dealing with cats

We have, yet again, a feline as part of our family.

This would be #4 in the 10 years here in the country, and #5 in 16 years of marriage.

I still haven't figured out how #1 survived as long as she did living with a greyhound. Think retired racer who caught squirrels routinely, yet never chomped the tree-rat-sized feline inside the house.

Go figure.

Enter George.

Or rather, Georgette, as my feline-gender-differentiating-deficient ER nurse wife found out to be much more appropriate.

George was our first foray into an "outdoor cat" here in the country. "He" came from a nice elderly lady up the street and my wife and children just had to have "him".

George was skittish, like most country cats.

Mind you, most country cats out here are feral, or should I say they were when we moved in. All 12 of them. None of them survived the first year.

That's when I learned my favorite feline pet names and developed a list.

More on that later.

George liked the garage.

George like to hide in the garage.

Unbeknownst to me, George's favorite hiding spot was on the top of the driver's side rear tire.

George committed suicide by minivan.

After less than 2 weeks as part of the family.

On our way to some function where the entire family's presence was required post-haste, nonetheless.

That was the kids' first lesson in pet death. Lots of tears. Some uncontrollable sobbing.

Some ambivalence (oops!).

My wife swears George heard me reciting my list once or twice.

Enter, George's sibling, Allie.

Or rather, Al.

Another case of nursing anatomy failure with felines.

Allie (as he was so lovingly called by four members of our family) was not so skittish and certainly not suicidal.

By all rights and means, Allie was one of those tolerable country cats.

By tolerable, I mean Allie didn't kill birds (at least if he did, he never left evidence) but did kill mice and moles and voles and other rodent-like creatures in the garage and the workshop and around the yard. That earned Allie, if not admiration, at least a mutual understanding that if such behavior continued, Allie would not have to hazard dodging high-velocity copper-clad hollow-point projectiles from my kitchen window.

Allie, unfortunately (sensing a theme, yet?) liked larger rodents as well. Like tree rats.

Tree rats don't come around the house too much with all the hardwoods rimming the property and the feline presence to keep the plague at bay. So Allie went hunting.

Alas, the hunter became the hunted. Someone (and a very poor shot of a someone, at that!) maimed Allie with birdshot one day and Allie came limping home to a sympathetic nurse with three children wondering how to care for poor, wounded, crippled Allie.

I get the phone call and suggest Allie be examined to determine the nature of the wound.

Enter the country vet.

Now, I'm friends with the country vet. He's a nice guy. He delivers horses and puppies and cows and maybe the occasional litter of kittens (but he's never admitted that to me). He's a bird hunter, which automatically places him in the top 5% of nice guys on the planet.

He knows how to deal with maimed, limping cats.

Or at least he knows one way.

Just not my preferred method, apparently.

I thought that if the damage was significant, Allie would be mercifully put out of my misery. I mean, after all, he's a country vet!!!!

Enter my awakening to the need for young country vets with 4 very young children to pay for all those vet school bills, start a business and buy a house.

A few days later we have a 3-legged cat and a bill for $465 and seventy-three cents!!!!


That 3-legged cat chewed a hole in a screen one day and disappeared for weeks, finally showed back up and disappeared again for good.


So, we wait a good long while and a family at church offers us a kitten, which I vehemently oppose due to the growing population of oppossums, raccoons, feral cats, skunks and coyotes in our area. Kittens are simply not good ideas with all those critters around.

Somewhere around the 13th of September said kitten arrives complete with box and food and dishes to live on the front porch (already have one canine in the house and said canine doesn't gee-haw too well with felines).

Cue the music.

You know the kind.

The kind that segues from happy into foreboding . . .

See the evening of the 14th we're outside enjoying the fall sunshine when one of the kids walks over to me and says, "Dad, the well is making a funny sound."

Never what one wants to hear less than 2 hrs before darkness settles in and the temperature is dropping.

Apart comes the well housing, out comes the pump, up comes the piping with a nice little split in it.

