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.

TEN CATS ARE TOO MANY

A friend suggested that most people treat their cats as "fur babies" and consider them one-by one, but I treat these cats -- which are hardly "mine" -- as a group.  We know that how we think of things has a big impact on what we do about them.  I stopped thinking of these cats as my family and began to consider them as a "colony," a sort of biological project.  They are enchained, knitted, through generations.  I did not choose them -- they simply claimed what they thought was a good space for cats.  Electric warming, regular cat food, lots of noisy things to knock off surfaces.  

This is the colony at the moment:

2 fertile cats, one the daughter of the other.  The daughter is devoted to the mother.  We see humans with that relationship.  These two cats produce kittens.  If I succeed in eliminating their kittens while they are outside, they grieve for almost a week, even if they aren't nursing.

When kittens come -- and sometimes these cats abort or never become pregnant -- if I can catch the moment, I usher them on out of life through drowning.  This is an old practice among farm wives.  When I dislocated my shoulder, I lost track of a lot of things and failed to end kittens early.  The daughter-cat as a newborn was about to be ended when her mother suddenly saw what was happening, grabbed the baby by one backleg and carried her shrieking though the trapdoor to the dirt crawlspace under the floor.  I followed but she hid the kitten in an inaccessible spot where it grew up with no light at all.  In the end she came staggering out of the darkness, but her hormone status is addled.  She has many tomcat characteristics and is ferociously aggressive when strange tomcats come calling.

During my addled recovery from the fall, my guard was down so I didn't prevent what became two big solid-but-soft tom cats I call the bachelors.  They are not so friendly.  The mayor of Conrad suggested I contact the vet there to see if any ranchers wanted mousers.  Then the temp went to ten below zero and I didn't have the heart.  I guess the ranchers didn't either.  If one responds to spring, these cats are available.

In the meantime, two more kittens arrived, one mostly white that I call Salt and the other dark so I call him Pepper.  Both male.  The white one is fond and likes me.  They were both cute when they were little, but are now long, slinky, pushy, demanding cats.  But I would keep them and castrate them as my limit of two, if I were being sensible.  They both occasionally have periods of respiratory distress, sneezing and dripping, so they can't be given up for adoption.

4 kittens, newborn

That's six cats.  Then both old females gave birth and I had six additional kittens.  The daughter, Tuxie (black and white), the one who grew up under the house, had kittens with troubles.  One died at birth for its own reasons.  I helped along the other two.  But Blue Bunny, the cat who's lived here the longest, produced four kittens, all of which have eye troubles, gummy eyes, sometimes sealed shut, so that I spend time cleaning eyes with cotton balls.  Now they are eating canned food and semi-box trained.  They still nurse, just not so much.

There's another tomcat, the Mooch, a battered ancient creature who comes in the night after a week of battle, recovers on whatever overstuffed chair doesn't already have a cat in it, then disappears for a while.  I've never touched him.  We all just go around him and he avoids us.

So I thought it was ridiculous for an 80-year-old woman with very little income to have all these cats.  I began calling veterinarians.

To spay a cat:  $97 to $135

To neuter a tomcat: $60 to $69

To kill an adult cat:  $50 to $53

They refuse to kill kittens.  It makes them feel bad.  

The cheapest solution would be to kill all the adult cats.  $200 plus transportation for thirty miles.

In the past, human farm males were asked to cram a tomcat headfirst into a boot and snip off their balls with scissors or a knife.  Normally part of raising livestock is removing testicles from male meat animals.  "Soft-hearted" people had better stick to plants.

I am humiliated and embarrassed that this cat situation is out of hand.  Not just cost and smell and mess, but also because of my five years of animal control in Portland going into the homes of demented old people overrun by cats and inches deep in excrement.  No one complained about the people being half-in and half-out of death.  They wanted the cats removed.  I didn't have to clean the house, but I called social services.  No time or duty to do follow-up.

When I moved to this small town, some people were friendly and hoping I would have something interesting to offer them.  When I said I was really more of a rez person, some drew back, some turned hostile.  I tried to say I came to write and didn't plan to spend long hours gossiping and playing cards.  In fact, I wanted to be left alone.  This was bad news for the kind of small town person who thinks they are in charge of everyone else.  They told me that the last woman who came wanting to be left alone -- even if she died -- got exactly what she wanted.  She died.  No one knew until -- you know.  I did.  Animal control officers remove the pets of people who have died alone when the police have to deal with it.

