Shooting and fishing

For the number of alarums and excursions involving livestock in this household you'd think we didn't care. Donkeys loose, dogs astray, cats eaten by eagle owls. The list is endless.

This time it's Paddy Paws the ginger cat, so-called because of the prominent thumbs on his front paws. A timid animal with the eyes of a possum, he was a comfortable cat and would drape himself across the shoulders of the Robertson women and hang down on each side like a living fox stole.

Four years ago my brother came to shoot with Meg, a stinking lab that lunged at Paddy who immediately disappeared. The next thing we knew, a huge eagle owl appeared in the garden – from where we know not – and flapped menacingly from tree to tree for three days. And that was the end of Paddy Paws.

If eagle owls ate small children, complete with their pushchairs, as some of the wilder popular prints have claimed, a nervy ginger cat was going to be a cinch. Two years later, he was traced to a hollow tree the other side of the graveyard beside the burn and enticed back.

That summer, my brother returned with Meg who had not improved in odour or temperament. And this time we really didn't see Paddy again apart from occasionally, we thought, late at night in the headlights as we neared home.

But that might have been the other ginger cat who is a lean killer, out at all hours snapping up voles and small birds (I could never bring myself to put a bell on his neck, it just seemed unfair. Not to say silly).

We didn't even find Paddy's distinctive paw marks in the snow this time. He really had gone or was maybe dead. And none of the neighbours had seen him.

In January I found the tail ends of three dead salmon high on the burn bank after the snow had gone. They could have been eaten by anything. But three was two more than we had ever come across before and close to the same spot where Paddy had lived rough in the past.

Last week the gravedigger came round and said that there was a dead cat in the graveyard. It was Paddy. He was quite unmarked, neither mangy nor emaciated, just lying out in the open atop the grave of old Miss Gordon who was particularly keen on cats but I wouldn't like to read too much into that.

The gravedigger was visibly upset and then rather shocked when I unthinkingly carried him off by the hind legs like a dead hare.

Had he been living within yards of us all these years? Had he been away and come back to die? He was nine years old. Who knows? He's buried under the Victoria plum; a sunny spot. I expect a good crop next year.

This article was originally published in the Scotsman. June 4th, 2011