I’m sad to say I’ve finally given up hope that Oin was possibly on some sort of epic personal journey and that he’d return home as he has nightly for the last nine years, often injured from battles yet still ready to deliver a marker.

I can’t say we always got along. Hell, he wasn’t even my cat to begin with. But as will happen when you take care of something for years, I became attached. This was most apparent when he got that battle wound and I had to nurse him for two weeks, including hand-feeding him water and wetfood because he was so damn deranged from painkillers and an inner-ear infection he couldn’t quite coordinate his big poofy head with the old cone attached. But soon he got better, and returned to ignoring me (unless he was hungry).

Oin had always been an outdoor cat. I strongly disagree with people keeping cats from going outside (though I keep my yap shut nowadays, as with most things). I can easily hear some friends arguing that he’d be here if I’d just kept him inside. But I’d also have a house that smelled like lingering catshit, and he’d have a completely different, likely hostile, temperament. I just don’t get why people have predators as pets and don’t let them be what they are, as God Intended Them To Be (ha), holding them back from going outside and nearly killing birds and rats and voles and mice, then playing with their half-dead bodies for 30 minutes before dragging them to the kitchen floor and howling with joy.

It’s odd to lose a pet by having them just disappear. Not getting closure can be a hell of a thing, because you end up returning to wondering what happened, over and over. I can only hope that he did indeed find a better foodbowl with less hippie, more meaty offerings, and is happily drooling all over some poor sap’s lap.