Fun fact: Domesticated housecats can run at a thirty-mile-per-hour pace.
It was late. Very late. Four in the morning late — that deep, dark hour when all is calm and peaceful, and nothing crazy ever happens.
Except this time something crazy did happen — and, of course, Gus was right in the middle of it all.
I was working a late shift back then, not long out of college, still living at home with Mom and my sister Paula, and our cats, WT and Gus. I had gotten home around 2:30 a.m., made myself a bite to eat, and watched a little TV. The hour had just passed 3:30 when I finally plopped down onto my bed, all set to enjoy a long morning of well-earned sleep.
Alas! The household’s junior cat had other ideas.
Our Gus — formally, Augustus H.T. Cat; informally, The Gussycat — had come to us from a litter of feral kittens. After a rough start, Gus had fit in well with the family. Even WT, the senior cat, tolerated his presence fairly well. But Gus always retained that little bit of wildness, that touch of strange and crazy that sometimes led him to do unexpected things — even if the clock said, “No, sorry — no crazy right now. Go to sleep!”
Not long after I hit the sack, pandemonium broke out in the hallway outside my bedroom door. If you’ve ever worked a late shift, you know how important it is to get your sleep. Any loss of that precious dreamtime is not appreciated. I dragged myself out of bed, as grumpy as you can imagine, and threw open the bedroom door, demanding an explanation: “What the (censored) is going on out here?”
My angry question generated no comprehensible response — just a stream of unintelligible, panicked cries from my mother and sister, both of whom were already tumbling down the stairs to the first floor. My fuzzy, sleepy brain could only pick out a few random nuggets of information: Gus, window, glass. Nothing that made much sense.
“What?” I asked, hoping for some clarity.
“Get WT away from the glass in my bedroom!” commanded Mom from the bottom of the stairs before she disappeared into the living room.
I made my groggy way into my mother’s bedroom, where the pieces started to come together. At least, the pieces of the mystery came together; the pieces of the windowpane — which lay scattered on and beneath the windowsill — were most definitely not coming together, and never would again.
The sight of the shattered glass finally helped me do the math. Somehow, Gus had jumped through the window and plunged to the patio below.
Gus hadn’t jumped out the window; he had jumped through the window, shattering the glass in the process. There wasn’t a cat-shaped hole in the window, like you’d see in cartoons, but there was an impressively jagged empty space where once a pane of solid glass had stood. No wonder everyone was going crazy.
Everyone, that is, except WT, who had stationed herself by the broken window and was surveying the scene with what can only be described as detached bemusement. Given my assumptions — that we already had one mangled cat on our hands — I made sure to perform my assigned task.
“Shoo!” I said to WT, whisking her away from the carnage before she did any damage to herself. “Go on. Get out of here.” WT complied, jumping down from the windowsill and slinking out of the room with a cat’s typical studied indifference.
Once I had seen the sane cat off to a safe distance, I returned to the window to learn the fate of the crazy one. I peered through the jagged remains of the pane and looked down to the back patio, where the search-and-rescue operation was in full effect. Fortunately, our back yard was small and fenced off, so Gus was effectively corralled as soon as he landed. In just a few minutes, the tag team of Paula and Mom recovered our wayward cat and brought him back to the safety of the great indoors.
Later, I was able to reconstruct what had happened: Not long after I had gone to bed, Gus was seized by a fit of “the crazies.” This condition, common in young cats, had sent Gus zipping around the house at top speed, running from room to room like his fur was on fire. When his frenetic path took him into Mom’s bedroom, Gus decided that a flying leap onto the hope chest beneath the window would be just the thing to make his night complete.
Unfortunately, Gus did not realize that upon this hope chest’s slick, ultra-smooth top surface sat a folded blanket. As soon as Gus’s paws hit the blanket, the whole bundle of cat and fabric shot across the chest’s lid, propelled forward by the leaping cat’s full-bore momentum. The blanket acted like a magic carpet ride, launching the leaping Gus forward and upward into a low orbit that sent our feline daredevil right through the window and out into the night, until at last he landed in the yard below.
What damage resulted from this unscheduled liftoff? The window was totaled, of course; it would take several days to get a replacement pane of glass installed.
But the Gussycat, despite bursting through glass and plunging to the ground from a second-story window, survived with just a cut on his right front paw. He seemed completely unfazed by his airborne adventure.
Long after that crazy night, the legend of Gus the Flying Cat lived on. For years thereafter, Gus seemed like a Super Cat: indestructible, amazing, and capable of anything at any time.
Gus survived his night flight and lived on for another decade, until he finally made his last leap away from this world and into the next. I miss him to this day, but I will always remember the night when the Gussycat flew — the night when I learned that cats really are capable of just about anything… and sometimes “anything” happens at four in the morning!
~Stephen Taylor