2 "Queens" + 4 kittens

This moment there's a very living kitten swarming up my leg.  A seedy character, he didn't turn up when I put out cat food for the kittens.  There is always one kitten missing, never the same kitten.  When I went searching, I found this "four" in my reading chair, embraced by one of the bachelors.  This big cat had been chasing kittens earlier and I was afraid he'd killed this one, but it was safe, not particularly pleased by being awakened.  The leg-climbing kitten reached the keyboard, which some kitten had peed on yesterday, and wanted to taste my coffee.  I took him out to the front room.  The missing "four" had returned to the furry soft bachelor and was blissfully asleep.  I tossed Mr. Adventure in with it and the bachelor made room.

A POST ABOUT CATS FOR A SHORT DAY

"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.

CONSCIOUSNESS, THEORY OF MIND, AND EMPATHY

Tuxie, a formal cat with a soul patch.

Observing these nearly-grown kittens who bounce around me, I see that they are conscious, able to form a purpose and pursue it, even if I try to discourage them.  How many times did I have to throw Tuxie off my keyboard so far — I don’t mean how many occasions, I mean one after another after another.  25 in a row, so far.  But she has no interest in my opinion of her actions, just which ones might hurt her.  Or be good to eat.  Nor does she wonder why I don’t want her on my keyboard.  Or what a keyboard is anyway.  She does have a passing interest in the little cursor arrow, thinking it’s a bug, but no interest in the "mouse" whatsoever.  It’s just a lump to her.  She doesn't do metaphor.

So that’s consciousness, but not self-consciousness.  She doesn’t ponder what sort of kitten she is or where she came from, she simply performs her life as she has evolved to do.  It happens to be quite a successful strategy for survival, since part of that evolution is to be cute, but that’s only as an individual cat.  Taken on the whole, cat mortality is high.  Their strategy for group survival is to make lots more kittens.

This is a town loaded with cats: pets, ferals (entirely wild but in town), satellites (come and go around households), mousers, field cats — all opportunists, just taking the path of least resistance.

The people in most places are pretty much like that as well, but they watch each other, and most wonder what the other guy is doing.  It can be competitive, or it can be meant to help.  They spend a lot of time trying to figure out what each other are doing and why and whether it will really work or not.  If results are good, they might try the same thing.  In terms of cats, today they discovered how to get on the roof by climbing a tree.

A cat tries to figure out what a mouse will do, both in the sense of hot pursuit and in the sense of lying in wait at likely places.  I watch them play and realize they take their toys into the bathroom because the room is small and there’s not much to hide behind.  When I move big pieces of furniture, there are often little caches of toys just beyond the reach of the cat, because cats don’t think of using a stick to knock it out of there.  A monkey would.  But they have a constant itch to go behind, to tip over, to knock stuff off heights, to pounce on any lump of cloth — like my slippers.  Also built in is the thing about the leopard dragging off a dead gazelle, except that it’s a washrag.

One of the early consciousness “raising” events decades ago was a male and female biology team that went out with clipboards to observe herds in Africa.  They watched and noted every small meme performed by the ungulates.  At the end of the day, the woman’s notes were all about protecting babies, nursing, calves getting lost, and other domestic acts.  The man’s notes were all about sparring, scanning the horizon, making bluff attacks on possible predators.  They weren’t ASSIGNED this difference in gender roles — it’s just what they noticed, what got into their consciousness.

I don’t know whether the team went back and consciously tried to note the actions of the animals that were opposite their own gender.  The tendency in experiments now is not to be so free-form, to set up events that will show what the animals are thinking as demonstrated by their behavior, and then to videotape them so they can be observed and analyzed repeatedly by different people with different interests.

A recent experiment showed the usual suspects (university undergrads) a little vid about eating.  Then they were asked to complete this word:  SO_P.  The students supplied:  “soup.”  Then they did the same thing but with a vid about showering. They asked SO_P and they got soap.  That’s sort of trivial but it shows how much context and mind-set control what we think.

