Cat families

[pyraxis]

Now that I'm back in town, there's no sign of the teenage stray kittens who were hanging around our porch before we left. It's been a few days now, so I guess they must have moved on.

However, someone else showed up when I started putting kitten chow out again: their mother.

She's a skinny, gorgeous tortoiseshell who never did get comfortable with humans. I call her the queen because she sits right outside the back door on her hindquarters, all thin and regal, staring directly at you through the glass. Doesn't ask, doesn't move, just sits and stares as if by force of will she can compel you to walk out the door. When the handle clicks, she's gone in a flash back to her spot under the porch, but as soon as you set out the food and disappear, she'll creep back out, startling at every person-noise, and grab what she needs.



She's the one who taught her kittens to come get food from us until you're big enough to catch it on your own. Usually she makes her own way, but for a few days she'd been unusually bold about coming on the porch. So we fed her, and later we discovered why: there were four little shadows creeping after her. Two orange ones, a black one, and a grey one, and sadly I don't have photos, but when Wolf gets home, he does. She stuck around until the kittens were brave enough to get their own, and then vanished again. She's good like that: she only came for food when she needed it for her milk and then to teach her kittens while they were still small.

But now the kittens are grown and left, and she's back again, and her belly's swelling. I didn't know cats could get pregnant again so fast.

The father is a friendly black guy we call Half-tail. He must have been a former housecat whose owners abandoned him, because he has no fear of people. He happily twines around your legs and he loves to roll over and get his tummy rubbed. But he's all solid muscle underneath, and never been spayed, and lost the top half of his tail somewhere along the way, so they must have left him young.



Wolf says maybe we should take him in to get fixed, but I'm not so sure. Maybe they could help the infections in his eye and his tail, but I still don't see what right we have.

Comments

[exodus]

they are both really gorgeous cats. i think the half-tail is so endearing, but i've got a thing for adopting what other people might view as 'fugly' animals.

[pyraxis]

Yeah he's really pretty, and posing for the camera too, look at him.

It was funny when the kittens were around, because he'd be eating and three or four of them would come nosing around him and push his face out of the way to get the food for themselves. He always seemed kind of tolerantly bemused where these rude little kids had come from.

[pyraxis]

Yeah, thinking about it more, I think that's a sensibility I need to bring into my art. Making things with less shallow cuteness and more fugliness, for lack of better words. A lot of times things come out 'nicer' than I meant them to, and it's frustrating.