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Descanso
man is Back Country's wildest cat
By Ryan Weaver
The Alpine Sun
DESCANSO — Of all the species of cats to ever roam the hills of the Back Country, only one walks on two legs and stands six feet tall. He is the only cat that can speak English, and his voice is deep. The words that come from behind his cleft lip have a strange resonance, as words would sound rising from a deep well.
When asked if he eats cat food, he said, “I am a cat, so everything I eat is cat food.”
The last time he had a human name, Dennis
Avner, he was 13 years old. He was living in  Michigan, near an Indian reservation, and went to see a medicine man. He had shown a strong kinship both with water and with the cat, and the medicine man renamed him “Stalking Cat.”
It is legend among the Huron and Lakota Indians that a man evolves to become his totem, which for Stalking Cat was the tiger. He said he knew then that he would transform himself completely.
When he was 18 he got his first tattoo. It was on his chest. For the next 20 years, as the funds became available, tattoos would branch out across his body. His arms were painted green with scales, and his left elbow became an octopus. That was the homage paid to water.
One of Stalking Cat’s friends owned a Siberian tiger named
Sasha. Cat duplicated Sasha’s bold black stripes onto a piece of paper, and the intricate pattern was later tattooed onto his face, even onto his eyelids.
“I have a high threshold for pain,” Cat said.
It’s a good thing, too, because there was to be no turning back in the process of changing himself into a tiger.
In 1980, Cat finally found someone to do his unique type of surgical work. There are only a few people who do body modification in the world, Cat said, but Steve Hayworth is the best.
Most of the procedures had to be invented. On the third operation Cat finally got his ears cut and reshaped into leonine points just the way he wanted them. He had the septum in his nose relocated to give him a different profile, and had silicone injected and inserted as carved blocks to give his nose ridge, cheeks, and brow ridge a cat shape. He had to go to Mexico for some of the work, since the procedure has been outlawed in the United States.
Cat would return to Hayworth for work again and again. He had his lip cleft and shot with silicone. He put 24 special studs through the lip that could be equipped with synthetic whiskers. Six more studs were screwed into a flat metal plate attached to his skull, so that his brow could have whiskers as well. His wildcat eyes are an over-the-counter contact lens product of Wesley Jensen.
It has been said that Cat has had his teeth filed into feline fangs, but actually he had his teeth removed by a dentist in El Cajon so that an accurate set of cat teeth could be replicated with dental acrylic.
Cat, who went to school to learn electronics as a kid and currently runs a computer business, helped pioneer technology to give him a lifelike tail. He has two, actually: an animatronic one that is programmed to move, and a bionic one that is directly responsive to signals from his own muscles. Along with a friend, Cat helped develop a tail that moved to muscle reactions in his calf. It is accomplished by the same technology that responds to the movement of a heart in an EKG. Flexing his calf creates a swish of his tail.
Some years ago, Cat worked for a company in Peutz Valley. When he quit, he moved off the property and came to Guatay in the Back Country. He’s been here for about six years, and said he is not finished becoming a tiger. The next step may be to get two ears mounted higher on his skull.
It appears that it would be hard to function normally in Cat’s current state, with so much altered from the natural, but Cat said his only regret is that he didn’t start his transformation sooner.
For now, he is about as much a cat as anyone has ever been. Cat was asked if people ever see him and run or scream.
“Every now and then,” he answered. “A couple times a year.”
Cat has been featured on Ripley’s Believe It Or
Not, Larry King Live, German TV, Japanese TV, Romanian TV, South American
Telemundo, and in the Soviet Union. His website is at Stalking
Cat.
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