Stray Cat Rescue. Part 4. The Case Of Yoko, Columbo And The Mystery Kittens.
You’d think if you were a cat, born in a field and camping in a garden centre for the first six months of your life you’d be able to climb a tree, but no. The stairs were an insurmountable mountain and no easier going up than down. Both ascension and descension involved a contemporary dance of circling, backfoot-stomping, sidewinding, cross-stepping and up-backing. I would have carried her but she’s not a picker-upper. At one point I thought she was paralysed, turned out she had just decided not to come down the stairs ever. She had already successfully taken ownership of three bedrooms and a bathroom though, so I thought the most rational and reasonable thing to do would be to move up there with her and just stay in bed forever.
You be Yoko.
In fact, I was quite delighted about her idea, but on day three of our John and Yoko bed protest, I went downstairs to get her breakfast, turned around and she was standing behind me in the kitchen, wide-eyed and weird. Pride flooded through my body. Baby’s first solo flight and one of many daily breakthroughs to come.
Her eyes are like headlamps and always on main beam. I love the way she stares straight into my soul and yells something profound at me. Sometimes she’d have “feral dropout”, as I call it, where she stops dead mid-conversation and gazes into the abyss, frozen for ten seconds while she reboots. I’ll never know what she sees while she’s feral buffering in the beyond, but I have my suspicions she’s receiving messages from the Mothership.
Feral dropout. Please wait while systems reboot.
Day twos breakthrough had been finding a dry food she would eat. I didn’t want her to have a totally wet food diet for the sake of her teeth, but it was a real challenge. Her appetite was voracious, as you’d expect from a cat who’d never known the security of a home, but she rejected almost everything. Not out of petulance, she just wouldn’t and couldn’t eat it, possibly because she was anxious or unwell, she eventually managed to eat a mixture of chunks in jelly and a chewy dry mix, but only if you didn’t stop cheerleading her on from the side. If you stopped cheering she stopped eating. Also, if you didn’t guard her flanks, she’d jump at every imaginary wild predator creeping up behind her in the kitchen and every other mouthful of reconstituted beef in gravy would be flung across the floor in a panicked over the shoulder tiny freak out.
She might have issues with the stairs, but the thing you’d expect to be the biggest challenge of homing a feral cat was an absolute breeze. She went immediately into her litter igloo, through the flap and everything. I was thrilled, amazed and proud. I love cleaning out litter trays, it’s like digging for buried treasure. I found a diamanté necklace in one once, it was mine, but it felt like striking gold.
She ate and ate and ate, pee’d like a professional and spent twenty minutes covering it up, but I waited and waited and waited for the first poo. I wasn’t too worried, as she would have been stressed and lots of people can’t go when they travel. Like when you go on holiday and can’t go for days. Well, it took three days and I think it caught us both by surprise. She was constantly by my side, jumpy and antsy, but incredibly snuggly and affectionate, it was like living with a koala bear fruit bat. She followed me into the kitchen and as I was preparing her breakfast I became aware of an alteration in the atmosphere of our already well established routine. I turned around to see her producing a two-foot poo on the tiles in the kitchen doorway. It was so big she had to shuffle forward as she dispatched it. It was a remarkable achievement, longer than her actual body length and dead straight. I was thrilled and impressed in equal measures and had to fold it in half to pick it up. What a girl.
Post poop bath in a sunbeam.
In spite of her glorious achievement that morning I had a feeling her guts were giving her a bit of grief and suspected it was going to take quite a while to sort out. She had been very well fed and catered to by the garden centre ladies, but I had my own gut-feeling that she may have some medical issues to resolve. It’s either kittens or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Even though the lady in the garden centre had said her swollen tummy had gone down after she’d had a big poo, I just couldn’t see how she couldn’t be pregnant, unless she already had had a home and had been neutered. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving her back and concocted a bank robbery heist movie style getaway from the vets in my mind if she turned out to be microchipped. Then we’d have to go on the run and wear wigs.
I put it off as long as I could, convincing myself that she needed just one more day to settle in, but finally phoned the vet after a week to book her in for a check up, de-worming and vaccinations. Within that week I had rinsed every site and forum on the Internet for “is my cat pregnant?” And convinced myself and the vet she was.
She had a voracious appetite, terrible morning sickness (which they get too apparently) and an ever expanding girth with two kitten-shaped bumps on her sides. The vet, over the phone, told me to prepare a nice nest for her, she will manage to give birth by herself but if there are any problems call the emergency number. I said I’d call 999 if there are any problems. I got my trusty beloved leopard print suitcase that had taken me round the world and in and out of trouble down from the top of the wardrobe and padded it out to make a cozy nest in preparation for the kittens coming.
Lazing on a Sunday afternoon.
I don’t know why they terrify women our entire lives with the threat of the bleak and barren horror of middle-age. I cannot imagine any better feeling than lying on the sofa on a rainy Sunday afternoon, having survived the horrors of and fulfilled all your life’s ambitions, watching Tyne Daly as a murderous guest star on a Columbo triple bill with your little cat asleep on your lap and a cup of tea on your peacock coffee table. She is a typhoon 10 of affection and everything I was worried about has disappeared. Leonard Nimoy is up next.
Sunday Columbo triple bill - Tyne did it.
