Serial Bob

We have a bulkhead next to a small extension at the back of our house. Between bulkhead and laundry is about a foot and half of pavement. This has become the place where our local serial killer lays out his victims. I tend to let cats in and out at this back door, where I’m sort of tucked inside, facing the patio and a fence. This is often the first view of my yard I have in the morning, but I’ve learned not to look around the door at the area between the bulkhead and the house until well after I’ve had my coffee.

Our ex-stray cat has decided that this is the place to leave displays of his night’s work. Right now, fortunately, he’s apparently on hiatus, but earlier this spring when everything was young, tender, and frisking with joy, he was busy. The “work” that always impresses us most is the squirrels, full grown ones that he lugs in for us to admire. He used to eat them whole back when he was on the lam, but now just the head seems to be satisfactory. What’s the zombie joke? “Brainssssss!”

Anyway, he caught four squirrels this spring, great big plush grown-ups who should have known better. I don’t feel too sorry about them, because we’ve got a ton of squirrels who are up to no good with my bulbs and gardens. I do mourn the bunnies and chipmunks he catches, but what purely I hate, what I yell about, are the song birds.

Worst and most heinous of all his crimes, he ate my adorable jazz-master catbird in his fine, gray Wall Street suit. He crunched house finches around the bird feeder like potato chips, so that I gave up putting seeds into it. He brought me a darling Carolina Wren in his mouth, held so carefully that when I coaxed it away from him, the wren took flight straight from my hand. I hope very much that his/her rattling little bold scolding self survived the ordeal. This cat of mine could give Sylvester a bad name!
Web Site: Juliet Waldron

Bob's Good Idea

Bob, the Cat-Boy-in-the-Hood who has chosen to live with us, occasionally finds his new home boring. With his usual creativity, he has found a good solution—good, at least, for him!

This April, the weather has been erratic, with warm spells, followed by really chilly cold spells. We’re glad to see the rain, because we need it, and I’m glad to see the cold, because it suppresses the neighbors and quiets the place down a little.

Anyhow, Bob has a pretty good routine devised. He cruises, hunting for moles and mice as he always has, using our house as a convenient pit stop for crunchies, and for shelter when it rains, snows, blows or is otherwise inclement. This works well for him, even at night, because we are retired and also because we are old, which means one or the other of us is awake and always ready to play doorman for him.

When the weather is really bad, however, he may be stuck inside for 10-12 hours which soon becomes intolerable. Things then become intolerable for our other three gentle, completely domesticated felines who are kept indoors most of the time. To liven things up, Bob will try to play with them, and like a lot of tough street cats, his idea of fun is not the same as theirs. He plays rough, and although I don’t think he really means to hurt them, they clearly do not like it.

Well, around 2 a.m. on a night when I was up reading, it started to rain. So, I opened the door as usual and there he was, waiting to come in. After giving him the usual quick stroke on the head, I went back upstairs and climbed into bed, because rain on the roof is a wonderful sleeping potion for me. No sooner had I settled down, then the noise began. It was kitty thunder footing, and if you have more than one cat, you know what I mean. Amazing how much noise those dainty little feet can make, especially in a herd! I figured Bob was just blowing off steam, so I ignored it. With the lovely rain drumming, I soon went back to sleep.

The next day I came downstairs and at once realized that this had not been a good choice. In the middle of the living room lay a headless mouse. I realized Bob must have smuggled in some "entertainment."
Sure enough, a few nights later the process repeated. I tried to check his mouth. He easily evaded me, and trotted off into the dining room. The other cats—for once—followed. There he dropped his mouse, and then sat back with a feline smile. The others approached, quivering with excitement. Rarely do they get such a thrill!

The poor mouse took one look and made a run for it, and a melee followed as the indoor cats took after it. Bob licked his paw, apparently well pleased with himself. It suddenly came to me that we now had a mouse inside—perhaps crippled—which would obtain a small revenge by dying far back under my ten-ton entertainment center. After hanging around for some time, following the stampede hither and thither, I realized there was not much I could do to either help the mouse or hinder the cats. In the end, I decided there was nothing to do but go back to bed.

Kat Hurl

It is spring now, so let’s just say that cats take a little extra work. This is because they groom themselves, and swallow what they groom. To make a bad situation worse, they shed their winter coats. This leads to internalization of large wads of cat fur, hence to vomiting.

