a cat encounter

This story happened some years back
I want to tell you about a cat. His name was Primus. He was black but had 1 white patch of hair on his chest. Like he had chest hair. He belonged to my neighbour. We fought once. We had a birds nest in a tree outside our bedroom window and when the 4 eggs hatched Primus discovered where his next meals would come from. During the light Icelandic summer nights he stalked the nest and one by one picked off the new life in the making there. Night after night I woke up to the cries of the parents when Primus had his paws on their offspring and our war was fought. When there was only one chick left in the nest I caught the cat as he was trying to snatch it and with a large swing I flung it over our greenhouse and into the next garden. He didn´t bother the birds for the remainder of the night. The next morning the bird took the chick and made it fly and my husband took the tree away with a saw. I didn´t see Primus for a very long time after that.

Some time later I met him in my garden. I meowed, he meowed back. I went inside my house and started working in the kitchen. He followed. Carefully he examined my kitchen and living room. I gave him few shrimps that I defrosted under the warm water from the sink. He ate them and left. Since then he came regularly to see me. He waited for me when I got home from work. Sat outside, even in the rain. And when I opened the door to my house he insisted to come in. In good weather in the summer we all sat outside on the veranda, him too. He spent hours with us and I fed him some shrimp. He developed very neat tactics in eating them. I wanted him to earn them. I would take out a tall glass and put the frozen shrimp in them. I´d run the hot water and thaw them in the glass. Then I served the glass to Primus. He usesd his claw to latch onto a shrimp and pull it out of the glass. This he would do until all of them were gone from the glass.

For a couple of years I was away for extended periods and he stopped coming to my house. My husband saws him from time to time outside our house but Primus always refused to come inside. When I came home for vacation once I didn´t see him for the first few days but then one day as I was coming home I met him coming away from the house as I was approaching. He took one look at me and turned around and ran up to the house. He received his rations of shrimp and a chat.

This went on for a few years. One spring day he stopped coming altogether and I didnt even see him in his own yard. I was worried something might have happened, an accident as we live very close to the highway. After 2 weeks my husband met our neighbours and asked them about the cat. They admitted having taken him to the vet to have him put to sleep as they felt he was astranged from them and foul tempered and not really a pet anymore. I am still angry…