He was an abandoned cat, one who somehow ended up in the custody of the local Humane Society. That's where my daughter adopted him from, and she named him Tibby, a largish mostly grey feline, with a strange hanging pouch for an abdomen. That might have resulted from a condition relating to lack of adequate food. Once in my daughter's household, however, inadequate food was never a problem, although Tibby was always anxious before dinnertime, reminding my daughter that he needed, desperately, to eat.

This is a household of lots of domestic pets ranging from dogs to cats to rabbits, and even once, when my granddaughter was young, a little gerbil. Tibby never felt disadvantaged; he knew his place in the menagerie and tenaciously stuck to it, insisting on his entitlements. And when, on occasion, one or two or the rabbits was let out of their enclosure to just hop about wherever it pleased them, Tibby respected their security; he never posed a threat to them.

He did, however, pose a threat to the teeming wildlife around where my daughter lived, so Tibby became an 'inside' cat, never permitted out. And then my daughter relented, and put together a wire arrangement, a quite large affair, meant as well for any of the dogs who wanted to be out when she couldn't supervise them. That sufficed, apparently. Even so, if ever a chipmunk or a mouse managed somehow to get into the house, or a water snake in the spring, Tibby would pounce and my daughter rode to the rescue.

A dozen years later, Tibby is no more. My daughter moved with her household to another home, one which gave all the animals the same amount of acreage and the freedom to roam, as long as they were supervised. And Tibby, as usual, was permitted out into the confines of yet another large wire enclosure. Not that Tibby didn't resent the fact that the dogs could go out and he couldn't, to just kind of slop around the house. When the dogs, all ten of them, large and small, and mostly, like Tibby, rescues, were let out for pee-break, Tibby often tried to slip out with them, and sometimes succeeded.

Last Friday, which happened to be the 13th of November, he had managed somehow to slip out of the house without my daughter noticing. She was busy working, and heard what sounded like a vehicle braking. She has a fence across the front of her property, a heritage stone farmhouse, erected when she and her partner moved into their new home. In front of that fence is a highway and traffic can be fairly high at times.

She had a premonition. And called for Tibby, but there was no response from inside the house. Where he was supposed to be, of course. Then she went outside on that windy, pouring, cold day in early evening, and looked across at the highway, and just made out what looked like a small, limp form. And that's where she found Tibby.