GENERATIONS OF CATS

Smudge and her kittens

One of the excellent features of this decrepit house is the big picture window in the kitchen that looks to the east up an alley with a power line running alongside it in diminishing scale like an exercise in perspective.  I take many photos out that window, mostly of the feral cats who hang out there, having dug themselves a burrow under the back workshed.  

In lieu of a deck, I rolled out some old carpet to be a smooth surface.  I will add a photo of the latest brood if I can make the software work.  Every time there are “upgrades” the camera stops interfacing with the computer until I learn a new protocol.  If I don’t download the upgrades, they automatically install themselves in the middle of the night when they somehow turn on my computer unless I unplug it.  I think I should learn to draw cats, at least until they invent a way to upgrade pencils.  (I’m sure they’re working on it.  Mechanical, right?)  

The point of upgrades is to corner the market, sell, sell, sell on grounds that it’s an improvement though it’s really only a way to pull customers away from the fundamental reality of a fist with a pencil.  Of course, my first step away from the physical act of writing was the keyboard.  By now I’m compromised.  But not when it comes to cats.

Recently most of the cats have left, scattering or dying of the plague that sweeps the town when the population gets too dense, or maybe poisoned by the cat-haters, who overlap with the chicken-haters.  (The latter have a point.  Infections from backyard chickens —avian flu— are rising.)  

The first feral cats came years ago when the calico that I call “the Granny Mamacat” arrived with a column of kittens going along behind her.  The one closest to her heels was a tiny gray kitten I called “Smudge.”  The Granny Mamacat was looking pretty tough this summer, a rack of bones with fur going every which way.  Now she’s gone and I suspect she died of old age, but I haven’t gone looking for fear of finding her corpse.  All the kittens but Smudge grew up and disappeared.  Smudge was gone, too, for a while. 

In the days of Smudge’s babyhood, I fed the ferals outside on the carpet, but then there were too many cats because pets from blocks around came to share, dogs ate everything and chewed on the dishes, and one summer a family of magpies carried off cat kibble to feed their babies for weeks.  Now I feed the remaining cats in the garage and lately I’ve been standing over the dishes at mealtime to enforce who can eat.  

The kittens have just experimented with drinking water, which was funny to watch.  One tried putting a paw in the water, tried scooping water with a paw, finally put his (?) nose in — which made him sneeze — and finally began to lap.  The other two watched closely and saw how to do it.

I can’t touch any of these cats, so the only genders I know for sure are the mother cats.  Technically, they are not feral but satellite cats who revolve around this household.  They evolved because of agriculture when people kept cows and had barns.  In those days they didn’t use poison.  At least not as much as today.  So there is a cat surplus which — because the dogs are all confined by a leash law — thrive in relative safety.  On ranches it is coyotes who are the canid limit to felines.  It’s ecological.

Only a few cats are living in the garage now.  Uncle Shorty is a big patched cat from a previous kitten batch.  He had really short legs at first but they grew to normal size.  Shorty will attend cat births, snatch the kittens while they’re still slimy and eat them.  I can’t blame him much, since I wait a day or so and then, if I can find them, I drown them.  The death toll is dozens by now.  I drown them in my rather splendid bathroom sink in warm water, holding them firmly together in a bunch and singing, to make it a sort of ceremony of returning to the womb.  It doesn’t take long.  Sometimes I weep.

Some reading this will be horrified and never read this blog again, because drowning kittens has become a signifier of unbearable and unjustified cruelty in our society.  We can accept hundreds of thousands of deaths of humans and animals so long as it’s far away and doesn’t cost money — indeed, may make a profit.  My cousins and friends do not want me to talk about such social justice issues because it won’t “sell.”  They want me to write “cute” kitten stories.

One of Smudge’s kitten-batches was drowned except for one that somehow escaped.  She raised it under a big pile of windfall branches in that back workshed which I keep in case all sources of heat fail except for my little woodstove.  (The gas has never failed so far, but the electricity does.)  The kitten was elusive but survived sub-zero temps.  I called her “the Blue Bunny” because she really was gray shading towards blue.  (Blue Bunny is a local brand of ice cream.)  

