Bodhi, the Nine-Lives Cat

Every block has a lucky cat. Ours is Bodhi — my neighbor’s beloved companion, and very likely the most fortunate animal for a mile in any direction. By my count he has spent most of his nine lives already, and lived to nap about it.

Consider his record. Bodhi once disappeared into a storm drain and was pulled out by the fire department nearly a mile from home. Another time he fell from a tree and was impaled by a branch, needing surgery to pull through. Either of those would be the story of a lifetime for most cats. For Bodhi, they were warm-ups.

Because the closest call deserves telling in full. One night a predator — most likely a coyote — attacked him, and he vanished. His owner searched and found no trace, and had every reason to believe he was gone. A memorial went up right on the sidewalk, with a notice about the attack. Neighbors left flowers and notes. People stopped to talk, and some stopped to pray. The whole block was grieving one cat.

But Bodhi had done the one thing a cat can do when everything on the ground wants to kill it: he went straight up. A very, very tall tree — and there he stayed, hidden in the branches, for six days without food or water. When he was finally spotted, a neighbor did something quietly heroic: at two o’clock in the morning, up a ladder into that tree, and brought him down — scraped up, severely dehydrated, and alive. The vet checked him over. He’d made it. Bodhi came home.

His owner told the story herself in a short video, and it’s worth every minute — you can hear exactly what he means to her, and to everyone who gathered around:

And the hero of the two a.m. ladder climb? There’s an interview about the neighbor who brought Bodhi down — because a rescue like that deserves its own telling:

And here is the part I find most moving. Bodhi wore a little protective eye charm on his collar — and when his owner was searching for what she feared were his remains, that charm was the thing she was looking for. After he came home, the memorial on the sidewalk didn’t come down. It became a gratitude table. There’s a note with Bodhi’s update, in English and in Spanish, and a supply of protective eyes that anyone passing by is invited to take — for themselves, for their children, for their own animals — as a reminder, in his owner’s words, never to lose hope, and that we are always protected.

A cat survives six days in a tree, and a neighborhood ends up with a little shrine to hope on the sidewalk. People still stop there. That’s Bodhi’s real ninth life — the one he’s living as a symbol.

And here he is showing off the very skill at the center of all of it. Climbing has been Bodhi’s undoing and his salvation in roughly equal measure — it put a branch through him once, and it carried him out of a predator’s reach and kept him alive for six days another time. Watching him scale a trunk like it’s a staircase, you understand how he’s still here to pose for pictures.

He didn’t start out easy, either. His family remembers him as an unusual, almost autistic kitten — before he grew into the healthy, easygoing cat he is today. Somewhere in all of that, Bodhi seems to have burned through eight lives and a good part of the ninth.

So his owners made the wise and loving call: Bodhi is now a house cat, with a fine catio of his own — an enclosed porch where he can watch the birds, feel the sun, and take in the whole neighborhood without any of it being able to get to him. There’s a quiet grace to it, too: the catio keeps Bodhi safe from the world, and the songbirds safe from Bodhi. Everybody wins. Here he is among the cherry blossoms, exactly where a lucky cat belongs — most of nine lives spent, and every one that’s left lived in comfort, dearly loved.

And here he is on duty in that catio — sun on his fur, birds in view, and not a single one of his remaining lives at risk. A happy ending you can actually photograph.

These portraits are lightly enhanced — Bodhi is exactly as I found him, with a little polish added to the backgrounds.