When I first moved to Valier in 1999, one of my best Browning Blackfeet friends stopped by.  My neighbor immediately rushed over, using the pretext of bringing me some garden truck: two potatoes and a turnip.  She believed she was protecting me from a home invasion.  My visitor was Darrell Kipp, an internationally valued educator with a Harvard degree, a person I’d known since he was in high school in 1961.  He knew what my neighbor was thinking: she was demonstrating it.  She thought she knew what Darrell was thinking, but she had no idea.  She didn’t even have a concept of what a Harvard education was.

The theory of mind is the superficial noting of how an individual acts and how one interprets it.  A cat has a theory of mind about a mouse: it will run along a wall, it will dodge under spaces too small for a cat, double back, flatten out or narrow up to get through small apertures.  And the cat develops a repertoire of responses and predictions that help it catch that mouse.  Mammals and reptiles have brains that grasp a theory of mind.  It’s an open question whether bugs do, but they seem to know when and how to jump on prey.  Under a microscope one can see the microbes “eat” each other —the big ones just en-glob the little ones — but more than that it sure looks as though the big ones know how to chase and the little ones know how to evade, so is that mind?

Humans — at least SOME humans have the capacity to empathize.  This is not the same thing as sympathize, which means sharing the pathos of what has befallen others.  A little kid who sees you crying will come and put his arms around you, try to comfort you, but they probably won’t feel or even grasp what a grieving person knows and feels.  Even more dismaying, if a little kid is crying, people snap at them, “Stop crying!” instead of asking to be told all about it, enough to feel it in their own bodies, to share the burden of the feeling.

Many think that empathy is what makes humans able to work together, to share values, even to love each other.  This is a key to art and civilization.  But now, in a time when not so many people can even “feel” each other, some thinkers are trying to understand what is beyond empathy — a Spockian shared minds sort of thing, maybe.  Our insistence on rationality and logic may have gone as far as it can go.  Maybe it’s causing us to miss a lot of useful phenomena that would make life better for us all.  We need to throw aside a lot of old tired assumptions, like the idea that those who are different are a threat.  Maybe they’re a salvation.

PONDERING PEE

I'm such a germophobe. SO terrifically icky.

It barely reached zero degrees fahrenheit today  (1-10-17).  Forecast for tonight is twenty below.  I skipped my trip to the post office two days in a row.

All eight cats have come into the house including that massive hooligan, Finnegan.  Duckie, the smallest of the ferals and the crossover who led the way through the cat flap to colonize the furniture, has come into heat.  All the others are also hitting puberty and doing their best to answer the call, but having a little trouble with the mechanics of “hooking up.”  They get the biting the neck part.  And everyone is making all sorts of sexy sounds, finally including terrible shrieks.  Fastidious little Tuxie is keeping her distance — it’s not a white-tie sort of event.  Momo and Douxie  are the other boys.  I’m not sure about Shorty, as he’s too wary to let me even look at him across the room.

Granny Mamacat has been sleeping on the sofa all day and was yesterday as well.  Maybe she’s ready to give birth.  Maybe she’s sick.  If I go into the same room, she goes out the cat flap.  I try not to go into that room so she’ll stay quiet.  She has a big lump on one side that might not be kittens.

What could be worse?  Well, this immigration of ferals has introduced a new set of fleas.  Adam had’em and so do I.  Bunny seems to have bald spots, which I’m hoping are the result of over-vigorous scratching of itches, so I used the last of the flea med on her.  All the bedding and my nightie will spend the evening in the garage, because the one usefulness of such low temps is that they will kill fleas.  Of course, I’ll have to bring it all back in at bedtime and it will be cold.

I have three kinds of flea killer besides the cold.  One is based on pyrethrum, made from chrysanthemums; one is a complex version of the same thing; and one is basically what we used to call laundry soda, which is close to baking soda.  Two are sprays and one is powder.  The sprays are hard to get onto the cat because I use water spray and compressed air to drive them off places they shouldn’t be.  I knew I was in trouble when the directions on one spray said, “Lather the cat well and rinse.”  There are only four of these cats I can even touch.  

What could be worse?  Politics?

I don’t know whether to count the tales of Trump in Moscow paying people to pee on each other while he watched as a “worse” or a “better.”  As weirdo, “daring,” supposedly sexual behavior goes, it’s a relief that it evidently didn’t involve a child.  (And it was probably warm.)  But as revenge on the Obamas it’s totally ineffective.  As blackmail, if it’s true, it’s useless now.  The “pussy” is outta the bag.  (These are low jokes but sort of fit the situation.)  This morning it’s labeled untrue.  But believable, given Trump.

