I had started to write about my cat Loki shortly after his death, planning on a three- or four-part story about his life, but it was too hard for my grief to handle all at once. Instead of writing and posting it all at once, I will do so over the next few months. Today would have been his 18th birthday, so it seems fitting to start with his birth.
It was a typical spring Saturday when I visited my dad’s house on my birthday in 2005. My dad still lived in my childhood home back then and my brothers and I visited frequently, though not as often as when our Labrador Toby was still alive. Toby had passed away the previous August, a tough decision we had to make when he could no longer walk. It’s never easy to lose a pet, but it’s even harder to watch them deteriorate to the point when they can no longer function without help.
In February of 2005, we had a sudden death in the family. My little brother’s cat Zelda had been ill for a few months and was diagnosed with diabetes. We had left her with the vet for overnight care, preparing for life with a diabetic cat, complete with expected insulin injections. Unfortunately, Zelda was too far gone and died at the vet overnight. It still upsets me to this day, but she was no longer the cat we knew and loved. Her suffering was over, and we started the grieving process over again less than six months after losing our dog.
My dad had a large feral cat colony in his backyard. His girlfriend would often feed them, but the colony likely moved in because of an overabundance of prey. The house was up a steep hill from the Codorus Creek, providing plenty of resources for wildlife to thrive. We had mice problems for years at that house, and once the black rat snakes and feral cats moved in, the mice infestation went away.
We suspected some of the feral cats might have been from our cat Puff, the only cat we never had neutered. Irresponsible on our part, but Puff was not a typical cat. He lived outside most of his life, banish because of his desire to mark furniture with urine, mainly my dad’s TV. My middle brother and I would bring Puff inside when dad wasn’t home, watching him closely to prevent spraying, and he did spend winters in our basement to stay warm.
Puff loved being outside and ruled the neighborhood like a crime boss. He hated being in the house, preferring the freedom to roam and hunt as he wanted. He would bring back presents for us, the worst of which was a partially skinned rat. I patted Puff on the head, then grabbed the shovel and buried it. We found out after he died that Puff frequented a few houses, each one thinking he was homeless. He always returned to us, his main family, probably because we were the ones who rescued him from a terrible situation.
Many of the feral cats resembled Puff, but only one had his Scottish Fold-like ears. At least, according to my dad—I never saw the “Puff clone.” When Puff died, we got Zelda and her sister Indy, one for each of my brothers. My cat Luigi was not thrilled, but she tolerated the new kittens, Indy more than Zelda. After Zelda died, we had peace in the household. Luigi and Indy got along fine, and though Zelda left a hole in the family, it was slowly healing.
Dad’s neighbor had been working with the York County SPCA to control the feral cat colony. The man would setup humane traps for the cats, then take them to the SPCA where they would be spayed/neutered before being released back into the wild. The SPCA offered this at a discounted rate of twenty-five dollars per cat, and, to my knowledge, the neighbor paid the fees without complaint. He wanted to control the population without killing the cats, likely because the cats were providing a natural culling of the rodent infestation.
One of the feral cats was extremely friendly and would sometimes let us pet her. But she was a genius when it came to the traps and had avoided them for months. On April 17, 2005, when I visited my dad for my birthday, he pointed to a box on his front porch. The female cat was there with her newest litter of kittens. She did not mind we were in close proximity—we had gained her trust, though she still did not allow anyone to pick her up. We kept our distance from the box and I glanced at the kittens that were “about a week old,” according to my father, making their birthdate approximately April 10, 2005.
Not long after, the mother cat was finally trapped and spayed by the neighbor. He did not know she had kittens, and back then it was assumed that the mother cat could not produce milk once she was spayed. The six kittens were then taken in by my unofficial “stepsister” to be bottle-fed until they were old enough to eat cat food. Now there were six kittens who needed homes.
My dad had insisted early that I was taking one of these kittens as a birthday present. This was maybe retaliation for my mom getting me Luigi as a Christmas gift when I lived with my dad. Either way, I told him repeatedly that we did not need another cat. Our rental complex had changed the pet rules again, going from no restrictions to a two-pet limit. We had two cats and that was enough. That did not stop the discussion in our family, and I made it clear that IF we were to take one, we needed to wait until the little one was old enough to leave the litter.
It was sometime in May when dad picked me up from work and we went to see the kittens. They were now old enough to leave, and though I still thought we were fine with just two cats, I did want a kitten. My dad and his girlfriend had already taken two of them, and my stepsister had chosen her two preferred kittens, leaving two in need of homes: a sweet female and a rambunctious male.
The female, named “Mitzie,” was cuddly and affectionate, but I already had that in my Luigi. The male, who the kids had named “Ranger” because he liked to wander out farther than the other kittens, was adventurous and feisty. He did not care to be held and wanted to explore. He was extremely playful and seemed wilder than the others.
He was the one I chose.
I held the kitten on the ride home since neither my dad nor I had planned ahead and brought a carrier. I was not exactly planning to bring a kitten home that day, and my mom and brothers were not keen on the idea. I would have taken both the male and female, giving them playmates, but it was a fight for me to even bring home just one kitten. The little kitten squirmed in my hands for most of the ride, wanting to go off and explore my dad’s truck. As far as cats and kittens go, he was the most curious one I had ever seen, and I’ve had many over the years.
Luigi and Indy were not thrilled with the addition, but as expected, they tolerated it. Meanwhile, the humans were in a disagreement with a name for the new guy. For a couple days he was “Gandalf” since he was grey and we were fans of the The Lord of the Rings movies from a few years earlier. My middle brother wanted to name the kitten “Monte” after his Monte Carlo car. I replied that I would not be naming a cat after a car and moved on. He would call the kitten this occasionally until we settled on a name.
“Gandalf” the kitten was extremely lively and quickly started to show that he was going to be a handful. The little guy did not seem like a Gandalf once his personality started to show and I wanted to name him “Stitch” after the Disney character. No one agreed with this, and though I would go on to refer to the cat as “little monster” many times over the first few years, a phrase used several times when referring to Stitch in the movie and TV show, we moved on from the name and tried to settle on something else.
During this name debate, which went on for days, I kept coming back to the name “Loki,” the trickster god of Norse mythology. The kitten was showing that he was a troublemaker, and the name just seemed to fit him. By the time he went to his first vet appointment, we had decided that was to be his name: Loki, the trickster.
And in the early years, he lived up to his name well.