humAnImAl dIspossessIons 127suggested that it had been some time. My mother, afraid that Cassie would
not survive the brutalities of an oncoming Canadian winter, persuaded me
to house her in my miniscule undergraduate apartment. It took four adults
(with a couple of pairs of oven mitts) to capture her, and when I released
her into her new home, she mauled my hand so badly I was sent to the hos-
pital for shots and bandages. Because of my mother’s certainty that Cassie
would be beheaded by the government and her head shipped to Ottawa
for testing (this still sounds absurd to me, but she was unwaveringly insis-
tent), I pretended in the hospital that I had been randomly attacked by an
unknown street cat.
Like Animal and Jara, then, we were initially adversaries: between the
mauling and her repeated escapes from my apartment—after which, to rub
salt in my psychic wounds, she would reappear at my mother’s house!—
I did not have any special love for this creature. There was, however, a
critical moment of transformation that fundamentally changed our rela-
tionship. One fall afternoon, as I watched Cassie (yet again) hightail it out
my back door, down the fire exit, and toward the river (where she would
no doubt begin her journey back to my mother), I decided not to chase
but to follow her. Conceding to her preference for another home, and her
insistence on remaining a creature of the outdoors, I trailed after her with
a calmness I had not yet experienced with her. She knew I was behind her
but she also knew I was not giving chase, and very quickly the lines be-
came blurred between which of us was following the other. Eventually, we
wandered home together, back up the fire escape steps and into our apart-
ment. We began to wander together every day, without fixed destination,
sometimes exploring the river bank and at other times just meandering
along the sidewalks of our neighborhood. We became, and would remain
across three cities and two countries, a somewhat notorious neighborhood
phenomenon (she was often hailed by neighbors who did not know us
well as “the cat- dog,” and I “the cat- girl”). I would frequently read novels
as I walked, and Cassie would tear up and down trees, getting ahead and
trailing behind as she so desired. For most of our lives together, I lived in
places from which she could come and go at her leisure, and she made plain
to me at every turn that she had chosen to stay with me but in no sense
depended on me for her survival. Across seventeen years, ours has been a
friendship founded on the refusal of mastery and on a vital resistance (de-
spite the well- worn insistence of veterinarians and many cat lovers on the