Bob like a Lamb: the many faces of Bob part 1

 This is Bob. He's a very picture-o-genic fellow, so there'll be lots of different versions of him in the future. This one shows the one feature of Bob that everyone notices first, and the reason for his name — no tail.

Summer a year ago, he and the neighbor's cat got into a rolling, fur-flying fight on this upstairs porch — and rolled down the stairs. They rolled off the side of the steps about halfway down, and landed on the concrete walk. Bob was on the bottom. He landed on his back. They both walked away from the landing, but Bob was staggering.

He didn't want to be picked up. He slowly walked up onto the front porch, and rested for a while. I was hanging out with him, but when I went inside for a few minutes, he vanished. When I came back out, and started calling him, the crows down the hill were making a fuss. I hadn't been calling him for 10 minutes when a coyote came trotting up through the orchard. Broad daylight, 1:00 in the afternoon. It was only after reading the book called Bird Brains that I realized the crows had been notifying the coyote of the injured animal. Ravens do it with wolves.

Bob didn't show up that day or that night, but he must have been well hidden under a bush, because the next morning there he was on the front porch, loudly demanding breakfast. Two lives in one day.