Tw0 comments by reader E. A. Blair called my attention to his nesting cat Kvedulf. Blair mentioned that for several months his cat occupied a box of styrofoam packing “peanuts,” and sometimes burrowed in so that only his head stuck out. Of course I demanded to see the photos, and E. A. kindly sent them to me. I post them here along with his story, which is touching. It ends sadly, as all pet stories must.
My recently departed cat Kveldulf was almost as box-obsessed as Maru. Not a box could enter the house and be left uninvestigated, and woe for me if I got rid of one before it was thoroughly checked out. One of my favorite pictures of him I titled “All Packed & Ready To Go”. He created a nest for himself in a box full of styrofoam peanuts and he burrowed into it with only his face (and sometimes only his eyes and ears) showing. It was six months before he tired of it, and to this day I still find the occasional peanut in a corner or under a chair. He also once succeeded in crawling into a box only two inches high, and on another occasion got his head stuck in one of my shoes.
Back in 2002, while I was away, my landlady* illegally entered my apartment and let both my cats out. One hid in the attic; Kveldulf got outside in a Milwaukee January and was gone for a couple days. When he returned, he’d been touched with a mild case of frostbite in his hind legs. It wasn’t too severe, but as he got older, he walked more and more like a drunken sailor. He carried on quite well despite his infirmity, but at the age of seventeen he finally reached a point where I had to carry him to his food and litterbox. It was then I decided to take him to the vet on the trip that only humans return from. He fell asleep peacefully in my arms. I had him cremated, and his remains rest with my late wife in her urn (he was really her cat, anyway).
*I moved out the following month.
Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your story and pictures.
In the basement at my old house I used to keep a large dishpack carton into which I dumped packing peanuts for recycling. My kitten loved to go diving in this box and would happily swim around completely submerged in peanuts a couple of feet deep.
Unfortunately I have no photographic evidence to show you.
A photo of a kitten two feet under packing peanuts wouldn’t really be that interesting. 😉
A video on the other hand …
And to continue another theme : reanimate her, just so that she can be burned! (Thatcher, may she persist in locked-in syndrome, unnoticed.)
Sweet cats, even if peanut fixated!
:-/ It isn’t right that we outlive our pets.
Respectfully disagree. I’m better equipped to deal with the loss of my cat than she is to deal with the loss of her caretaker.
Respectfully disagree too.
Example for counter- (cross- ?) analysis would be Mahouts and their decades-long charges.
How do they feel when “their” elephant dies after 20 years together?
Kvedulf was a beauty, wasn’t he?
Sorry for your loss. He was a beautiful kitty (so is the other one), and your story is very touching.
It’s a miracle! Cat sighted in wood grain
“Evening Wolf” is an awesome name for a housecat! I must have read “Egil’s Saga” at least 3 times in as many different translations, and never tire of it.
I have kept a tradition of giving my cats Viking names. So far, there’s been Astrid, Thorbjorn, Freti, Kveldulf and Isa. Kveldulf received his name because, like Egil’s grandfather, he was a troublemaker. I had thought briefly of naming him Loki, but my wife said that naming a cat after the god of mischief was asking for trouble. Freti is a nickname meaning “little foul-fart”, which he received because his shelter diet made his use of the litter box his first week home very notable.
I’ve read the Egil’s Saga translations by Palsson & Edwards, Scudder & Svanhildur Oskarsdottir and Kellogg & Smiley. Of those commercially available, I prefer Palsson & Edwards, but I’ve personally translated large sections of it myself (it was the first saga I read in the original Old Norse).
So … what is the Old Norse for “cat friend”?
(“cat lover” would probably get too much attention on the streets of Trondjheim.)
As a “Wol”, I have a not-exactly-academic interest in Owls too, though not necessarily in Odin’s eye.
By the way, “Kirth Gersen” is a pretty formidable nom de commentier.
I lived in Texas for some time, which for me (hailing from more civilized places) was comparable to Vance’s “Beyond.” As an atheist there, I was constantly afraid of being “de-weaseled” by the local theocrats.
What a lovely story! Our Tristan loves to try and fit into anything… even if only his behind is actually in there.
I get pleasure from, result in I discovered exactly what I was having a look
for. You have ended my four day lengthy hunt! God Bless
you man. Have a great day. Bye