There are also their eating/sporting habits. Cats are like owls. When they eat a mouse or tender young rabbit, they eat every bit. This means they swallow fur and bones. All that stuff has to go somewhere, either out the back or out the front. Often, it’s easier for cats to hork, so that’s what they do. Then Cat Mom has a cleanup job of which she is not particularly fond.

This morning, sitting in front of the computer, waiting for it to boot up, I happened to glance out the window. I never saw farther than the sill, however, because I could see that some rotten feline had thrown up all over. There were kitty crunchies swimming in a light sauce of tummy juice, spilling over the edge and oozing down the wall. When I got my bucket with hot water and white vinegar, rags, paper towels, my gloves, etc., ready, and pulled back the horizontal blinds, I discovered that the window, too, was involved. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat execute the classic drunk’s forward splash maneuver before, but there’s always a first time. Another trip was required, for more paper towels and the glass cleaner.

We who love cats have all endured the awful cold squish between the toes during a darkened, sleepy nighttime trip to the bathroom. We all have our “Epic” puke stories. I think mine was back in the 80’s, when one of my kitties (I suspect it was Stanzi Marie Pussycat, a lovely tri-color patched tabby,) barfed fulsomely into my trusty dot matrix printer over night. I didn’t discover this until I went to turn it on.

Cussing, I carried the poor little machine outside and shook it heartily, upside down, knowing that even if the printer wasn’t totaled, this was just the beginning of a lengthy cleanup. As I watched the stuff fall out, I actually had a moment of wondering why I loved these cats so much.

It didn’t last long, though.

Cat Names

Cat Names and how they get them is a long and tortuous topic, as twisted and lumpy as old street cat’s busted tail. The “owner” (or, more properly, the feline “host”) gives kitty a name, but as Paul Gallico told us long ago in his wonderful and heartbreaking story, The Abandoned, kitties arrive with their own names, secret names that only cats know.

It is my theory that the secret name leaks into the susceptible mind of the cat “owner” and causes a kind of sea change to occur. The original “given” name becomes something else, it transmutes, sometimes taking along the elements of the by-human-bestowed name, sometimes not. I gave the name “Pamina” to a small flame-point domestic shorthair barn-born kitten, during my extended period of Mozart Madness. This promptly morphed into “Mina,” which became in turn became “Meena,” “Meena-Moo,” and finally just “Moo.” At the same time, we had another barn baby who made a perfect imitation of a Maine Coon, old-fashioned black and gray. As if Mozart wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, I was also reading a lot of ETA Hoffmann, one of the 18th Century inventors of the Fantasy novel. This darling round kitten became “Murr,” after Hoffmann’s own beloved feline companion. (It means “purr” in German.)
Typical of human skill in naming, this large cuddly ball with toe feathers and a fluffy buff belly, did not purr at all. He had that gorgeous round Maine Coon face, with neck ruff and ear feathers, so he became “Murr Face.” After awhile—and you can see this coming—it just became “Face,” or, when we wished to address him formally: “Face Cat.”

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with “Mittens” or “Boots,” nor even “Fluffy,” although I think these cats, too, have secret names, ones their owners may never discover. I once read in a new age magazine that cats prefer names which have initial sounds of “S,” “T,” “F,” “B,” “M” and “P.” On the strength of this (perhaps) dubious authority, I followed the rule for many years in giving cat names. We had “Set” and “Tut” strictly following the Egyptian theme. We had Bast the Beautiful, a ferocious black female who chased squirrels up trees, caught them and then rode them down to their deaths. We had “Sam,” a Siamese, of course, but of the apple-headed big bodied variety. His full name was “Mahasamatman” after the Buddha.

Some nice folks in Nashville let us take over Sam’s care, as he’d moved over to our house anyway. Fact was, they’d picked him up behind a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. He loved those dinners we had in the eighties: corn chips covered with chili and cheese. You could make Sam a plate starting with the chip, bean and burger layer, then top it with salsa, sour cream and guacamole, and he’d motor through it, right down to the bottom.

