Sky and Rat

Spent the whole day and part of the night yesterday nursing a sick heifer. She is bit brighter today....


Anyhow being out at all hours gave me several chances to appreciate the incredible beauty of last night's sky. The moon was a gleaming waxing crescent with a couple of handy stars or planets clustered around it (Venus was undoubtedly one of them.) 


They looked surreal grouped together like that and early on all the stars were amazingly bright. You almost expected Merlin to step down out of the whirl of them.


This has been a great winter for stars and skies and we have much enjoyed watching.


As to the rat. We put the sick heifer in a sort of greenhouse in the woodshed. I was coming down from tending her, in the dark, with only the light of my fairly pathetic flashlight, when something chirped right beside me.


I thought, "RAT," and spun my light to see. There was a grey thing stretched up the barn upright as high as my hip. My heart leaped into frantic action, bang, bang, bang. The thing was the size of a cat.


Then it chirped again and dug its claws deeper into the wood of the post.


It WAS a cat.


Athena, the grey barn cat that Alan is so fond of.


I think she took a year off my life....maybe even two.