Star Thrower

This is Star Thrower. If you've read Sunday's post below you'll know what he's been up to, and you'll also know why he won't be coming in the house any time soon. (Not to worry, he has a barn and his own furniture and multiple quilts.) We picked him up on the side of the road almost 18 years ago. He was 5 weeks old at the time and about the size of a grapefruit. We'd been keeping an eye out for his mother whenever we'd drive to town. She seemed to be feral and we had hopes of rescuing her until one day when we saw her carrying kittens that we hadn't known existed. Not long after that, we found she'd been run over. It took us a while but we ended up finding her 3 little ones camped out not far from her corpse. We named the first Eiseley (after Loren Eiseley, the writer and naturalist) and he lived to be 15. The second was given to a relative and died of cancer at the age of 12. Star Thrower was the third. He was named after Eiseley's short story The Star Thrower. He's very sweet and has never once complained about having to endure all of his days with such a wretched moniker. Eiseley's short story is also pretty great. It's one of choosing hope and love over weary cynicism. There are lots of altered versions of it floating around cyberspace but the original has a beauty, depth, and complexity that the others often trivialize. Here's a snippet:

....through war and famine and death, a sparse mercy had persisted,
like a mutation whose time had not yet come. I had seen the star thrower cross that rift and, in so doing, he had reasserted the human right
to define his own frontier.

~Loren Eiseley, from The Unexpected Universe, 1969