Cat: Menace or Medicine

There’s this smoky grey cat with lime green eyes that has laid claim to my home. I’ve seen it around the property for the last few months. It has walked up my driveway, up the lower steps to the front door and has cut around to the woods behind the house presumably to hunt. Yesterday it followed me up the front steps almost to my door. Today it hung out on the steps even as I came down to get the mail. He (she?) is becoming comfortable with my presence. I am not as comfortable. In the first place, I am a dog-person. I don’t speak “cat”. I don’t know what it means when a cat wags its tail as this one did this afternoon as I started down the steps and froze in my tracks, or what it means when it mews at me, and I mean this one looked me right in the eye and mewed. It’s a feral cat; no collar; a wild thing. But it seems so tame! There’s a part of me that wants to feed it but I’m afraid. There’s a part of me that wants to pet it but I don’t know if that’s advisable, or even possible. He seems to think that a five-foot buffer is as close as it wants to let me get. When I was a little girl, there was a neighborhood cat in Brooklyn that I dubbed “Muffin” because I had found it eating one from the garbage pail in the alley that divided our two-family, semi-attached house in East New York from the next one. Muffin played regularly with me and Shelley Harnett and Barbara Nigerian (how did I remember those names!), the other little girls on the block, and was very friendly until one day when she wasn’t. On that day, Muffin attacked me, biting at ankles which she held in outstretched claws that cut into my skin. I was terrified. The police came and took her away and I have mistrusted cats ever since. So what do I do? I know what I wrote the other day, about cats containing powerful spiritual “medicine” according to Indian lore. But I’m far more afraid of rabies than I am interested in the spiritual consequences of NOT embracing this cat. And yet, he/she is very beautiful and I am sort of excited that this animal has chosen me. Why is he here? Any cat experts out there, please feel free to advise. I bought the Friskies. Should I put out a bowl?