Buster has crossed over.
This animal was the first cat we pulled into our own after we moved from South Carolina to Tennessee. We got others not too long afterwards (at least as I measure time, which is admittedly sketchy), and Buster, renamed from the incredibly unoriginal Orangie (short for Orangeman; even at eleven I could tell his first owners were insipid fools), quickly took the position as the dominant male—a very softspoken, out-of-the-way dominant male, but any cat who annoyed him or invaded his personal space for just a little too long usually got clouted hard enough to skid them a few feet away.
Buster took the same approach to dogs. He tolerated their presence—he had to, since at that point I still owned my black lab/border collie, Chase—but his tolerance only extended in about a three-foot radius around himself. Unless, of course, they got overly interested in his people; there was one day I was walking around in the front yard, and he (as usual) was padding along with me, that a couple of large roving mutts, probably something like a gold-lab/mastiff mix (very blunt noses) decided to investigate me a little more thoroughly, and before I could reach out and kick them away Buster had already swiped the closest one on the nose (drew three lines of blood, too) and laid into the side of the second one, who decided to gtfo while the gtfoing was good.
Every cat we've owned since we got him has grown up with him looming over their food dish. We think he did this as sort of a little personal chuckle. He wouldn't eat anything at all. He'd just sit there, looking at it, and when one of the other males would come up for a nibble he'd lean a little forward, and they'd pretend they weren't as interested as they thought they had been.
With people he was very silly. He loved laps, but he would always ask very politely (and inquisitively) before assuming control of one. And if you said no he tended to keep asking until he decided your 'no' meant 'probably' and would then studiously nudge his way onto you whether you wanted him to or not. Once there, though, his favored position was one with his head on your stomach so he could look at you lovingly, or look at you demandingly and gently poke one set of claws into your belly flesh until you petted him.
Buster didn't really have any favorite people, either. He spent more time with certain people, sure, but that was because they tended to pay more attention to him. That and later on he liked to rest on my father because Dad had a nice cushion for his head. =P
I think it was my first year in college that we discovered a tumor in his left ear. That was sort of startling, but we got him some medicine for it and it fell out, and he stayed on some antibiotics (which are always fun to give to a cat) until the infection that had sunk in around the tumor had gone away.
As was known to people who'd been around to hear me talking about him, he'd been getting steadily weaker for some time. His body weight had dropped significantly, and the arthritis in his rear joints was pretty bad. He hadn't been able to handle dry food for a while, either, probably since early November, and had been on a steady diet of whatever moist cat food we could get him to tolerate along with Ol' Roy, which he seemed to love. (Interestingly, our current dog, whom I would love to give away, prefers dry cat food to dry dog food, so.) We were also slightly concerned about him because it seemed like he would keep biting his tongue; every now and then when he opened his mouth there would be a small red stain on the left side.
Lately, though, he hadn't really been taking to wet cat food, either, having to spend several minutes apparently working some of it out from between his teeth after every few bites, and his drool (which tended to fly everywhere when he shook his head) was getting a light reddish color as well. My mother had an idea and tried some turkey-flavored baby food about a week ago, and he seemed to rather enjoy that (especially since he could actually eat again, no doubt), but the mouth-working continued, and along with that he started a habit of relieving himself diarrhea in the house, which he never did unless no one was paying attention to him asking to be let outside.
My father and I took him to the vet today with the intent of putting him to sleep, so I was already a bit raw from knowing in advance. When they looked him over, they found that his weight had gone down to about 7.8 pounds (he weighed around 14 when he was young and fit, and the previous visit had been about 8.6, which was at the beginning of this month), and when the vet sedated him so he could see inside his mouth, we discovered a disgustingly large growth on the left side of his inner cheek—a tumor, in other words, half blocking his throat and raw and bloody on the underside. When I saw it I remembered the tumor he'd had in his left ear, and I wondered if they were connected, but that sight pretty well assured me that Buster wasn't coming home. My father said (and I agreed) he figured that a surgery might kill him anyway, and he just didn't have the heart to keep letting the old guy suffer just to keep him around.
They asked us (more me, probably because I stayed so quiet) if we wanted some time alone with him beforehand. I think I surprised them when I said I wasn't leaving him in the first place so they could go ahead and put him under whenever they were ready.
So I watched him stop breathing.
His body is with Shadow's, now, awaiting burial.
Goodbye, Buster.
