29 May 2009 - 3 May 2012
This page is a rememberance of Gryff. He was in our lives for only a relatively short time, but we loved him dearly while he was with us.
Gryff first impinged on our lives before we got him. My wife, Tracy, started surfing the internet and saw a picture of four kittens on the Coontastic breeder website. Of those four, she fell particularly in love with Gryff (short for Gryffindor), a red tabby. Within two weeks, in early September 2009, he had come to our house and joined in with our lives. When we first saw him at the breeders, he was at the bottom of a heap of kittens, with his three siblings (Hufflepuff, Slitherin and Ravenclaw) on top of him, chewing off his whiskers. He was just so soft, soppy and adorable..
He wasn't altogether welcomed by our other cats initially. Fluffy, in particular wasn't particularly impressed (though he came around later and became quite fatherly to Gryff):
However, it didn't take long for Gryff to start making his presence felt. As a young kitten he loved to play, loving a bit of rough and tumble with whoever would play with him. Squeaky was happy to romp until Gryff grew too big:
Gryff, maybe because he was a Maine Coon, was more than a little bit unusual for a cat. He wasn't bothered by rain, and he positively adored the snow. He would go romping in it, charging about, loving every second. In his first winter I managed to get this shot of him before he raced off to join in a snowball fight the girls were having:
Gryff would stay out in the snow for hours on end, only coming in when he could barely move for snow clumped up in his underbelly fur and on his legs.
During the winter, our garden pond freezes up too. Gryff, being intensely curious walked on the ice, and discovered that little wavelets came up from the pond underneath and washed over the top of the ice. He spent many hours pouncing on the wavelets and trying to catch fish under the ice.
Gryff's liking for water caused us a big problem on one occasion. Because he liked to drink and loved paddling, we started to put the plug in the bath and leave half an inch (12mm) of water in the bottom. He'd bounce in and out, taking a little drink, have a paddle and then go skidding about over the lino covered bathroom floor with his soggy paws having great fun. This worked brilliantly until one day when things went a little wrong. During the day, while we were out to work, he jumped up on the bath and managed to get his leg between the arms of the top of the cold tap and turn it on. By the time we got home the bath had overflowed and was pouring water through the ceiling into the study below. Gryff, on the other hand, was discovered by Tracy rolling about the bathroom floor happily chasing wavelets. Needless to say, after that we never left the plug in the bath!
Gryff liked wide open doors. So, on entering a room he would rise up on his back legs and hit the door with both front paws in a powerful punch. Sometimes the door would swing open, ricochet off the radiator behind the door and hit him as he entered, where upon he'd gallop forward muttering imprecations under his breath. Silly mog!
I don't know if it's a Maine Coon trait, but Gryff was a very vocal cat, which often proved useful when he was hiding in the garden. He'd stay mostly out of sight (he never understood that he needed to hide his tail too..!), but because he kept on muttering to himself it was often possible to hear where he was before we saw him. At night we could hear him muttering his way up to the landing when he wanted to sleep there, and hear him groan & grunt as he lay down, then squeak as he dreamt his catty dreams. His purrs were powerful, and we could often hear them in the bedroom when he was in the living room. Up-close you could see that his purrs really vibrated his whole body.
When sitting down, doing nothing in particular, Gryff would often sit near us with his mouth slightly open, looking particularly vacant. Not that he was entirely stupid, just very soppy. He simply loved being near his people.
Most cats hold their tails up like a flag. Not Gryff. Most of the time his tail swept down from his rump like a Cheetah or Lion so the tip was near the ground. Now, Maine Coons are not short-hair cats, so there was a side effect of this.. The feathering on the underside of his tail often brushed the ground, picking up leaves & sticks. We frequently pulled twigs out of his tail that were 12" (300mm) long, and occasionally double that.
Over the two years or so we had Gryff, he continued to grow up and become a really fine figure of a cat. He was a Maine Coon, and would reach full size at the age of 4. This photo of him with Fluffy on Tracy's lap shows just how big he was at the age of 2 years 10 months:
Then a month later (for info, the tiles on the fireplace are 6" [150mm] square):
We were so proud of him, how he was growing up into such a fine cat, with a wonderful, loving and very dopey temperament. He was beginning to become a very proficient rat catcher and had progressed a long way from his first kill (a shrew half the width of his paw that we think he killed by accidentally treading on it).
The majority of our garden is on a 1 in 3 slope. Gryff used to thunder down from the top of the garden to the house. While doing this his glossy fur rippled in beautiful waves. He looked like a miniature lion with his ruff, tail position and his big-cat grace. As he ran, his left front paw always touched the ground a fraction earlier and slightly behind his front right, so when tracking him we could tell which way he was going and whether he was running or walking at that point.
Thinking of hunting & tracking.. There was one occasion in late October 2010 where Gryff was very lucky to survive. Our youngest daughter had a friend around to stay during the half-term, and she came down to make herself some breakfast. She saw a large black creature glide diagonally down the bank onto our patio, turn around and fix its eyes on Gryff, who was next to the kitchen window. The big black creature was a Panther, and at this point was less than 20 feet from the house. The girl moved behind the window glass, and the Panther saw the movement, registered that it was a human and fled. Gryff had been on the Panther's dinner menu, and his life had been saved by this little girl. I don't doubt that the little girl saw a Panther, because I have seen it once, and my wife has seen it three times (once with me, and twice when walking the children). On the occasion when we both saw the Panther, it was on the other side of the narrow valley where we live and it was trying to stay out of sight of a dog-walker. The animal's shoulder was the same height as the dog-walker's Border Collie dog's shoulder, and its body was 50% longer. The tail was almost as long as its body and swept down from the animal's haunches and was held horizontal close to the ground at the end. There is no mistaking a big cat when you see one, and this was a big cat, the size of a Panther. Moreover, we have a leopard skin from a man-eater my Grandfather shot in 1927 in India, we showed the skin to my daughter's friend, and she was able to confirm that the Panther she saw was about the same size. I was able to track paw prints in the dew where the girl said it had gone, and the paw-prints and flattened grass areas were over 5" across, with about 2'6" between paw placements. This confirmed to me that she hadn't made the story up.
Unfortunately Gryff appears to have had the HCM gene, and went missing on the evening of Thursday, May 3rd, 2012. We found his body 3ft from our garden fence on Saturday morning. He seems to have had a massive heart-attack and died almost instantly. The only consolation is that he wouldn't have felt anything.
We do miss him every second, expecting him to punch the doors open or yowl at us at any moment. For a cat who had not yet reached the age of three, he'd affected our lives far out of proportion to the time he'd spent with us. More than a few tears have been shed as a result of his passing.
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