Words by Terryl

Merlin was beautiful because he was powerful. Comfortable in his conceit, he was afraid of nothing in this world or any other. He was twenty-two pounds of gristle with a glossy, smooth, charcoal-colored mink-soft coat, but lurking underneath that sensuous exterior was a badass razor-sharp tomcat. By day his eyes were deep green, but when I woke in the night to his stare they were backlit amber. I knew the thrill of prey in that steady preternatural gaze for a heartbeat or two. Then he would blink, slowly, in the way his people offer trust, and a basso rumble would start deep in his chest. My heart rate would go down as he became my sweet boy again and we would snuggle and drift back to safety and sleep. It was like sleeping next to a furnace, for which I was grateful. Some of the digs we shared during the early ski area period of my life were cold. We didn’t have a proper bed, we slept curled up together on the floor in some dive, me in a sleeping bag, him stretched out long against my back, pinioning my feet, or curled up in my belly.

Merlin thrilled everyone, of any species, who ever met him. He wasn’t one to pick a fight, but carried himself with easy, relaxed menace. People scooped up their little dogs instinctively, while bigger dogs either offered him their bellies or slunk away on them.

We were poor and transient when Merlin was young. I could carry my life in my arms then: my big frame pack on my back with the skis tied in under the flap, a box of books under one arm, ski boots dangling from my other hand. Merlin at my heels. We had to move at least every six months with the change of seasons. We had no transportation of our own, so on moving days we hitchhiked to get to our next digs, which were typically crammed with equally poor, equally transient fellow employees living the dream.

One trucker who stopped for us on a winter-to-summer move from South Fork to Bristol View Guard station, 25 miles past Creede, Colorado drawled “That damn cat followin’ you, girl?”

“Yessir,” I said. Merlin waited patiently until I had everything stowed. When I got settled and patted my thigh, he made a single spectacular leap from the ground up into the cab, landing gently on my lap. It would be like a human taking a standing jump and landing gently on the roof of a three-story building. The trucker was duly impressed.

Merlin laid his ears back and hissed at him. “Awright, awright, big boy, I ain’t about to gonna mess with you none.” He glanced up at me and said, “He looks like he could draw blood.”

“Oh yeah,” I answered, “and he’s fast as hell, too. You’re bleeding before you even know you messed up. Ask me how I know that.”

He grinned. “Even you?’

“Especially me.” I rolled back my sleeve to exhibit the evidence of my latest lapse. “I’m supposed to know the rules and keep my place. He cuts everybody else slack till he has them trained. I just forgot myself for a second.”

Merlin settled into loaf position, wide eyes on the trucker, who took us all the way to the turnoff to Bristol View, my summer posting with the Forestry Circus. As I was accumulating my stuff, some dumbass dog came bolting down the quarter-mile long driveway from the guard station, dust roiling behind him and hackles up, barking like crazy. The kindly trucker eyed the situation with concern. “Don’t worry,” I said, “this ain’t Merlin’s first rodeo.”

The dog’s bluster and bravado waned as he got closer. Apparently the other cats he had tried to intimidate got scared and ran away. Unconcerned, Merlin washed his face while he waited. With precision timing Merlin jumped aside and let the dog’s momentum carry, giving the dog a smart rap upside his snout as he passed. Merlin spun in a blur to face the dog, puffed up with his best Halloween cat profile, ready for battle The dog couldn’t turn himself inside out quickly enough, and scooted back up the driveway yipe yipe yipe-ing with his tail between his legs.

“Awright, missy,” said the trucker, throwing me a wide, genuine grin, “Looks like you and your boy got things under control here. You have yourself a good summer, now.”

“Thank you, sir, I will.” I slammed the door and waved my thanks. As the truck pulled away, Merlin rolled in the dust to get a taste of the place before we started our trudge up the long driveway to the guard station and our new gaggle of roommates: 13 guys, five dogs, and one other woman.

Merlin’s only predictable exception to his general policy of not starting fights was moving day. He would, as a matter of course, kick everyone’s ass in our new place on our first day there, just to let everybody know not to start anything with him they weren’t prepared to finish. He would start with the dogs and work his way up the food chain. It usually took just a little love tap across the nose for the dogs. One short, sharp yipe and it was over.

