The Untimely Demise of Stevie Nicks

A couple of facts to begin this very real, very true story.  I am a dog person.  I grew up listening to the sounds of the seventies to which my favorite band, Fleetwood Mac, belonged.  The first time I heard Fleetwood Mac I was smitten.  The first time I saw Stevie Nicks I was in love.  My ex-wife is a cat person.  When we got married I promised to let her have a cat.  I didn't think she was really listening when I made that promise.  The day after we returned home from out honeymoon she said "let's go get one". 

"One what?"

"A cat, let's go get a cat, like you said we could".

"Did I say that?"

"Yes."

"Must have been during sex."

"Yes."

"You're not suppose to listen to what I say during sex."

"Okay, I'll ignore you next time you tell me to make like a dog."

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

"I still want one."

"Want what"

"A cat.  Let's go get a Maine Coon Cat, I seen an ad for kittens in the Falls Times."

"I guess, but I want a compromise."

"Yeah, what, you want me to bark like a dog?"

"Later, but what I mean is I get to name the cat."

"Okay, but not something dumb like your brother named his".

My brother's cat was pure white, psychotic and hated my wife.  If she were to walk into the room, my brother's cat would immediately begin to snarl and hiss.  My brother had named him, 'Fleetwood Mac' and my wife thought that was the dumbest name for a cat.

"Stevie Nicks!", I replied.

"No way!"

"Yes way, or we're not even goning to get one.  I'll get a dog."

"Okay, Stevie Nicks, but I'm only calling him 'Stevie'."

And so, a few hours later this little gray Maine Coon kitten invaded our home.  He was instantly adorable although I held out for almost two weeks before I admitted to that and it was almost three weeks before my wife walked in and caught me playing with little Stevie.  Every time she went downstairs to do the laundry or visit cute little Pam on the second floor, I would drop what I was doing, find that little catnip mouse and play wiht that little gray fuzz-ball until I heard my wife's footsteps striking the third floor landing.  I guess the day she caught me, the kitten and I were both hitting the catni, we didn't noticed the intrusion until her shadow fell across our mutual sunbeam and her laughter lit up the room.  I think she even may have thought I was converting to a cat person.  I wasn't.  I was just trying to make the little fella feel at home.  Quite at home.

When Stevie was about six months old we started taking him outside.  My wife wanted to do the leash thing but I figured he be more enjoyable to watch if we just let him explore; I was looking for cute photographs.  And pets on leashes just isn't the 'happening' composition.  So we let him roam even as we kept very close proximity in an effort to keep him contained but not restrained. From his very first days out in the 'wild', Stevie showed signs of becoming the stalker and the prowler that Maine Coon cats are known for.  We would watch in awe as our cute little feline would crawl along the ground, reach his chosen destination, raise his ears and eyes just above the grassline and wait.  He exhibited an almost supernatural sense of patience, his very breathing inperceptible.  As stoic as an African crocodile Stevie would wait, hidden by the grass, for his chosen target to enter his strike zone and then as swift as a bolt of lightning he would pounce.  More times than not when his paws once again touched terra firma his front two would have a newly acquired victim in their grasp. 

He began with the harassment of grasshoppers and chiggers but soon graduated to butterflies, moths and toads.  Stevie was fast becoming the king of his domain and his domain was forever growing in size.  By the time he was one he began making the rounds with my wife and I to the various state parks throughout Maine.  His travels proved disrupted to the local wildlife.  Having displayed his mastery of the insect world, Stevie was now creating havoc for frogs, lizards, small birds and even squirrels.  Although I never actually witnessed the catching of any squirrels I sure as heck saw a few getting the run of their lives.  Yes, you might say that Stevie was becoming the king of the jungle and the jungle in this case was the vast woods and fields of Maine.  All of maine from the shore to the mountains was his home and his home was his heaven.  His little hunter's paradise.  Looking back, I think he knew his antics entertained us and I guess he had a sense that his little 'kills' were the pinnacle of our entertainment.

One day after we had him for a year, Stevie came trotting back to the loving arms of my wife with an eight or nine inch garden snake in tow.  The snake had already ventured on to whatever heaven little snakes go to when they leave this life.  My wife had no way of knowing if Mr. Snake had been alive or not when he made Stevie's acquaintance.  In my mind there is no doubt.  Yes, mr. Snake was alive and just slithering along as snakes do when little Stevie discovered him.  I have seen first hand the change in my cat's attitude from the couch to the great outdoors and I sensed that among the neighboring catdom, Stevie's balls were reputably big.  He killed that snake, I have no doubt, and then he dragged it home as a trophy to my young bride.  Of course, I did miss all of this.  I was suspended eighty feet in the air somewhere, insulating a stretch of pipe in order to keep Stevie in cat food and catnip.  When I arrived home that evening, my wife greeted me with these loving missed-you-all-day-dear words: "you need to get rid of that snake YOUR cat dragged up here today".   Inwardly, I acknowledged the logic almost immediately, and the irony.  The kitten that my wife so badly wanted, the cute little fuzz-ball she liked showing off to her friends became MY cat the very instant that it starting dragging home dead reptiles.  My cat, the king of the Maine woods.  And had we stayed in them Maine woods, Stevie may have lived a long, proud and endearing life but I probably would have turned into the Jolly Green Giant and been relegated to a life of doing vegetable commercials never mind that I don't eat vegetables.  No, I was getting a little tired of glowing in the dark and sensed I needed a change.

