Dear Diary, I've been sleeping the month away and so much has been going on here with the cats. Big Tom has not shown his face in our neighborhood for at least two weeks. He's been the alpha, the granddaddy of all cats. But now he's gone away. No sign of him. Maybe he was feeling too much stress from the humans to become tame. Maybe he went after a rat in the creek and a bigger rat went after him. There's no way to know. We don't send out search parties. We don't do rescue missions. His genes run through each and every cat here. We will miss his face.

This moves my dad up a few notches on the dominance list. He and Winnie are always threatening to have it out, and maybe they do have their spats at night while I'm tucked into a nice warm bed and unaware of what's going on out there in the yard.

Moochie has also disappeared. She more or less vanished into thin air I think. The last few times I saw her she was getting thinner and thinner, and then poof, she was gone. Unlike Tom, who was full of vigor, Moochie was sickly and thin. I don't think she went out of the neighborhood at all. She just melted away until there was nothing left of her--no body, no bones, just thin air where she had been.