived with us. About three o’clock in the afternoons, Midas would wake up from his nap and go “help” my son with his homework. Every day.
Midas also liked to store his “prizes” that he found outdoors in my son’s shoes, which didn’t win him any popularity awards. And pencils kept disappearing from my desk. “Who’s taking all my pencils?” I ranted. Everyone denied touching them. “Well, they don’t just sprout legs and walk off!” I fumed. We found them some months later when we moved. Under the couch. With teeth marks in them.
One of the funniest incidents was when we came home and found him on the roof, meowing. Assuming he was too afraid to get down, my son bravely climbed up there to rescue Midas… at which point Midas just jumped down. He was meowing to show off! “Look at me, look at what I did! I’m up on the roof!” My son was disgusted.
As autumn progressed, he began changing. A sizable ruff developed under his chin, and the fur on his hind legs got longer down to a certain point, looking like pantaloons. My lady got curious, and started doing Internet searches.
“I think we have a Norwegian Forest Cat,” she announced one day. I poked around a little on the Internet and concurred.
The Hispanic family moved away. He stayed. He was, finally, officially Our Cat. Then we moved away, for a new job. He came with us, of course. A neighbor had planted his front yard with Christmas trees. Midas made a beeline for the trees. It was my first clue that the “Forest” in “Norwegian Forest Cat” actually means something.
As he grew, and grew, and grew — Norwegians take years to get to their full size — I began to appreciate his beauty. Using available light from a window — it would still be years before I would build my little pet studio — I took my first formal portrait of him, shortly after we’d moved. His ruff is clearly visible here.
He was the most intelligent cat I ever lived with. He had figured out how humans open doors, and would try to do it. But his paws could never grip the knob to turn it. Good thing we never had the new kind of door handle that’s a lever you pull down. He would have figured that out.
One day, he came to the lady of the house, meowing plaintively. She told me that there was something in the meow that sounded like something was wrong. He kept walking away from her, meowing. She followed.
He led her into the spare bedroom, jumped up on the windowsill, and started looking out the window up into the sky. Then she saw them: yellowjackets! Coming out from under the eaves! There was a nest up above the ceiling. We called the landlord.
Then we moved back east, to Poughkeepsie, New York, which is infested with ticks. Indeed, POK, as the locals call it, often swaps with Lyme, Connecticut for the #1 spot for Lyme Disease (caused by ticks). There was a patch of woods adjacent to our apartment building. He would spend his entire day in that little grove of trees, and come home each night to have “mommy” pick the days’ accumulation of ticks off of him. We began to understand the “forest” in Norwegian Forest Cat.
My job ended, and we moved to a rundown motel in Vermont that had once been a nice place next to a ski area. Lots of woods around. Once again, he spent his days in those woods. One day, he took “mommy” on a tour of his spots in those woods. Showed her his hiding places, his sleeping places, everything.
By the time we moved to Nashville (again for a job), we had gotten the memo about forests. We searched and searched until we found an apartment that had woods across the parking area from our front door. He would spend all day up there on that hillside, every day. Often we could look up there and see just where he was.
One day, we noticed a fox up in those woods. Of course, we worried that the fox would find him and turn him into dinner. Frantically, we scanned the hillside looking for him. I finally spotted him — behind and above the fox, where it couldn’t see him, and watching it. It seemed that the fox never knew he was there.
It was while I was in Nashville that my photography began to blossom. I’ve told that story in earlier editions here, how I began buying pro equipment and set up a little photo studio in our home. Of course, he was my first model. Here’s what came out of that first studio session:
It was a few days before this that I had rescued a stray in Nashville that became my longtime companion on my later travels, a tortoiseshell that I named Pookie. I’ll write her story someday.
Here’s another shot, probably my favorite shot of him, playing with a catnip-filled toy mouse:
It was while we lived in Nashville that he came to me one night and woke me up. Mama was away on a business trip. I had “trained” him (to the point that a cat can ever be trained) to not try to wake me up, but something in that meow that night convinced me that something was very wrong. I got up. He led me downstairs, into the kitchen, and stared at the food bowl.
When a cat stares at something, s/he is pointing at it. I looked at the food dish. OH, MY GAWD! GIANT ANTS! CARRYING OFF HIS CAT FOOD!
Tennessee has some BIG bugs. These things were about an inch long. And there was a whole trail of them, each carrying off a chunk of cat food. I was horrified. I killed a bunch of them, then used a baking soda solution to clean their trail (hoping it would erase their scent trail), and then floated a clean food dish in a larger bowl of water — you know, to make a moat that they wouldn’t cross to get to the food, and called the landlord the next morning.
That cat’s intelligence amazed me.
Time went on, and we moved to Colorado, a story I’ve told at length elsewhere in this Substack. After living in a motorhome for some months, we settled in Indian Hills, a small development up in the mountains west of Denver. There are Wild Things there.
One day during winter, a squirrel came up to the window. Apparently squirrels know all about glass, and that cats can’t get them, because it seemed completely unperturbed about a predator sitting inches away from it. It made a comical sight:
That squirrel actually taunted him.
As far as I can find in my archives, this is the last shot I took of him. You see, among the Wild Things in Parmalee Gulch are critters that have pets for dinner: the place was full of cougars. I once found a deer that had been killed by a cougar, while hiking on the hillside above the house. I recognized him: he had a distinctive curl to his antlers and had visited my house often. It was a brutal scene, with Big Cat tracks all around. I got the heck out of there, checking behind me every few seconds.
One fine Saturday morning in the fall, Midas asked to go outside and never came back. Our other cat, Pookie, took over his territory inside the house later that day. I knew at the time what it meant: she knew he was dead. But we didn’t have closure.
My lady found a piece of him in the back yard the next spring after the snow melted. His killer had left one front leg behind. We cried and cried, but we finally had closure.
That happened a decade ago, and I still think of him nearly every day. He was one remarkable cat. I used to tell him that he was “a magnificent beast.”
Years later, I was camped in a fine campground in Utah when a Scandinavian couple came in and set up camp next to me. They were touring the USA in a rented motorhome. Pookie, being a cat that loved every human she ever saw, headed straight over there to get petted.
I went over to retrieve her and visited with them a bit, and we talked about cats. At one point, the gentleman mentioned to me in the best English that he could muster that in his country, “we have the Norwegian cats that live in the trees.”
“Norwegian Forest Cats!” I exploded. “I know them well. I lived with one of them for many years!” And the memories of him came flooding back.
He was a special cat that profoundly touched my life.
So sorry for your loss. Norwegian Forest Cats are wonderful companions. And smart. I currently have one so I can really relate! There’s photos of him in this piece I wrote a while back. He travels with us in our RV: https://collettegreystone.substack.com/p/cool-kids-on-the-road
What an amazing, one-of-kind cat Midas was indeed! Thank you for sharing your memories of him with us.