"Salt and Pepper"
As this batch of kittens grows older, they are more belligerent than previous ones. I've stopped thinking of these cats as "families" and regard them as a "colony" as though they were foxes or ground squirrels. I don't even name them anymore, though these two (that's all there were -- I didn't interfere) are distinguishable because one is more white and the other is more gray, so it's easy to call them "Salt" and "Pepper." They are quite different from each other, but both are belligerent. From they wake up (too early) they are tussling or chasing a bit of paper or my favorite ballpoint or the lid off something that should not have its lid off.
Same kittens, a little older
Their favorite ground of adversarial mauling is my bed and they don't care if it collapses or if I am in it. They just like it to flat, smooth, and warm from the electric mattress pad, which is necessary because their claws go right through an electric blanket. It seems inevitable that they would electrocute themselves. The four older cats -- the two yearling toms plus their aunt and mother -- like the warmth but are also pleased to tuck into the back of my knees or to drape themselves on their bellies over my feet. (The mother and two of the kittens developed the Valier cat contagion and died.) The oldest cat is the one who was once so besotted with the big intruder tom with the personality of an Irish barfly. She must be the one who brought in the belligerence gene, though it's not unknown as a necessary development in kittens.
Salt is particularly at war with my feet. She attacks them or my slippers whether I'm wearing them or not. While I walk she grapples, which gives me the strange sensation of having three feet, one with no leg and therefore uncontrollable. Other times she wraps around one ankle like an exercise weight so that one foot weighs twice as much as the other. Both kittens love the hem of my nightgown, even if it's not moving. They interpret it as a kind of tent they can get inside. When it is hanging on its hook, they jump to grab it and swing on it like Tarzan.
Pepper is smaller and more frail, more often assaulted, but still game. She slips over the back of the old wicker chair while I type and tucks herself under my chin. She likes to watch the screen but doesn't attack it. Maybe she's a he. Their balls are still small and anyway I forget. They are not so cuddly anymore. If my sleeve is wide and my cuff is unbuttoned, Pepper runs up my arm against my skin and uses claws to get back out.
The battle of cuff and hem was not happening when the two kittens were born. They were tiny fluff balls who could only eat and sleep. They didn't even make noise. Their mother guarded them closely, only leaving if she had to, and since I had done away with her entire previous batch, which caused her to grieve and search and come to look in my face, pleading for help, I felt evil and repentant. I let Salt and Pepper grow.
Now they are nearly adult, slightly bigger than their mother, and now she fights them viciously, biting hard and kicking harder, to make them stay away from her crimson titties sticking out of her black fur. They are no longer fluffy but have grown flat short coats like hers. The two yearling tomcats who were born while I was still in shock from my dislocated shoulder are finding that these just-previous kittens are the right size to assault -- I mean, sexually -- which makes them squeak pitifully. They aren't mature enough to have kittens or even old enough to be spayed, assuming I could afford it. But the last time I heard the libidinous noises and went to break up the leopard-bite on the nape of the neck, it was the kitten who had the tomcat by the back of the neck. I had thought the on-top cat was female. But cows will mount other cows.
The Mooch, who is a battered old gray-and-white tomcat who may be a survivor of a year's ago batch that never came into the house, has been missing for days but showed up yesterday. After a day of heavy sleep in his customary chair, he left again. The neighbor came over looking for her little cat, a calico and therefore female that has been missing for a few days. In heat, I suspect. I was no help. They have two big dogs who are never out of their cage. We are very different households.
It's so easy to criticize other people's households. Pets, like sex, respond to human culture shifts so that now we're in a time when some pets are babies and others are criminal. The news today included both dogs who killed a woman and another mass shooting. We're all mammals. Humans are not that different unless they work at it.
When I first came back here, I didn't have a cat for a year or so, though I'd had one earlier. Then I got two kittens, one calico and one ginger, and got them altered as I'd always preached at Animal Control. They lasted a long time, until they were crippled by old age. For them I installed a cat flap in the door between garage and kitchen. After the original two were gone a while, gray cats crept in. Now it's their house. Probably thirty or forty have died one way or another. Maybe some just left. They have been a stream, mostly related, the same as most of the families in town. Across the street there have been two old-age deaths and two move-aways, one of them the last clergyman living in town. He said to me, "I'm a young man and if I want to start a family, I must move to where there are young women." It's not just here: most of my family -- in other places -- have died of old age.
Next door two have died. Across the alley two others have died. I'm reluctant to block the cat flap, though cold air cames in, because if I die (I'm 80.) I don't want these cats to be trapped. This is not a feel-good blog post. It's a short day. There is no wind in Valier, but rampant force is hitting just north of here. It could easily shift.
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