Beware the Company of a Cat

If you ever see a black and white cat on the run, do not approach or engage the animal. It could be Barney, our barn cat, and he should be presumed dangerous. He goes by many aliases: Barn, Barn-Man, Barn-Barn, Barn Master, Little Barney Boy, and Sweet Little Barn Muffin.

Barney first came to us at about the same time our previous barn cat, Bunty, was dying. Bunty was thirteen years old, and Barney just showed up out of nowhere, a spry and spirited juvenile. My wife believes Barney was a godsend, which is exactly what a blossoming con artist cat would want you to think. My best guess is that Barney asked around to find the barn with the oldest cat and decided to take up there in an attempt to become heir apparent.

It worked.

Now Barney has even swindled his way from the barn to our porch, and I would consider him more of a porch cat than a barn cat—though I wouldn’t consider him entirely ours. I’m pretty sure Barney scams other families during the day. I believe this because my wife bought a fancy tracker collar to put on him so she can monitor his movements and protect him from peril. Every day he makes a circuit to three other houses in our vicinity. Then, at night, he comes and sleeps on our back porch in a little cat house with a heated pad—Bunty is probably rolling over in his grave (he used to sleep on a pillow in the hayloft).

“Little Barn-Barn, do you have secret families you visit during the day?” asked my wife, interrogating him after seeing the tracker data. Barney remained silent. He does not like the tracker, and sometimes I wonder if he likes me.

“It’s under there,” my wife said, pointing to the location where Barney first lost his tracker.

The tracker is on a breakaway collar, and Barney enjoys finding new places to break free. There, in this instance, was the old corn crib, which, sitting on fieldstones piers, had about a foot and a half of ground clearance. He lost it right underneath the middle of the structure, meaning I had to dust off my claustrophobia to crawl under there and retrieve the collar. A few days later, he broke loose again.

“It’s in there,” my wife said this time.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. There was now a tremendous blackberry thicket that I had to tunnel through on all fours. Eventually, the tracker collar became too much of a nuisance for all involved and Barney now roams unmonitored, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that he has something else up his sleeve.

During the past few weeks, due to the winter storms, my wife has broken her own protocol—no animals inside—and taken the extraordinary step of letting Barney sleep inside our house on those bitter cold nights. She put an old pillow in a cardboard box, and the first night he slept soundly in this makeshift bed. On the second night, however, I awoke in the middle of night to a cat kicking me in the head. Apparently, Barney had gotten out of his bed, jumped into our bed, and snuggled down between man and wife. When I awoke, he was asleep on his back, pummeling me with his hind legs, as if he was trying to push me off the bed.

All this is to say, I think Barney wants me out of the picture.

Barney, the Barn Cat