Trip to town for piping, since I don't have any more splice kits.

Back home after dark and start putting the pipe back on, only to find that the cold has made both the pipe and my hands less than cooperative, despite attempts to warm them up. I finally call it quits around 10:30 p.m. and head in for dinner.

I clean up the best I can (without running water, mind you), find some food and sit down to enjoy a meager dinner and head to bed so I can get up early to go shower at the Y.

Ten minutes into a very late dinner with red-mud-stained hands, I hear a pitiful little caterwauling from the direction of the front porch. Thinking that I really didn't want to deal with that kitten tonight, I just kept eating.

Then I heard it again. This time I realized it wasn't possible that such a tiny little kitten could be making all that noise.

Just.

Not.

Possible.

Up I get and head to find the flashlight and the .22 to relegate myself to hauling off a dead possum or raccoon that just wanted to raid the food bowl (despite my best attempts to remind a certain daughter that the kitten would do better without the added bait on the front porch to attract vermin that were likely larger than the kitten itself). Just what I needed to deal with after all the other fun I'd already had.

I sneak up to the front door and very gently turn the deadbolt, trying very hard to keep quiet so as not to alert the offending raiding critter. I get the door open and see the kitten with it's back arched and hackles raised, hissing up a storm at something at the bottom of the stairs. At this point I figure the kitten is either half demon or scared out of it's wits (or maybe both) because there's no way something so little should even think about standing up to a wild critter of any sort at it's measly little size.

I see a pair of green eyes glaring back up at me and think, "Great, it's another feral cat!" But it's one of the biggest, whitest puffballs of a tomcat I've seen and I know I've never seen it around here before. I think, "It has to be a neighbor's cat, so I'll just walk out the door and shoo it away."

Just as I put that thought into motion, aforementioned demon kitten disappears in a blur of cat fur both large and small.

Remember that "list" I mentioned earlier?

1. Bullseye

2. Nine cents (approximate cost for a bullet)

3. DRT (ER mentality - Dead Right There)

ad infinitum


Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was anger, maybe it was just hatred for anything that attacks anything else at my home ( I consider you warned); but I raised the rifle to my hip and rapid fired three rounds, saw the tomcat hop into the air and strike out across the front yard.

I didn't even care if I hit it, but the last thing I wanted (or so I thought) was to make a trip to the emergency vet's office with this kitten.

I walk down the steps and hear the kitten still hissing and rustling around and figure it doesn't know the danger is passed.

Unfortunately, the kitten didn't know anything because it's CNS was going haywire thanks to now-dying and making the awful-est of noises tomcat breaking it's neck.

Just.

Freakin'.

Wonderful!

Remember that I'm getting up at 0500 to go shower at the Y since there's no running water in the house.

Remember I mentioned the date as September 14th.

What I haven't yet mentioned is that the 15th is my wife's birthday.

Oh, joy!

So, I get to get up and gather all my stuff in the dark in order to be ready to get out of the house as quietly (and quickly) as possible, knowing that I have to wake up a certain birthday girl and tell her, "Happy Birthday. By the way, we still have no water and the kitten is dead. See you this evening!"

Just how I wanted to start her day.

And mine included disposing of two dead cats at the office dumpster. Yeah, Rah!

After a hiatus of a couple of years or so, enter Lily, the rescued cat. Rescued from what, I'm not too certain as my mother-in-law saw her slinking around for a couple of weeks at their house before she decided we needed another cat.

My daughter absolutely adores her. My wife won't let her in the house (too much dog hair already, but the indoor dogs were her idea, not mine!) and the dogs both think she's tolerable. The crazy cat even thinks the dogs want to pet her so she rubs against them every time they come out the front door.

She doesn't hide in the garage.

She doesn't chase birds.

She catches rodents (little rodent skulls already abound!).

And she doesn't expect me to pet her.

All-in-all, truly another tolerable cat.

But the boys saw a coyote very close to the house yesterday.

Just dandy.