For nearly the entire decade of the eighties I found myself in the bowels of one nuclear power plant or another either insulating a radioactive pipe or stripping asbestos, radioactive asbestos, off of the aforementioned pipe.  My parents who had a couple of years earlier retired to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina invite my wife and I to move down.  The deal was sweetened when my father agreed to help me get back into college and finally, ten years after high school, get my degree.  The wife and I discussed it among ourselves and decided we would give the south a shot.  We did not however discuss these plans with Stevie Nicks nor did we deem it important to embellish him with the differences between the cool and mostly dry Maine woods to wet, humid cypress swamps that were about to become our adoptive home.  Never even mentioned the different class of critters he was about to receive as neighbors.  No, we simply tossed him into his little travel carrier and unceremoniously tossed that on top of the pile of suitcases in the back seat.

We arrived in South Carolina in mid-September 1989, directly on the heals of Hurricane Hugo.  In fact when we got to the Grand Strand we were stopped at the Intracoastal Waterway.  the hurricane was less than twenty-four hours gone and no one was getting into the Myrtle Beach city limits unless they were a resident or a resident family member came out to escort them.  After a couple of hours we discovered my folks had evacuated to the KOA Kampground in Florence, SC, so we turned around to go meet them there.  When we reached Florence we were told that my folks had headed back to the beach an hour prior.  At this point I am sure that Stevie Nicks, in the language of meow, was trying to tell us something about omens and how he really, really missed Maine.  Unfortunately the wife and I missed attending Cat University so the only part of Stevie's protest we understood was simply, "meow".

Hurricane Hugo was a nasty storm, one of the worst that had ever graced the shores of the continental United States.  It cut a swath of destruction fifteen miles wide from Charleston, SC to Virginia.  It disrupted the lives of many folks and displaced tens of thousand of peaceful and not-so-peaceful denizens of the animal kingdom.  And most of these people and animals remained confused, bitter and feisty well into the new year.  During this time my wife and I, along with Stevie Nicks, began to settle in our new home.  For the first couple of months Stevie was relegated to the interior and was one again my wife's precious little feline.  Little by little we began to let him out and little by little he began to explore his new territory which was never really 'his' territory but we told him it was as a means to appease him.  He reciprocated our little reassurances by awarding my wife with a few new species of the local sacrifice union.  First was little yellow-breasted bird that I was actually able to scoop into the trash bin before my wife got to see it.  Then there were a couple of toads and at least one more small snake that prompted a phone call to the college campus I was attending to let me know MY cat was bringing home reptiles again.  And these little games between Stevie, my wife and I went on pretty regularly into the month of January.  At least until the first weekend of the new year.

On that eventful weekend, under our diligent supervision, Stevie Nicks decided to stretch the bounds of his empire all the way to the other side of the field where the great cypress swamp began.  Now, before Hurricane Hugo the great cypress swamp wasn't much more then the awesomely stagnant little puddle by the cypress trees but with nowhere to drain the three feet of water that Hugo left and its wake, the little puddle was now pretty much a full fledge slice of swamp.  It was a rather nice day for January, the sun was out and though cooler for the region it was still light years from the cold and snow back home in Maine.  As we enjoyed the weather, we would watch with enjoyment each knew slide, wait and pounce maneuver of our beloved cat.  And then little Stevie froze solid.  I mean like a statue and in hindsight, I swear the entire meadow when silent.  And then like a shot out of a cannon, Stevie was up and running back up through the field in our general direction.  Reaching a point roughly 100 feet below us Stevie pounced and took wing.  For all the times I have watched this cat hunt, I have never seen him get so airborne and I was thinking to myself, here comes another little snake on his way to little snake heaven.  But that wasn't the case at all!

Just as Stevie Nicks landed on his intended target we got the sight of our lives.  Stevie was no longer hidden by the grass with his prey somewhere underneath him.  No, sir.  He was hooked claws first onto the head of an alligator and this wasn't no baby alligator.  My wife screamed out in surprise and then started hollering some foolish gibberish that sounded a lot like, "Get the hell over there and do something.  Go get Stevie off that thing's head."

To which I replied, "huh"?, "Me"?

Well, I would like to end this little story by saying Stevie put up a valiant fight and chased that poor confused alligator back into the brackish waters, but most of that would be a lie.  Stevie Nicks did put up a valiant fight, right up to the point that he disappeared into the gators mouth.  In about twenty seconds it was all over.  The king of the Maine woods was on his way to becoming the excrement of the southern alligator.  I was saddened by his untimely demise and departure.  'Sad' is not exactly the term I would use for my wife.  She ran towards that alligator kicking and screaming all the way, throwing rocks and sticks and cussing like a sailor on shore leave.  The gator ignored all of this and simply ambled back into the water to enjoy his lunch.  When my wife turned around I was prepared to comfort her but all of a sudden I became the object of her rage.  Somehow, all of this was turning into my fault faster than the speed of light.  I reckon I was suppose to have gone and pounced on that old gator's head myself in an effort to save the coolest cat that ever lived.  I don't know, maybe I should have.

The following day a game warden and local officer went down near the swamp and captured a seven foot long alligator.  We were content thinking it was the one who had eaten Stevie Nicks.  Since the passing of Stevie Nicks and the passing (via divorce) of my wife, I have remained strictly a dog person.  And still am today.  But from time to time I come across this one remaining photo of old Stevie and the memory of a certain Maine Coon cat crosses my mind and somewhere within that mind, I hear my cat's namesake singing "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow................"

©Robert C Burnham (August 2007)