My Cat Never Came Back From the Korean War

Smokey was a veteran of many cat fights. His ears were shredded and there were scars where many bites and scratches had gotten infected. I became very adept at being his personal “cat doctor”.
When he was 12 years old, an incident happened that I could not take care of. He had been missing for 2 or 3 weeks. I went out one morning and he was laying on the front porch, more dead than alive. He was very skinny and was dragging his right front leg by a sinew of skin. I figured he had gone through a mowing machine as there had been mowing machines working in the fields in the area.
Smokey was family and we took him to the veterinarian in a nearby town. The doctor neatened up the amputation. I fed him with an eye dropper and dusted the amputation with sulfa powder. Slowly, he got better and fur started growing over the stub. It was almost humorous seeing him go to the bathroom. The paw that wasn’t there dug a hole. Afterwards, he covered up the mess with the paw that wasn’t there.
I knew he was getting much better when I looked out the window one morning and saw him chasing and catching a female cat. Doing pushups with the front leg made his leg very muscular. My mother got a younger cat for company. The cats ate together in separate bowls. When the young cat was finished with his food, he came across and started to eat out of Smokey’s bowl. Smokey watched for a minute and then knocked the young cat across the kitchen with that well muscled leg. Needless to say, the cat learned the lesson and was very careful after that.
I lived in a two story house with a basement. A window into the basement, for light, had a one foot casement frame. One day, my father’s friend brought his prize field trials black and tan hound to show him. He came around the corner of the house and Smokey was sitting in the window frame. The hound started growling and coming closer. “He won’t hurt your cat”, the friend said, but the hound came closer. Suddenly, that leg that been doing pushups for a few years, flashed out and ripped off the end of the hound’s nose and he was no longer a field trials hound.
In February 1951, I was drafted into the army at Fort Ord, California. One week later, I got a letter from my mother telling me that the day I left for Fort Ord, Smokey had left home and was never seen again.
When I got home from basic training, I was talking to the owner of a local service station in town and he remembered seeing a gray three legged cat hopping along the highway to the south. I have no idea how far he got in his quest to find me.
In a dream once, Smokey had gotten all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge and didn’t have the toll to hop across the bridge!