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In the winter, my daily wood chores are usually a solitary respite from telephones and computer screens. I stand back by the alley, swinging an eight-pound maul until the wheelbarrow is full -- by some wonderful cosmic coincidence, during cold weather the air-tight stove in the living room consumes a wheel-barrow of wood each day.
Occasionally my solitude is disturbed by someone walking
down the alley; these strangers generally offer a word or
two of encouragement or sympathy. Once in a while my
next-door neighbor comes out his back door to laugh and say
Quillen, you know you can borrow my power splitter any
time.
We have an informal deal. I keep his computer running, and he offers me his hydraulic wood-splitter. I do borrow it once or twice a year, to split those logs that repel the maul.
Otherwise, though, the winter afternoon wood-fetching is a lonely excursion. Sometime in February, though, I saw I was being watched every day. The observer was a scrawny gray tiger-striped alley cat, whom I hoped would soon move on to a good, loving home.
Not that I minded having a cat hang around the woodpile. Woodpiles provide excellent nesting areas for small rodents, which carry diseases like plague and hantavirus, and if this alley cat wanted to practice carnivorism there, so much the better.
But we already had two cats: The Cat Formerly Known As
Princess (generally called Lulu
for no known
reason), who'd been around since about 1997, and a spring
2003 acquisition named Magpie (common name Maggie
)
for her coloring. We got Maggie because our 17-year-old
tomcat Hector had died of a lethal injection, brought about
by end stage renal disease, that January, and Lulu really
needed another cat to harass so she wouldn't pester us all
the time.
Both are indoor cats, though. Hector was street-smart and a warrior (over the years, despite his castration at the proper age, he lost one eye, the tips of his ears and the end of his tail). But the younger cats just seemed the type to get eaten by a coyote or smashed by a car, so they stayed in.
I didn't want to have to worry about an outdoor cat, but otherwise the prospect seemed attractive. It would kill rodents and pursue birds.
Judging by all the birding books on the shelves, there are millions of American bird-lovers. I am not among them.
There's a reason we have the phrase bird-brained
to describe stupidity. For instance, the bricks of the arch
above a second-story window on our house extend about an
inch out from the wall.
This tiny ledge is obviously not big enough to hold a nest. Every spring, some bird builds one anyway and lays eggs, which fall out. Apparently, the notion of building a home in a Stupid Zone is not confined to humans. At any rate, I don't like birds. I don't like to see them, hear them or eat them.
A cat in the yard might discourage avian visits. So I started leaving the shed door open. The alley cat might want some shelter from the wind, and I hoped it would hunt and devour unwanted shed inhabitants.
Alas, Martha noticed the alley cat, and started sneaking food out to it. As the days grew longer and warmer, the cat seemed to be more at home here, and even put on some weight.
To simplify domestic conversations, we needed to name
it; the result was Ferrill,
pronounced feral.
It seemed a good masculine name to go with a tomcat that
lived by the alley.
By mid-April, though, Ferrill was getting fat. Martha said kittens were imminent, but I maintained my state of wishful thinking.
You can guess what happened next. On the morning of April 21, Ferrill was skinny again, though her mammaries were enlarged. Within days, we heard scratching and plaintive high-pitched meows from a junk-laden corner of the shed, and soon we saw three charming little kittens.
Inviting a tomcat to visit is one thing, but a single mother is another, and if she's not going to act in a responsible way, then we have to. She'll need shots and we'll need to get her spayed, after which she'll probably run off. Just the first round of vaccinations for the kittens cost $84 at the vet last week, and I hope we're able to give them away before they need their next round.
What seemed sensible last winter, encouraging an alley cat to patrol our property, has turned into a money pit.
Oh well. You can have cats or you can have mice and birds. There's really not much reason to pick one over the other, except that cats usually don't defecate in your cereal or build nests on narrow ledges.
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