THE FOURTH KITTEN

There were four kittens in the last batch. That’s the way the gestating wombs in a cat are arranged: a pair of pouches big enough for two kittens each.  The most recent Littles were Blue Bunny’s creations but Tuxie had two kittens just a little later.  I managed to remove them, so these Littles had a double mom.  It’s harder when there are two Momcats and they take turns guarding babies.  They get in the birth box and spread out over the kittens, sometimes both of them.  If they think there’s major danger they move the kittens to farthest away reading chair, but I bring them all back to the birth box in the closet.

Two viruses circulate among cats in this village: one that is a virus related to dog distemper except it's feline and one that gets in eyes.  Sometimes kittens survive so there are five Big cats: the two Momcats; Plushie, the soft and tolerant tomcat who gets hurt by meaner tomcats from elsewhere;  white Salt who once had a dark partner named Pepper who is still around sometimes; and Spot, renamed Mr.Lust after he kept mauling kittens and the Momcats ran him out.  Yesterday I was typing when a goblin face appeared from behind the screen: the Mooch is still showing up now and then.  He'd been sleeping in the back corner of shelves next to me.  It’s a colony, not pets.

I try not to name them but these were called by their coat patterns to monitor well-being:  Stripe, Streak, Splotch and Saddle.  I think it was Splotch who became sick enough to die, but all four are rangy, scroungy, fragile little specimens.  I haven’t kept track of gender.

Unusually, Blue Bunny this time had two kittens, then 24 hours later another two kittens.  I don’t know whether they were from different tomcats or which tomcats or whether they were germinated or gestated a day apart. It was unique that when I counted their knobby little heads to see where they were, one was always missing, the fourth kitten.  And it wasn’t the same one.

Sometimes the missing kitten was sleeping against Plushie while the others were dozing in the sunlight.  Once in a while the wanderer was enjoying an empty cardboard box that just fit him.  Maybe the little one was looking for remnants in the feeding bowls.  By now the kittens are SmallCats.  They are more different. 

(The spellcheck hates me to be atypical and constantly changes things, sometimes to new words.  This includes my email address which is disastrous.  I hate its guts, clearly programmed by some compliant, narrow, inexperienced, nonreader techie.  What happened to the literate app I had before?)

One likes to think that the missing kitten was “better” in some way: more inclined to explore, less in need of constant sleep, able to separate, more like a leopard that wants solitude than a lion pride lounging on each other.  It was a temptation to write a little story about that 4th kitten and romanticize it.  But dying all alone is not happy.

Not that this 4th kitten was alone.  The one who died slept up against my ribcage night before last, though it was very sick and I didn’t think it would last until dawn.  The kittens all have oozing eyes and clogged noses, but this one was sitting or propping with its face to the ceiling in order to get more air.  The similarity to Covid-19 was unmistakeable and quite possibly it IS a corona virus.  The best I could do was wipe faces with warm water on a cotton ball.  I had cat eye drops that were supposed to be soothing, but the kittens turned into razor machines because they hated them so much.  

In a previous generation, I didn’t quite wait long enough to remove Bunny’s new kittens.  She came back inside soon enough to see what I was doing, took one kitten down under the house because the trap door was open, and was in such a hurry that when she came back for the black kitten that turned out to be Tuxie, she grabbed the kitten by one leg and ran just ahead of me down the hatch.  Tuxie screamed horribly.  Bunny tucked the two babies in the barely dug-out part of the ground under the geranium window.  She didn’t tend them very often but they survived in the dark, hearing me and the radio upstairs.  One day Tuxie came staggering out of the hole, mewing.  Then the other kitten, the gray one that later had a damaged face so bad that I took him for the vet to euthanize him.

So Tuxie has always been a dependent, demanding cat who attached to Bunny more than to her own kittens.  Neither Momcat really focussed on babies and if they did give them attention, it was on their tail end to help excretion.  The front ends were neglected nor did the tomcats pay particular attention.  Tuxie takes a lot of rejection because she is so aggressive, handy with claws, ready to smack transgressors, even me.  I smack back. 

Whatever Bunny is doing, Tuxie wants to be right beside her doing the same thing.  This is not always convenient or even very possible.  I’m more indulgent with Bunny, remembering how devoted she was to Finnegan, that renegade destroyer of house interiors who peed in the geranium pots.  Bunny would sit alongside Finnegan and lean on him, something like the way the HalfCats now lean on Plushie, who is practically inert compared to what Finnegan was.  I figured that tomcat, who joined us as a kitten from outer space, might have been a “bengal” with exotic genes, but more likely was just from Butte where the weak don’t survive, not even if they’re human. 

But mostly, I don’t interfere with cat life except to run off intruder tomcats and to slip kittens from their beginning to their end, quickly and humanely as possible. If I fail at that, I pet them and cuddle them and keep the cat food coming.  Last night when it became clear that Splotch was breathing slower and slower, I found a box that fit, put a thick towel in the bottom, and focused a lamp to keep it warm.  When death came close, the kitten thrashed and turned over, its mind gone but its body still wanting to get air.  The other cats wanted to climb in, not because of concern for Splotch but because they all want to get into any box they see.

Memory from my early childhood was with me.  My first cat was dying in a box by the basement coal furnace where my mother put it to keep it warm. It was about 1944 and she was a farm girl.  No one took a cat to the vet.  It took a day or so for the cat to die.  I squatted alongside with my hands together — “Don’t touch that cat!” — and my elbows close to my sides.  It was not emotional.  I just wanted to know.

When my mother, one of a set of four girls, was the oldest of youngsters, their old horse died.  Their father pulled the carcass over the hill so it wouldn’t be seen but didn’t bury it.  The girls went daily to monitor the decomposition, dispassionately, not touching  It taught them to be careful about attaching to living beings, because they die.  But then there are new creatures wanting to attach and it all goes on.