I don't recall just when it was that the black shorthair cat showed up in our yard. He was one of several that came to the food dish on our porch with such regularity that we knew he had to have a den nearby. When the little tortoiseshell showed up in 2002, they became a couple and in the summer of 2003, there were kittens.

He was a surprisingly devoted father, taking his turn in bringing several kittens at a time down to the food dish on the porch and watching over them from under one of the vehicles while they ate. His devotion ended up getting him trapped with Baby when they came down to look for their kids after we'd trapped the kittens. His poor attitude toward people made it easy to dismiss him as hopelessly feral. After he had healed from his operation, we let him loose in the yard and let him live his life on his terms.

I honestly didn't think too much about him. He was feral and that was that. He had a safe place to live and steady food. Beyond that, I didn't think there was much we could do for him.

That seemed to suit everyone just fine until at the end of the summer of 2005 he decided he wanted to be one of our cats.

He started showing up on the deck during the day, visiting the housecats through the screen door or the wire of the small cat run. Skinny and Clarence seemed particularly fond of him and I had to wonder if he remembered Skinny from the time she lived outside (up until September 2004.) That he might recognize/remember Clarence as his kitten seemed a stretch but Clarence and Lola were allowed out in the cat run a few weeks after we brought them inside, so I suppose he could have seen them in there from that time on, before the memory and their scents changed too much.

Over the course of a month or so, Black Bart came to take his meals on the deck. Denny built him a little "bus stop"-like shelter that looked into the kitchen from the deck and as winter approached, he was often sitting there day or night, peering in at us. He would still hiss and move away when I went outside to feed him, but he retreated a shorter distance and his hiss seemed more rote than heart-felt. A few times, he even ventured inside the screen door, but if I made a move into the kitchen, he would hasten outside again.

It took catnip and leaving the cat run open to capture him. After he was prodded inside the house, he quickly found the feral havens both in the downstairs bedroom and up in the living room. There was a minimum of hissing as the ferals were all more afraid of us than of a new cat, and he was well-behaved from the start.

After a few days of lying low, Bart came out of hiding when I fed the cats, keeping to the shadows and out of reach, but understanding the procedure and fitting in. Then he began to get up on the second shelf of the cat tree and would stay put while I walked through the room. He was taking baby steps toward us. In late December of 2005, I finally ventured to pet him.

He liked it. Before long, he was coming up on the bed at night for petting and rubbing and now it is hard to remember the scared, "feral" cat he was before he came inside to live with us. I think about the lonely years, the hard winters and the fear he lived with for so long and I'm glad he decided to come in from the cold.