Of course, there is a best-selling child’s book called “I Could Pee on This” which was purportedly written by a kitten.  We could all send copies to the White House in case Trump hasn’t chosen a pillow book yet.  (It can be vetted later.)

Credibility will be the issue with this story, but Trump’s attitude and behavior all along makes it easy to believe he did this little ditty and probably worse.  And probably has always indulged in what he thinks is his entitlement.  Vulgarity has always been considered an indicator of immorality.  Likewise with greed.

Mixed social attitudes about taboos that result from changing ideas about what is important and what is natural have created a lot of opportunities to cause outrage among enemies.  Those whose morality is strict — esp. when it comes to anything previously hidden and forbidden like excretion or sex — sets them up for scandal.  In the past the naughty things have been the privilege of those who have enough money and power to hide them, a secret entitlement for wealth, church, and government.  As Abu Graib made shockingly clear, it’s easy to impose mental torture on men who are afraid of nudity, menstrual blood, or dogs.  But as various African outlaws have demonstrated, it is possible to violate taboos so deep and biologically based that they threaten sanity.  It is impossible to understand eating one’s own flesh, killing one’s own loved ones, choosing which hand to be amputated, murdering babies.

Peeing and breaking wind are often considered funny.  Remember ancient Prince Phillip stinking up the Royal balcony?  And all those metaphors about impossibly elegant people still not shitting cold cream?  Excretions, even if only gaseous, prove we are animals.  But some still insist that humans are NOT really animals, rising towards being angels.  Which shows they are not using the minds that make them human.

Some people would say that my loss of control over cats and fleas is immoral.  It’s certainly unpleasant.  To some it would mean poverty, and they would be right, but poverty is only a precursor to possible immorality, not immoral in itself, except when it is imposed unnecessarily by profiteers and then THEY are the ones who are immoral.  The mistake the greedy always make is that no matter how elegant and bullet proof their automobile may be, it still must be operated on shared public streets and it still must obey the universally agreed upon traffic laws.  When the poor see such vehicles go by, the response may not be envy but hatred.

Cats are flea-vectors and fleas can be disease vectors, so that’s why they should be eliminated aside from the fact that they itch and raise a bump.  For a kid with HIV, a flea bite can be more serious.  Any break in the skin is always a possible point of entry for infection.  Accepting feral cats into this house means risking fevers passed from mice in this grain town.  If I were a little more wealthy, I would get the cats I can catch to the vet for sterilization or euthanasia.  We don’t have the population density for humane societies.

I’m not willing to accept shooting feral cats.  In the Philippines they have been shooting drug dealers on sight, which expanded to shooting drug users and is likely to expand to whoever looks like a drug user.  They say in Brazil “they” have been shooting street urchins.  Killing cats is a small entering wedge for violence.  Because cats, like rabbits, survive as a group rather than individuals unless they are pets, their weapon is fertility.

But that’s a whole other topic, humans and fertility.  Maybe we should encourage peeing on each other, since it won’t lead to more children.  They say urine is not particularly infectious.  Just icky.  

SO SOON, SO LATE, SO EARLY?

Portland is the City of Roses, right?

When I was a clerical specialist for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings, I always kept a desk book in a three-ring binder.  It held a check list of things that had to be done on a regular cycle, like weekly or monthly, and phone numbers that were relevant to complaints, and other useful bits of info.  Since a big part of our work was inspections, the day began with sorting messages and preparing the inspectors for the field, which might be something trivial or might be part of something pretty major, like a landslide with houses involved.  Once they got their feet under them and the keys to their transportation, the inspectors left.  Then the clericals did office work like data entry until they came back late in the afternoon to write reports.

Mike Olsen brought me a huge bouquet of roses 

from his yard every day in summer.

When I left, his little boy made me a bird feeder.

It's still out there in the tree.

But there are other ways of looking at a day.  I’ve been looking for a new dentist, since the health care organization that employed my last one ran him out of town, which means that I’m searching the Internet for information.  First of all, there are so many index businesses that organize public information that one would thin there were dozens of dentists in each of the 3 market county seats in driving distance but there are only one or two in each of the three towns.  One of the pieces of info these platforms include in store indexes is a little graph of when the businesses are busy, I suppose so that people can figure out when lines are short — though around here there aren’t enough people to make very long lines.  It’s another urban bright idea.  So much of the internet is run by people who have no concept of “rural.”

