by Jim Thomason

Created on: January 17, 2009

I meet Fat Tuesday in my backyard a few months ago; she is a feral, adolescent feline of the hefty persuasion. She has grown into her name, for at the time she was trashcan thin, but a steady diet of kibbles and pity has transformed her into a furry ball. Her rather impressive girth is enhanced by an endowment of strikingly frizzy fur that adds to her impressive stature. Tuesday was born in a barn, a runt among rascals, and where once timid, she has outgrown the stigma attached to her class and climbed the ladder of sociability. Occasionally, when solitude permits, she will stand for a superficial pet providing it is on her terms and offered with dinner. When feeling unusually friendly, she will drape herself around my shoe as I shuffle across the yard.

While her lifestyle is unfettered, it is not without danger. She pays a price for her freedom. Fat Tuesday must stand ever vigilant. A life lived "En plein air" is froth with danger. Others of her kind lay in wait and the next ambush can come in a rush of blinding fur, fang, and claw. More than once, she has gained a tree in front of the snapping, saliva-frothed jaws of roaming hounds. Less intimidating, yet just as deadly, threats confront her daily. Parasites, fleas, and ticks, taunt her as do steel monsters as they race over asphalt trails.

Yesterday, while enjoying a plate of angle hair pasta and a superb glass of Chianti, I heard a commotion outside my dinning room window. A cacophony of yowls amid a great beating of wings stirred me to action. I promptly spilled the Chianti and watched it pool on the Damascus tablecloth, a blood red portent which sent me racing for the door. There, in the middle of the lawn, entangled claw to feather and talon to fur, was a Red-tailed hawk and our heroine, Fat Tuesday, engaged in a life and death struggle as primordial as the ooze from which we crawled. The hawk was trapped, a prisoner to its gluttony, and Tuesday- feral, fat Tuesday, was intent on turning danger into dinner. Tuffs of fur and feathers rained down on the embattled pair as they danced to a song of death and destruction. Now the hawk is a noble creature, a regal rider of the sky, but this particular specimen looked more like a plucked chicken than a predator. With a last great flap of its mighty wings the hawk tore free from Tuesday's claws and catapulted into the sky. Tuesday spat a clutch of down, licked her paw, and slowly sauntered off, dignity intact, the way only a cat can.

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