I grew up in a village on the Rideau River south of Ottawa, Ontario. Many people remember the 1950s and early '60s as an idyllic time of free-range kids romping in the fields and forests with their friends and the family dog, and I do remember plenty of that in long-ago Manotick. But I also remember plenty of routine hazards, especially the river itself, and Highway 16, which ran through the village, down Main Street past our house, carrying a high volume of commuter traffic and heavy trucks between Ottawa and Prescott, where you took the bridge over the St. Lawrence River to the United States.

Our neighbours the MacEvoys always had a dog, and the dog's name was Happy. Over the 13 years our family lived in the village, the MacEvoys went through about five dogs named Happy. By the time I was a fully sentient being, say circa 1959, Mrs MacEvoy was in the habit of tying the least controllable and most vulnerable members of the family -- Happy the dog and whoever was the youngest kid at the time -- to the tree in front of the house. It never seemed to occur to Mr MacEvoy to build a fence around the yard -- our Dad's solution -- but different strokes do for different folks.

We were cat people (devoted, doting cat people at that), and my parents never managed to keep a cat alive for more than five years until the highway was diverted to bypass the village.

Free-range kids find their own fun, of course. In Manotick, for some reason, that meant a lot of sliding, in summer down the steep banks of the Rideau into the excitingly frothy waters below the dam that powered Watson's grist mill, and in winter just about anywhere a kid with a toboggan could find a slope. The enormous snowbanks thrown up by the highway plows were particularly appealing, and thus one small boy, the younger brother of a classmate, met his doom when he made the tactical error of sliding down the road side of the snowbank, right into the path of a homeward-bound commuter.

I don't remember parents being at all casual or accepting of such incidents. In fact, it was about the time Tommy Bracken died that the wee pupils of Manotick Public School first made the acquaintance of Elmer the Safety Elephant. Our fascination with the aforementioned frothy waters of the Rideau River brought the Canadian Red Cross Society into our lives, along with its irritating patron saint of swimming lessons, one Walter Safety. Grudgingly, we learned never to swim alone (who did that?) or to dive headfirst into unknown waters.

Humans and cats learn caution the hard way, through trial and error. Humans are large and reasonably intelligent, and they have the Highway Traffic Act and the Criminal Code on their side; cats not so much. Cats are small and vulnerable, and the first time they encounter a moving car or an interested predator can easily be the last time.

Old Bill is our last outdoor cat. He came to us off the street, having survived an entire winter as a stray, and goes frantic when denied exeat. Rosie, the new cat, is a purebred Siamese who has never felt natural ground under her paws -- and that's just as well. She's not smart enough to avoid the hazards, as Bill obviously is, and she would be both terrified and in grave danger the whole time. And any cat who comes into our lives in future will likewise become an indoor cat if s/he isn't already.