If I were to make a 24 hr graph of how things go in Valier, since I’m on the main artery street, it’s much about traffic.  It begins with the newspaper arriving in town about four AM and the people who do very early jobs in the county seats — cooks at the schools or cafes or those hauling cattle to auctions in Great Falls.  My neighbor used to leave for oil field work about this time but the boom has ended and he has no job.  

This time of year the railroad spur is working on harvest and may be assembling trains, slamming hopper cars together before there is traffic.  Semi-drivers who have caught a few hours in their sleeper bunks may begin to fire up but by this time of year it’s still dark at 6 and they risk meeting wildife.  If they do, they win.  Ranchers who use town water (many of these farms have no wells) like to come fill their huge tanks as early as possible.

The in-town traffic comes in waves: those getting to work at 8, those getting to work at 9, those going home for lunch and returning an hour later, and then the closing time.  Kids get out of school at 3 or 4 so it depends on what sport is scheduled for practice afterwards.

Froggies is for sale.

My own day is broken up.  I tend to work 4 hours up and 4 hours down, but cats make a difference.  I crash about ll PM, wake at 2AM unless there is commotion outside.  There are no bars in Valier, but there is a pizza and beer joint, Froggies, that closes about that time.  The out-of-town drinkers and swampers get home about 3AM.  Private parties tend to either end or get explosive about then.  Valier is so small and quiet that they can be heard blocks away.  Unless the dogs are set off barking all over town — then that’s all anyone hears.

I do a couple of hours of writing in the wee smalls because I work when the internet traffic is light so I can research without waiting, but also because for a while I was conversing with Paris.  Naturally the cats want to have a little something — it’s mouse-and-bird hunting time.  In a while I go back to sleep and so do they.

At 9AM the Baptist church next door starts their electronic Big Ben imitation (bonging every half hour).  They think of it as Christian evangelism that is welcomed so they keep it on the loudest setting.  What it really amounts to is a hangover from the medieval town clocks in Europe that reminded people to get up and go to work in the days before personal clocks.   

Bunny, Tux and Doux

Now the cats are serious about food.  The Bunny, the only inside mom, gets full of milk whenever she eats, so she’s prowling the house to call her kittens to nip up to the bar.  The outside cats are in a row watching the kitchen window for movement.

Sometimes I can sleep through the bonging and sometimes I get up, esp. when I want to do a wash because I have no machine, take a month’s load of clothes to the laundromat in one of the county seats and hang them on the line when it’s still early. But now I’ve figured out that if I have to wash late in the day, I can keep the wet clothes overnight and hang them in the morning.  

All three of the laundromats are always in disrepair; even the quarter-dispensing machines are often inoperable.  One laundromat is attended by an old couple and they keep quarter rolls at their desk, so that’s usually where I go.  But another has a big tough machine that will wash sleeping bags and rugs.  It’s also often in disrepair and there’s no way to call to see if it’s working, so I use it when I’m in that town for something else.  I won’t get a home machine until my sewer is reliable.  It needs to be dug up and replaced — estimate is $1,000.

The mail is up by 11AM.  There is no home delivery so most people go get their daily mail (esp. businesses) about that time.  Ranchers might only come once a week.  The out-going mail leaves about 4PM and the posties will need time to sort before that.  UPS gets to town in late morning and sometimes lunches here.  Fed Ex comes a little later, usually a girl driver.  The Schwann man (frozen food) comes maybe twice a week.  

Another nap after lunch.  Maybe a trip to the library or the trash roll-off which is when I get the REAL news, not the skimmings in the paper.  I could learn even more if I ate lunch with the Senior Citizens, but they charge $5.  I eat three meals at home for that much.  But if I got sick, they would bring me a lunch generous enough to last two meals.  It won’t be diabetes-friendly.  It’s country comfort food and the elders love it.  The point, it was explained to me, is as much for them to have a social time in their day as to feed them.  They used to take blood pressures.

I run my blog post through the wringer again to get the fat out of it, look for illustrations (google images), and in the last few months, look for strange typos and grammar mistakes.  I think the culprit is tiny TIA’s, undiagnosed.  Aging.  A movie to change the pace, usually a cop show.  Most movies are so poorly made and repetitious.  The one about the Brazilian Bull-Riders has disappeared already.

