Anyone who lives in the country is only too accustomed to homeless cats showing up on their doorstep. Over the period of time we ran the pet resort, we found homes for over 30 cats and kittens. The ones that were too old or too feral to be adopted by anyone else, ended up living with us.
Eulalia (Lily), one of our adoption failures, was getting old and frail by 2010.
John always tried to get all the cats in overnight. There were coyotes nearby. When Lily didn’t show up at bedtime, John went looking for her. The good news was, he came back with Lily. The bad news was his announcement, delivered in a dolorous voice, that he had seen two black kittens in one of the disused barns.
There had been an adult black cat roaming around our property that spring. We had been unsuccessful in our attempts to lure her to us, so we could get her spayed and neutered and hopefully find her a home. Now we had to wonder if these black kittens might belong to her.
This barn was a gloomy place, and hazardous to navigate due to old hay on the floor masking broken floor boards lying in wait to trip the unwary, as well as various pieces of abandoned rusted farm equipment that probably dated back a century. Stacks of old lumber provided multiple hiding places for cats and kittens.
We tromped down there together in the dusk of the summer’s evening. As soon as we went in the door, we spied one little black furball, despite his clever attempt to elude us by hunkering down in plain sight beside an old hay bale. I guess he thought scrunching his eyes closed would do the trick. If he couldn’t see the giants who had invaded his space, then they didn’t exist.
I don’t knock his strategy, you understand. I used to do it myself as a kid, when a strange noise from our cellar (which I was convinced harboured demons and monsters) would scare the bejesus out of me.
I reached down and picked him up. He curled into an even tighter ball. We had a look around, but there was no sign of the other kitten John had spotted.
We took this guy back to the house. He was so tiny he fit in the palm of my hand. Fortunately, unlike the kittens we found the first summer we opened the kennel, his eyes were open, and he was able to eat on his own and lap up milk. We ensconced him in a spare room, in a cat carrier for a safe house, with a tiny litter tray and some food. We left the cage door open and closed the door to keep out our own inquisitive cats.
The next day after the pet resort work was done, we renewed our search in the old barn. We could occasionally see the other black kitten scurrying around among the mouldy old bales of hay, rusty discarded equipment and lumber piles. We repeatedly failed to get anywhere close to him.
All the while, we worried that we had done a bad thing in separating the two of them. But over the course of the day, we kept putting out food and it kept disappearing, so we figured the kitten was all right.
On one of our forays, John swore he saw a bigger white, or maybe grey kitten going under a lumber pile. I hoped he was wrong, but knew, since litters generally come in fours or more, that he was probably right.
Between searches, we took the captured kitten to our vet, who pronounced him healthy, and about six weeks old. We named him Nero. I was trying to think of a name that was related to the colour black without being reduced to “Blackie” or “Shadow”. Nero means black in Italian.
Not that Nero spoke with an Italian accent, but when you’ve named as many animals as we have, you get inventive.
After the second day of spending our off hours kitten hunting in the hot hazardous barn, fishing out Nero from under various heavy pieces of furniture where he managed to get himself stuck and cleaning up some misses from his failed attempts to use the litter box, it started to become clear that John was regretting the impulse that led him to share the “kittens in the barn” intelligence with me.
“Maybe they belong to someone locally and they’re just visiting our barn,” he urged. If we collected the kittens, some neighbourhood child to whom they belonged might be left heartbroken. We should just wait and see what happens. I wouldn’t want to be the source of a child’s grief would I?
He offered this preposterous theory with all the seriousness of Newton explaining gravity. Ya gotta love it. He’s so much better at denial than I am.
Unrelenting, I sent him off to the nearest Rentalex to procure a live trap.
That afternoon, we baited the trap with food and set it up in the barn. After our kennel duties, we went back to find that there was a cat in the trap. Not the black kitten though, or even the black cat who had been wandering about that spring. Nope, we found ourselves looking at a large grey and white, longhaired adult cat, whom we had never seen before. We figured this was who John saw going under the lumber pile.
The cat was frantically throwing itself against the wire sides of the trap, giving itself a bloody nose in the process. After a brief ‘discussion’, I sent John back to the pet resort to get a big dog crate. These were stored up in the loft area of the kennel which could only be reached by ladder, going in through the dog dormitory, where the dogs would all break out into barking when they saw him.
You see why I had to ‘send’ him.
We set up the crate in the garage, with food and a litter box and decanted the cat from the trap into the dog crate.
All the while we speculated on how odd it was that this grey and white longhair cat should give birth to two black shorthair kittens. Was the feral black cat we had seen maybe the father?
