Kickass and the ridge cat

Kickass, the doorstop dog, watched through the window with the keeper and Phyllis as the feral ridge cat paid a visit to the bird feeder area, crouching briefly under the big rock pile and blending in to the black and white environs like a camouflaged tiger.  The cat has shared the ridge with the keeper for several years, apparently taking shelter in the tractor shed in times of bad weather, and roaming the prairie for rodent sustenance, and–the keeper hopes, having an occasional mouse dinner from the brood that once chewed $800 worth of damage to motor-home wiring. You might call the relationship between the keeper and the cat “remote,” but it isn’t, actually.  They may interact only with an occasional sighting of each other, usually broken by the cat’s anxious retreat into the underbrush, which gives the keeper a pang of curiosity as to why he is found to be so unacceptable.  But there is an odd closeness in that they—the keeper and the cat, are both exotics on the wild oak savannah full of natural tenants.  They share that “immigrant” identity, and if they were competing for the title of which one treats the ridge with greater respect and does the least to interfere with its natural evolution, the cat would win, hands (paws) down..