The humans he would tolerate, but he made sure they knew, with a hiss and a menacing look. Our lifestyle had given Merlin a keenly developed social sense of power hierarchies and he knew how to get everyone’s full attention. One of the roommates at Bristol View that summer had a beautiful, expensive, high-tech, four-foot tall set of stereo speakers he couldn’t quit bragging about. Merlin had little patience for arrogant, self-impressed attitudes other than his own. He stretched himself up full length and hooked his claws into the cover of one of the speakers, muscles rippling down his back. He yawned prodigiously and looked purposively over his shoulder at the loudmouth.

“Call off your goddamn cat!” the loudmouth hollered, “If that goddamn cat tears that goddamn speaker, there will be hell to pay, I promise you . . .”

You can’t explain to people who don’t know about cats that they’re not like dogs. You can call them anything you want. It doesn’t matter, they only respond if they feel like it. After a disdainfully unhurried stare, Merlin retracted his claws, without leaving so much as a nick in the silken front of the impressive speaker, dropped to the ground, flipped the guy off with his tail and sauntered away.

Merlin wasn’t mean. He was a pretty social guy, really. He was just two years old and still had a lot of kitten in him. He played with crumpled up pieces of paper and curled up in laps and did all the other endearing stuff cats do. There were those slow learners who thought they were going to pet him when it wasn’t his idea, and dogs who wanted to be friends. Merlin would turn up the volume a little for these learning-disabled household members, but by the second or third day when everybody understood their place, he was an amiable enough housemate; twining himself around the legs of roommates, flopping down on rare occasion in a sunny spot with the dogs, sometimes gifting half-dead presents to those roommates he was especially fond of.

I worked three summers out of Bristol View, as did several of that first season’s batch of roommates. Merlin’s return in spring was warmly welcomed by these repeat roommates. They had paid their dues and developed a relationship with him. They would sneak him sausage treats like old buddies do. Besides, as soon as Merlin showed up the rodent infestation endemic to all mountain outbuildings disappeared. The roommates were grateful for this.

By the end of that third summer Merlin and I didn’t have to hitchhike to our winter digs. I had purchased a used car that was right next to worthless, dubbed the POS. Our nouveau riche status for the coming winter also included a living situation with just one roommate. There was even a mattress! It was a mattress on the floor, but it was a room of our own with a door that closed in a funky little cabin at the end of the road, right by the Rio Grande river, with a laid back hippy logger-dude for a roommate. It had a wood stove. It would be warm. We had, I assured Merlin, definitely moved up in the world.

An early season snowstorm had left a scant couple of inches on the ground moving day morning, but a foot-deep drift had formed smack in front of the ritzy two-story log house next door to our new place. The POS couldn’t bust through it and we got stuck. I loaded up an armful of my still meager possessions and, with Merlin following in my footprints, started trudging the last fifty yards. Trouble was, the neighbors had a dog, a big, yellow German Shepherd. We were walking right past her front yard and she was not amused.

I know, I know! I should have seen it coming. I knew Merlin’s moving day policy better than anyone. In my defense, I had never been around a dog I was afraid of before, and my world had narrowed to the three inches between her snapping teeth and my thigh. I wasn’t even thinking of Merlin. The dog didn’t offer any real violence, but she was terrifying. We’d only taken half a dozen steps when Merlin’s right hook came out of nowhere. It was lightning fast and perfectly vicious. The swipe laid the dog’s nose open.

It takes a heartbeat to register a deep cut. Merlin didn’t waste the heartbeat. His ears were flat to his head and his tail was lashing. By the time the dog and I blinked and realized how badly she was cut, Merlin was wrapped around her head. He tore that dog’s face up. His back feet were raking and he was biting through her ears. The dog danced and leapt, but she couldn’t shake him. There were gobbets of gore flying from Merlin’s back feet. The dog’s screams of pain pierced my gut more than my ears. I cringed and felt throw-up sick. I panicked and—like a dumbass—reached into the fray to grab Merlin by the scruff of the neck. As soon as Merlin released his death grip the dog bit my forearm and Merlin opened up a deep scratch across the back of my other hand. The dog ran for her porch yipe yipe yipe-ing, leaving a trail of blood across the snow-white yard. I had him by the scruff, so Merlin didn’t have much choice about relaxing. I held him until he quit lashing his tail.

