BEE, THE WONDER CAT...

  My husband was very proud of his Christmas gift to me but I'm afraid I was not very happy about having a kitten in the house, pedigreed blue Burmese or not.  I had a new baby and a toddler so this cute ball of grey fluff seemed like too much hard work.  It occurred to me that she was going to be more trouble than the baby.  She had to be fed four times a day at first and came complete with suggested menu for those meals.  We named her Misty but that gradually became Bee because our toddler, Kara, couldn't pronounce "Misty".

She was as cute as a button and wonderful but there were times we could have cheerfully strangled her. However, she turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to our family because if not for her, we might all be dead!  The children were three and four when one winter night she woke me, making a hell of a racket at our closed bedroom door.  She was scratching at the door, yowling and leaping up at the door handle.  I got up to chastise her, and found to my horror that the kitchen was on fire!

I alerted Paul, yelling "Wake up! The house is on fire!" as I opened the front door to let the cat out. We then evacuated the children and their grandmother, who was visiting for the weekend. The phone was at the seat of the fire, so I ran up the back in the dark, through the bush, to have the neighbours ring the fire brigade. Those neighbours kindly opened their home to us. Bee sat on the top step until everyone was out safely, only then taking to the bush.  We lived in the country and had very poor water pressure so it wasn't long before our dear old, weatherboard home had burned to the ground, despite the best efforts of our rural fire brigade. We managed to save only a few items of clothing and bedding.

Without Bee to sound the alarm, we may have succumbed to smoke inhalation, even if we had been woken by the sound of the fire, smoke alarms being a thing of the future. Certainly, the children would had had less chance, as their bedroom was closest to the seat of the fire. We still shudder to think of what might have been, had it not been for that brave puss.

In her final days at the age of twelve (that's 84 in cat years!), she was frail and thin and spent her days sleeping in the sun, no doubt dreaming of the sleek action cat she used to be. She lived and died a heroine.

Thanks a million Bee, we still miss you.

© SMG 2008 - originally published (with much poetic licence) by that's life! Issue #38