Eight years ago when Strider showed up sick and wet in our barn, he would have been diagnosed with PTSD had he been human. It took years of tiptoeing down the hallway for Mark to prevent our younger cat from running away every time the man of the house entered the room.

And yet...slowly but surely our lost cat has begun to bloom. First he learned to raise a paw on command when Mark offered a treat. He'd sit on my lap and pur more deeply than any cat ever has before. And this year, he learned another new trick --- catching voles.

In the past, Huckleberry has been the hunter in the family. Where we live, this is actually a very good thing since mice try to move into the house every fall and the garden is full of rodents that nibble on our crops. But this year, Huckleberry didn't kill his offerings. Instead, time after time, he brought them through the cat door alive...and let them go.

I growled and complained, but then I realized that our more complacent cat had merely decided Strider was finally ready to expand his repertoire. Sure enough, soon after that final chipmunk had been recaptured, Strider began bringing in voles and consuming them down to the guts, including one massive specimen bigger than any I'd ever seen before.

An online calculator suggests Strider will be turning 48 shortly in human years, definitely no spring chicken. The moral of the story? Whether or not you can teach an old dog new tricks, that rule doesn't apply to cats. Cats, like people, keep growing and changing with every day they spend on this earth.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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