“Asshole,” I said as I threw him in the car seat “She was just doing her job.”

I cranked down the car window and slammed the door, yelling at him to just stay there until I could figure out what to do. The dog was crying under the porch. There was obviously nobody home, two sets of outgoing tire tracks marked the driveway and if there had been anyone home, the dog’s barking and shrieking would surely have brought them to the door. I was shaking and couldn’t muster a drop of spit to whistle for the dog, so I tried to get her to come to me with smooching noises and a soft, very wobbly voice. She wouldn’t come of course. I wouldn’t have either.

Whatcha gonna do, dumbass? I said to myself. Yer car is stuck. Ya gonna try to manhandle the dog? I walked in circles trying to figure out what to do. She’ll tear you to shreds. Even if you can get her out from under the porch, are ya gonna hitchhike to the vet in Monte with an angry, bleeding 90-pound dog? A minute seems like an hour in the thick of it, so it felt like a long time coming, but it finally dawned on me I needed help. I sprinted the mile back down the road to the little Rainbow Grocery on the corner where at last I caught a little luck on the day. My friend Kathy from the ticket office at Wolf Creek ski area, my winter job, was working the cash register. I offered up a prayer of thanks for this.

“Kath! I’m so glad you’re here! What a lucky break! I need help!”

“I can see that,” she said. “I’ll go get the first aid kit. Do you mind stepping back outside? You’re, ah, bleeding all over my clean floor.”

“What? Oh.” I regarded my dripping hand. “Not that.” I pulled a bandana out of my back pocket and tied it around my hand, drawing the knot tight with my teeth. “Sorry about the floor. No, I need help with an injured dog. Do you know Ray Rickmond?”

“The logger?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, sure, everybody knows him.”

“Well, I was moving in there today and . . . .” Her look of shock and concern stopped me for a second. I waved a dismissive hand “Nothing like that, just roommates.”

“Good, he has a . . . poor reputation.”

“I know. Anyway, do you know the people next door in that big log house? Do you know how I could get ahold of them? Their dog is hurt and she won’t come to me. She needs to go to the vet.”

“What, did you hit her with the car or something? It’s not like Hilda to be in the street.”

“Hilda is her name? No, Merlin attacked her. She’s bleeding and . . .” The victim’s name softened my adrenaline-induced rigidity. Hot tears grabbed at my throat and spilled down my face. She reached out to hold my shoulder a moment, a gesture of kindness, and said “Yeah, I know them. Shirley and John Jackson live there. She’s a realtor, he works construction. I’ll call Shirley’s office.”

“Oh, thank God. Thank you Kathyyyy. . ,” I stepped outside to try and get myself under control. I heard Kathy on the phone. The secretary at the Real Estate office reported that Shirley was out showing property and John, apparently, was working on a custom log home someplace out in the country, which, before cell phones, might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

My heart fell when Kathy told me all this. “Easy, girl, my boss says he’ll cover the rest of my shift. Hilda and I are old friends. She comes to stay with me sometimes when Shirley and John go out of town. The boss says I can go with you and try to help.”

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou, and thank your boss. God, I love a small town!”

She flashed me a sardonic smile. “Yeah, us South Forkers are awesome, all 350 of us.”

We got in her VW bug and went back down the road to the scene of the crime, stopping well before the drift. The amount of blood on the white snow made me start to sniffle and slobber again. “The poor thing! The poor, poor thing!”

Kathy said “Let me see if I can get her to come to me.” She got out, calling for Hilda, walking slowly up toward the house. Hilda came squirming out from under the porch on her belly, whining. She resisted weakly when Kathy grabbed her collar and steered her toward the car. I’d already gotten in the back seat. When Hilda saw me she started to struggle. Had she not already been weakened there was probably nothing Kathy could have done to force the issue, but Hilda had lost a lot of blood and trusted Kathy.

“Will Merlin be all right in the car?”

“He’ll be fine. The window is open. I checked while you were getting Hilda. He’s curled up in a sunny spot sound asleep.”