"The Sacred and the Profane", copyright 1957, is the earliest

I’m sorting and dumping books, and the piles of tear-outs and to-file material I’ve been hanging onto.  The advantage of waiting so long is that most of it is obsolete by now so I just discard with no regrets.  The books I’m currently working with I tipped onto their spines and wrote their copyright dates on the tops.  Two shelves from 1976 to the present, maybe half in this decade.  I can see the revolution.  The Enlightenment love affair with the rational has led them at last to a little assignation with the other side of the brain.  I’m so pleased.  The shape of day has yielded the Shape of a Millennium and I lived long enough to see it.

Now about these diseases. . . 

CATS (Part 2)

“CATS” IS BACK on Broadway.

Previous posts about cats on this blog include:

6-24-16   “Patricia Nell Warren’s “Gentle Being”

5-18-16   “Steve Jobs and the Cat”  (not really about cats at all) 
12-15-15  “The Counterclockwise Cat”

10-10-15   “Cat Begats”

6-2-14       “Spring Shadows”

11-11-14    “Two Degrees above Zero and Sinking”

8-4-14       “Community Cats: A Tribe of its Own”

GrannieMamacat, Smudge, the Skeezix

What I want to look at now is quite different from the stories above, which were mostly descriptive and about domestic cats, both feral and actually domesticated — that is, affectionate and dependent.  Now I want to look at cats as a species in terms of today’s households, current agricultural practices, ecologies around the world, economics, emotional dynamics, children, and as much other stuff as I can think up.  But first I need to tie off the narratives.

Let’s review the story of Patches, the Granniemomcat.  She’s been surviving on this street for many years.  I’d catch a glimpse of her now and then and always talk to her.  I thought she belonged to Old Dave, who lived across the street.  When Old Dave died, another woman also saw the cat, now called Patches by me, go in and out his pet door and tried to catch it to find a new owner.  No luck.  “It’s a crazy cat,” she declared.

Another year or so after that, Patches came marching into the yard with a little following of half-grown kittens.  That story is the 9-4-14 post.  The kittens gradually disappeared, some to bad ends (the yard dogs across the alley kill cats) but possibly some slid into homes.  None allowed a person to touch them.

Smudge had her kittens in fall and since I reduced them to one, thinking that it would keep her from coming back into heat right away and ease her milk reduction process, she took that one under a big pile of windfall sticks in the back building.  But kittens are meant to be several-in-a-pile, who occupy a nest and warm each other.  This kitten barely survived and didn’t develop properly.  

Finnegan

I called her the Dust Bunny, as she was exceptionally fuzzy rather than furry, and a blue sort of gray.  Then, like other emotionally damaged teens, she fell madly in love with a stranger, the Weirdo/Hop/the Striped Terror/Finnegan — long-legged lover of heights.  At first he tolerated the Bunny.  He wasn’t much more than a kitten himself.  But as time went on, she was too clingy and he began to hide.  If he napped hidden under the comforter, the Bunny simply slept up against the lump he made.  If he were outside, she went through the house calling, and then went out to search, still calling.

Continuing the human-like story, which suggests something about how much the adventures of teen girls are functions of hormones rather than intelligence, the Bunny was soon pregnant and then deserted.  Finnegan disappeared over Homesteader Days, as suddenly as he had appeared in the first place.  Maybe he jumped into someone’s pickup.  Maybe he was ground under by the massive farm machines that line up in front of my house for the parade.  Bunny searched and searched and got fatter and fatter, until she could no longer jump to the high shelves where they used to hang out.  She will not cuddle with me: she is imprinted with Finnegan.

Buddies

Because her snout is underdeveloped and small with a tiny tongue, I thought maybe her pelvis would prevent her from giving birth.  In the end she had four kittens in bed with me, just off the plastic and towels I had spread when she began the process.  I reduced the babies to two and installed them in a soft box in the dark closet, which meant that my laundry baskets had no home.  But Bunny moved those last two kittens down into the dirt space under the house and installed them between two floor joists near the place where the floor furnace hangs down.  These kittens will not be cold.  I can tell they’ve been nursing by checking Bunny’s nips, but I can’t see or hear them.  They will have trouble coming upstairs by themselves.

