Dewey's Nine Lives

It also helped, I’m sure, that CC fit perfectly into her new life in Kodiak. Subsistence, Vicki tells me, is an important concept in Alaska. It conveys both the simplicity of life in the small towns that dot the coast and the internal fortitude needed to survive there. Subsistence, in its purest form, means living from nature and producing with your own hands. It was the way of life for countless generations of the natives of Kodiak and other rugged Alaskan islands. It was the way of life Vicki’s great-grandfather Anton Larsen practiced when he homesteaded the island now named for him, and it was the life his daughter, Vicki’s grandmother Laura, returned to after the devastating tidal waves of 1964.

Vicki didn’t live like her grandmother, but she certainly embraced a simpler lifestyle when she returned to her old hometown. She rented a small house in the woods. She ran the new mortgage office alone, working hard to create a strong foundation before adding staff. She provided her daughter, with the help of her mother (who, unlike Vicki, owned a television, much to Sweetie’s delight), a “skinned-knee” kind of childhood, free from the overprotection and overscheduling so common among modern parents. Instead, Sweetie enjoyed long walks in the woods and scavenger hunts along the rocky Kodiak shore.

Christmas Cat, likewise, loved to explore the vast forest beyond the back fence. He hunted mice and spiders and other things he could nose out of the brush, often bringing them home as presents or playthings to be kicked around for an afternoon. He climbed trees with Sweetie and followed Vicki and Sweetie a few hundred yards on their hikes until they disappeared into the woods. There is an enormity and solitude to Alaska, a state more than double the size of Texas with a population of just under 700,000 (about the same as Louisville, Kentucky, and less than half of Columbus, Ohio.) In Kodiak, Vicki loved the way the mountains towered over the river valleys, and the huge eagles soared in an endless sky. But she also appreciated the way the forest closed around her and the familiarity of the shops in town. When she and Sweetie walked the beach, they were drawn to the power of the ocean. But there were also the snails clinging to the sides of the tide pools, the impressions in the rocks, the way the running tide “set the table” by exposing mussel beds and fishing nets. When the salmon were running, Vicki and Sweetie were gone for days, because although Vicki loved fishing for everything, she loved the salmon best, because a hooked salmon would fight. Most of all, she loved to watch Sweetie’s face burst into a smile every time the girl caught a fish.

After a year, when she’d saved a little money, Vicki bought a ramshackle house in town. The roof leaked and the walls were noticeably leaning, but she owned it, and that made her feel grounded and whole. The first winter, a pipe burst and the basement flooded. A few days later, a storm knocked three trees through the roof, and she and Sweetie spent a year arranging pots and pans to catch drips when it rained. When she had money, she fixed the house, piece by piece, but she never felt alarmed. After all, Christmas Cat loved drinking out of those rain pans, at least when he wasn’t running up and down the stairs. And as long as Sweetie was comfortable, Vicki could happily subsist, like her grandmother, within the limits of her own capabilities.

New house, new forest, owners gone for a few days: Whatever happened, CC never seemed to mind. He wasn’t a needy cat. He had his own life and his own habits, and except for his dietary problem—he still ate nothing but paste and, possibly, insects—he could take care of himself. Half the time, Vicki wasn’t sure what he was up to, but she always assumed he was doing it with style, even when he was just rummaging for cave crickets in the crawl space under the house. Often when she returned home from the beach, or on lazy Saturday afternoons, she would see CC sitting in his favorite spot on top of the six-foot fence post at the end of the yard, taunting the neighbors’ dogs. They would bark and snap, futilely trying to reach him, while he looked out toward the forest, occasionally glancing down at them with confident disregard. CC knew there was no way they could touch him.

But he was loyal, even in his independence. Almost as soon as Vicki arrived home from the office, CC would appear on the ledge outside the kitchen window. More often than not, his black fur was matted with tree sap or mud or crawl space dust. Vicki brought a towel to the door to wipe him down, but CC always barreled inside, leaving filthy footprints all over the house.