There’s an old adage about every life “Needs 9 cats.” You need at least nine, IMHO, because every cat is a stand-out individual. The older I get, and the more I learn about them, the better my feline relationships become. As the all-powerful aliens said on an ancient Star Trek “They are beings; they have spirit.”
–Juliet Waldron
http://www.mozartswife.com/

B.0.B. Cat

Bob, yes, that’s an acronym. He arrived as a skinny youth, a gray striped tiger with two enormous boy accoutrements carried proudly beneath his tail. He had a very loud, deep voice and a head and chest that were thick, out of proportion to the rest of him. Clearly, here was a young tomcat -- on the lam! I, of course, petted him. He was very friendly. I fervently hoped he had a home.

Then, one day as winter approached, I offered him food. At first he turned it down. He had on a tight, much weathered collar. He began to show up daily for petting, and also to eat what I offered. He drooled as he gobbled down a bowl of dry kibble, and I imagined he’d been recently abandoned—or that whoever had been feeding him had stopped. One day he came to me and put a paw on his collar, clawing. I removed it, and scratched his neck, which obviously felt good. It had been on the verge of choking. Again, I hoped that if he did belong to someone, even marginally, they’d replace the collar, but no one did.

We began to call him B.B., in honor of his sizeable boy parts, ever more notable as he grew. He began to appear, calling loudly, morning and evening, to get his handout. He liked to sit on my lap, too, so I began to huddle on the porch, sitting on the car’s silver sunscreen to keep my butt warm. I started to take my flea comb out and groom him a bit, pinching out the ones I caught, and cleaning his scarred up head. He seemed to like it. Because he was so big and such a tomcat, I was hesitant about handling him—I just let him do what he wanted, which was to curl up on lap and knead for a few minutes after he ate.

We already had 3 indulged indoor cats, and my husband was adamant about “no more,” so B.B. and I got through the winter as well as we could. (Chris keeps my cat collection under control.) I worried about B.B. when it was very cold, and offered water along with the food now, which he would lap thirstily. Still, he walked off every day as though he had places to go and things to do. (The song “Tomcat Strut” came to mind.) As long as he was fed, everything seemed OK, although I did worry when he showed up covered in blood from fighting during the autumn Yy-eowly season. In the depths of the winter, too, he’d show up covered in blood, but with no new wounds I could locate. Then his ribs and belly stuck out and he had no appetite. When I found squirrel tails in the yard, I understood that alone among 40 years of cats, I had concrete proof that B.B. wasn’t afraid to take on our thuggish local “tree rats.”

Cute, squirrels—and don’t get me wrong, there’s almost nothing more adorable than a litter? of babies, practicing their acrobatics, rejoicing in spring and the abundance of food. Yes, and they are smart, too, but just hell on my birdfeeders! I’ve never lived anywhere with such aggressive squirrels. These guys have a look in their eyes that makes me fear they’re planning a mugging. Perhaps it’s that we live in too urban an area for the men to plug them, like they would in the sticks, but we do seem in need of a predator for them.

Well, to return to B.0.B., a dear friend of mine who loves animals kicked in half of the Humane Society’s spay and neuter bill, and we trapped B.B. and took him on the appointed day. He was tested for Feline Leukemia/ peritonitis, given his shots and his life changed—we hoped—when we removed the B.B’s. We brought him home and locked him in a room with box and water, and fed him as he recovered. He seemed happy to be warm and didn’t carry a grudge, as we humans might. What we still didn’t know was if this paws are made for walkin’ guy would stay with us after neutering and gaining entry to our home.

As we suspected, he hasn’t changed his game plan one iota.

We did change his name, though. Now (at least to us,) he’s B. Zero B. or Bob. It seems like a decent name for a large gray cat. Who knows how many other names he has! I put a collar on him with a tag, and that lasted about 2 days, although I did get a phone call from a lady who said she was glad such a nice cat had a home, and that he visited her regularly. I put another collar on him, which lasted even less time, but received a phone call from a second lady who said pretty much the same thing. Who knows how many other benefactors he has?

Oh, B.0.B., you total bum! Even as I write, I’m waiting for you to put in your daily appearance. He’s taken to using our house for a crash pad, appearing when it’s cold, or raining, and calling for “in.” When the door opens, he heads for the food bowl and slams his face into it. Kibble flies in all directions as he eats . The other cats watch him, in awe. Then, after getting some patting—he’s a great leg rubber and has a wonderful purr—he goes to sleep upside down on the couch with his mouth open. He drools, too, especially when he’s happy or getting a chin scratch.