In the meantime another adventure was unfolding.  Granniemamacat had her kittens somewhere else — I suspected under the red house down the street, but I didn’t go looking.  She came to eat, then left.  Big thunderstorms have been coming through, and one was exceptionally powerful, both cold rain and slush.  The fields nearby were pounded flat.  

When it had passed, I heard what I thought was bird-calls.  Then it sounded like kittens.  I went out to see what was happening and it was clear that Grannymamacat had been nesting in the wild rose border against the house under my computer window.  They are thick and thorny cover, but no match for the storm.  She was against the foundation, soaked to the skin, and sort of stunned.  Soaked and shaking kittens were struggling in every direction, beeping like the warnings of backing-up trucks.  

It took me a while and a few stabbings to echolocate them and pitch them back on their mother.  Then I went for a lawn chair, a box with padding, and a section of plastic to make a tent over the chair.  When I got back to the nest, the mother had left, but I made my improvements (there were FIVE kittens) and went back inside.  What was I thinking?  This was my chance to do postnatal intervention, but their eyes were open and they were struggling to survive.

When I checked in a hour the kittens were gone.  I’ve been putting out kibble in the garage twice a day.  Next time I could hear the kittens and located them behind an old tin cupboard but didn’t interfere.  They’ve had their headquarters there ever since and now they come out to play and to eat.  Granniemamacat is nursing them in plain sight on the carpet.  She has claimed the garage and is not tolerating any other cats except Bunny, who is her granddaughter.

GrannieMamacat

This is very nice.  The cat I called the Dark Calico Mamacat appeared in June with kittens and wanted to move them in.  She’s been eating here.  Now she’s not allowed.  In fact, she seems to have left with her half-grown kits.  Also the two main toms are kept out.  The Grannymamacat runs them both off, though they are formidable cats: the Bull Tomcat, stocky and short-legged, and a lovely sleek all-black Tom.  These two cats are pets.  They only come around at the bidding of hormones.  I could probably trap them, but at the risk of enraging owners.

These matters are not usually discussed.  Those who are former ranch wives are sympathetic to the pathos but consider it necessary.  Some old men who love birds are sorry to miss an opportunity to kill their enemies.  Those who are single laborers away from their families or just here because they have to be somewhere, don’t even notice.  Little kids hunt for kittens and catch them if they can.  After that, it’s mixed.

Printer cats

The “common wisdom” is that a kitten that isn’t handled by humans by the time it’s twelve weeks old will not be tameable.  What I’m seeing is that there is enormous variability.  Some of the Grannymamacat’s kittens will tolerate being picked up and cuddled; others will spit and struggle.  The old cat attacks me, making her "snakehead" (all fangs, no ears) and jump at me, spitting and slapping my legs with claws.  I can’t put a hand on her, but if I did I would draw it back shredded.

In the animal control days, we could catch fugitive animals (both cats and dogs) by putting the equivalent of “roofies” in the food.  That’s not possible now because of drug laws.  I heard about making chloroform, but it takes more skill and equipment than I have, including a box like the one we used to employ to kill skunks: a two compartment box, one airtight and dark space for the skunk, and one communicating through a screen with a lid for putting in cloth saturated with chloroform.  

It’s easier to catch a skunk than a feral cat, but the consequences of scaring a skunk are not good.  Anyway, killing skunks is only because of them carrying rabies and, curiously, everyone has become very blasé about rabies.  Rabid dogs go crazy and run around biting.  Rabid cats tend to go hide until they are dead.  It is a brain virus.  There is a vaccine.  I should read up on which parts of the brain and all that, assuming someone took the risk of studying it.

Finnegan

Much has changed over the years.  No longer do people have cows so they can squirt milk in cats’ mouths.  No longer do they cook at home, and packaging doesn't allow for scraps.  Fishermen clean their catch at a provided sink/bench by the lake. I’m shocked when I see how much chemical fallow is used.  It’s bound to have consequences, one of which is eliminating the vegetation where rodents and ground birds used to live.  When driving cross-country, there always used to be cats in barrow pits or crouching on porches.  No more.  No longer are there crushed ground squirrels on the highways to attract hawks.

A rural small town is no longer friendly to unwanted cats.  Cats are among the most resourceful of animals, but even their rural habitat is contracting.  In Portland this time of year we used to take in hundreds of unwanted cats every day, but there are more niches for cats in cities.

Bunny