True to His Name

I’ve written before about my daughter’s cat Tuffy. He was named by my oldest grandson, and just this week we learned how really prophetic his name was. 

I got a call at the end of last week from Brittany letting me know that they had not seen Tuffy in a day or two. I remembered picking him up and loving on him on Wednesday afternoon. 

He had been sunning himself on the back porch. Brittany wasn’t exactly sure when she had seen him last, but it was somewhere in the same time span. 

We kept holding out hope that he would show up, but as the days went by I feared he might have been the victim of a coyote attack. Brittany kept hoping that maybe he had just wandered off. 

Ever since the baby was born Tuffy was getting less attention as is often the case.

A week after he disappeared my grandson found him on the back porch underneath the grill. 

He was thin and was favoring one of his paws. Later that night they noticed a puncture wound full of puss. Brittany had made an appointment at the vet for the next morning to get his leg checked out. 

The vet discovered that Tuffy had actually been shot. The puncture wound was a bullet that has gone clear through him. Along the way it shattered his leg near his shoulder. 

At first I wondered if he had been hit by shot from a shotgun. Around the time this had happened was dove season, and maybe accidentally Tuffy had gotten in the way. 

Sadly it wasn’t shot, it was a bullet. It breaks my heart to think that someone shot him on purpose. Who would do such a thing?

Then when I thought about Tuffy dragging himself home over a period of days that made me even sadder. 

Right now you would never know he’d been through anything while he sits contentedly at his home glad to be there. 

Decisions will need to be made about what route to go next, but I’m just grateful that he is still alive and at home. 

Tuffy is my surrogate cat until we are ready to get one of our own, and I sure do love him.