Soon enough we were on our way to the vet in Monte Vista, thirty miles away.

We were a bedraggled lot by the time we got there. The waiting room was full, but seeing us covered with blood as we were, the vet worked us in right away—with the generous approval of the people in the waiting room.

The vet and his tech lifted Hilda gently up on to the table and started work. He looked up at my blotchy, tear-streaked face over the top of his reading glasses. “Merlin?”

“Yes.” I nodded miserably. Merlin was well known here, too. The clinic had special leather gloves for Merlin’s visits.

I don’t remember how many stitches it took to sew Hilda’s face back together, but it was a lot. She would be scarred forever, the vet said, but she’d not lose the eye.

Having just paid rent to move in, I had about ten bucks to my name. The vet knew I worked at the ski area and compassionately discounted the bill, he even stitched up my hand and tended my puncture wounds into the bargain as well, but in the end it was still a hefty tab. Kathy put it all on her credit card.

We were there for hours. It was getting dark by the time we left Monte. Kathy’s car was covered with blood, but Hilda had some pain dope in her and had finally quit crying. “I’ll pay you back Kathy, I swear, if it takes the rest of my life. And I’ll clean your car. Thank you so much, I just can’t tell you . . .”

By the time we got home it was past dark. Shirley and John were home. Heckuva way to meet your new neighbors. They were decent about it although it was about as awkward as you’d think. I slogged through the drift and on to my new home, only belatedly noticing that the POS was in its designated spot in front of the new digs.

When I walked in, the little cabin was warm and fragrant. There was a fire in the stove and Ray was sitting in a recliner in the living room watching football on TV with Merlin in his lap.

“You look like you been to the war, girl.”

I looked down at the contrast between the rusty dried blood on my clothing and the bright white bandages on both arms. “I have.” I said. “Merlin let you get in the car?”

“Nah,” he said, “not really.” He waved a hand with a couple of fresh Band-Aids on it. “But he wasn’t too bad. You warned me. I came in and got some tuna fish as a peace offering. After that he let me reach in and put the car in neutral. I pulled the POS on in with the truck to bust the drift so you can get back out. The rest of the stuff from the back seat is in your room. You want a beer?”

“You are so kind, but no thank you, I just want to shower and crash. It’s been a long, terrible day.”

I showered and made our bed. Merlin came in and, purring, settled himself in loaf position on my chest. He was bonelessly relaxed, and so happy with our new digs he was drooling down his chin. Hard to believe it was the same hellcat who’d drawn so much blood on the day.

The next day I spent my last ten bucks on groceries and dog treats at Rainbow Grocery. Hilda ran shrieking when I went up on John and Shirley’s porch to leave the treats and a note of apology. Many hundreds of dollars past broke as I was, and with the ski area opening more than a week away, I turned to my traditional strategy for quick cash—tending bar. I went to the Riviera, the logger’s bar in South Fork, and started work. I earned enough to buy the cleaning supplies I needed to work on Kathy’s car that very night and worked on it every day till the ski area opened, but it never did come all the way clean.

Hilda came to visit frequently and we eventually became great friends. Most of the ruination was on the left side of her face, which was tat with scars. Her left eye and ear were a little droopy and the damage to her lips had drawn them back into a perpetual, bemused, pouty, half-grin—an expression of bewilderment both comic and sad. Her Phantom of the Opera face skewered me with guilt, which I assuaged with more dog treats than I should have given her. She was a sweet dog who loved to play and have her ears scratched, but every time Merlin would come around she’d howl and whimper and, terrified, drag her belly. It was tragic to see such a noble animal laid so low. Merlin never hurt her again but he would linger in her presence and let her suffer. The asshole.

I worked around the clock that winter, running the lift by day and tending bar at the Rivie by night, as many shifts as both bosses would give me. I was burnt out by the end of the season, but had paid Kathy back, established a stable, affordable roommate situation with Ray in the funky little cabin by the river, and the only boyfriend I had time for was Merlin, which suited us both just fine. It was a good winter despite its inauspicious start.

---

Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.

Terryl is the author of:
The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-9894698-5-2

AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.

A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.

Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.