When she was still tiny, the neighbor bought an old pickup that had three stowaways.  One died, one became the neighbor’s pet and one came over to live with us.  That was Finnegan, a big tough Ulster Scot striped tomcat who as he grew took over the house.  Blue Bunny fell madly in love with this delinquent and would sit next to him, leaning fondly.  Since Finnegan was tame, so became Blue Bunny as well.

This line of cats was quite unlike any others in Valier.  They were very much like the Primordial Source of all domestic cats:  aggressive, inclined to climb, yowlers, long-tailed, long-legged and long-snouted.  They bite.  After research I concluded they were the product of a trend to try to breed back to original cats which resulted in what are called “Bengal” cats.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_cat  I’ll save Finnegan stories for later.  What’s relevant is that he is gone now, after being a bad influence and fathering kittens with the Blue Bunny.  

Smudge’s most recent batch from the burrow is barely old enough to be out bumbling around, exploring the yard.  Recently we’ve had some warm days, the kind we would call Indian Summer if we weren’t worried about seeming racist, and I took a photo out the window of Smudge nursing her three little gray powder puffs of kittens.

Bunny — Smudge’s grownup offspring — had four kittens last spring.  When I began to take them, she realized what I was doing and carried two of them through the open trapdoor to the crawl space under the house.  The little black and white one was hastily grabbed by a hind leg instead of her nape which made her emit unearthly screams and shrieks.  After that, there was no sound or sign of them.  I didn’t even see Bunny go under the house again, but I left the trap door open just in case.  I can drown kittens — so long as they’re eyes are closed and they’re barely born — but I don’t want anything anywhere to starve.

One day I heard mewing in the crawl space.  When I went down, a little kitten, sort of marbleized gray, came staggering out of the darkness towards me.  I picked him up, cuddled him under my chin, and named him Doux because he was so soft.  But there was no sign of the tuxedo-marked kitten for a couple more days.  Then, again, mewing.  I went down and called and here came Tuxie out of the dark.  

I made a box bed but Bunny would have none of it.  Ever since, the three have slept on my bed with me.  I make them stay down at my feet, because they have a habit of reaching out with a front paw, like the kitten testing water -- I think because of growing up in the dark, feeling their way.  They want to pat my mouth (I know where their paws have been) or my eyes, but they forget to pull in their claws, so I wear my glasses to nap when they are likely to visit my head.

They are a little malformed and possibly sterile because of growing up with no sun whatsoever.  Douxie has only one testicle, so I sometimes call him Mono or One Ball. (Very rude.  He is, in general, an indignant cat.)  Tuxie has a flat and glossy coat like patent leather, a little black soul patch on her chin, and tufts of white hair in her “armpits.”  She does not get pregnant.  Neither has Bunny become pregnant again, but she nursed the two kittens until they were bigger than herself.  She has never been one to yowl, climb or shred the furniture, but her offspring do.  Douxie likes to perch on the top edge of open doors.  Tuxie begs me to turn on a little stream of fresh water in the sink, which she drinks and drinks.  She rarely drinks from the water bowl.

There are other stories, some sad, some maddening, some funny.  There is no humane society in this county.  The neighboring county shelters will not accept animals from Pondera Co, which is where Valier is.  The favorite way of dealing with a problem cat is to drive it out onto the landscape somewhere and leave it.  I’m spending about a hundred dollars a month on cat food, which I cannot afford, but as I say, I have a thing about starvation.  (In reality cats are good at finding new homes, but I also have a thing about desertion or abandonment or whatever it is.)

I do not think these are the kind of clever little kitten stories that will make money.  My cousins and friends cannot hear this.  To them, the point of writing is to make money.  If it is good writing, it will make more money.  "Cute" sells. There is no other definition of “good” than sale-able.  They do not believe that the Internet has made it impossible to make money by writing.  Therefore, they think, my blog is a waste of time, the eccentricity of an aging woman who never would behave.  There’s more to talk about.  I've already posted about the cats quite a bit.