The next day, we re-baited the trap. Later that morning we found a black feline in the trap. But it was the adult black cat, not the other kitten. It was going through the same performance as the grey and white cat, throwing itself against the walls.
John stared at it hopelessly, knowing how difficult it is to find homes for feral cats, and said, “Let’s release it.”
But I knew where releasing unneutered or unspayed cats leads. No way did I want to find another litter of kittens in the barn within a few months or even for the next few years.
I issued a dictum that no cats were going anywhere until they were spayed or neutered. Bowing to his fate, back went John for another dog crate.
This was the beginning of the Canada Day long weekend. I called the vet and got the earliest appointment after the holiday, to bring both adults in for a spay or neuter (we couldn’t get near the cats to tell what gender they were).
Once that was done, we’d have to figure out whether or not they could be tamed and adopted out. If not, I promised John that we would release them back outside, and try feeding them there.
In a cruel irony, we had just paid big bucks to a shelter to adopt two cats for my mother, and one for John’s mother, both of those ladies being cat lovers and both having ended up cat free for a time. Now we we going to have an indeterminate number of cats and kittens to find homes for.
Sometimes I’d like to punch Fate in the mouth.
We decided to set the cage with the adult black cat in the barn, assuming that the black cat was indeed the parent of the kittens and the grey and white one was some kind of visiting auntie (or perhaps uncle). We thought the kittens might stick close to Mom (or Dad). We placed the live trap next to the crate containing the adult cat.
I went out to the barn an hour later to check developments. The large dog crate was empty. Its doors were still locked and closed. I had no idea how it had done it, but the black cat had lit out for the territories. Houdini had nothing on this feline.
I took a look around, hoping to spot it. No black adult. But oh, look. Now there were three kittens scuttling around the barn. Two more black ones and a white or pale gray one. The good news was accumulating too fast for me to process.
I informed John of these developments. His face was as study in mixed emotions. He was clearly torn between his relief that that at least one cat was no longer his problem, but not happy to learn there were three more kittens in his world.
At this point I took pity on him, and suggested we give up baiting the trap until the next day, after we had taken the grey and white cat to town for her spay operation. We were going with the working theory that the grey and white cat was female. Toms aren’t known for sticking around to deal with the consequences of their amorous activities.
I had named her Calpurnia, going with the ancient Roman theme suggested by Nero.
The next morning, I was getting ready to take Calpurnia to the vet. John came in from the garage to greet me with the pleasing intelligence that Calpurnia had also somehow managed to escape her dog crate and was now loose in the garage somewhere. We would never find her, because the garage, while not as hazardous as the barn, was even messier with even more hiding spots.
John had reached his breaking point. He delivered a truly epic rant, calling down curses on all cats and swearing a mighty oath that he would have nothing more to do with baiting traps or catching kittens.
I couldn’t really blame him. To recap: over three days, two kittens had been initially identified. One of them had been captured. One adult grey and white cat had been captured and confined to a crate in the garage. One black adult cat had been captured and confined in a crate in the barn. Three more kittens had been spotted in barn. None had been captured. The adult black cat escaped. The adult grey and white cat escaped.
For all our efforts, we were left with the same black kitten we had just scooped up within minutes of the announcement of cats in the barn.
Undaunted (but now working alone), I re-baited the trap to see what, if anything I could catch before I had to return the trap to the rental place plus call the vet to admit defeat and cancel the spay appointment. I checked it thirty minutes later. Guess who’s in the trap? The adult black cat. Yay.
I took her to the vet, dropped off the trap at the rental place and decided to go to my trusty hardware store to buy another, smaller trap. I thought maybe it would be better suited to catching the kittens, as the trap didn’t need as much weight on it to spring closed.
I bought it, took it home, set it up in the barn, and checked in an hour. Got a kitten. What we thought was white or grey turned out to be pale orange. Within fairly short order, I had trapped three more kittens, one solid grey and two black.
Eventually John did manage to catch Calpurnia. We ended up the exercise with two adult cats and five kittens, of whom three were male and two were female. In addition to Calpurnia and Nero, we named them Caesar, Augustus (who turned out to be female and became Augusta), Tiberius and Aurelia.
Having exhausted my store of Roman names I liked, I resorted to musical comedy and called the black mother Dulcinea from ‘Man of La Mancha’. She calmed down once some time had passed and she learned no one was going to trap her again or take her to the vet.
Over the summer, we got everyone spayed and neutered. It turned out that Calpurnia had been in the very early stages of pregnancy. So there John. If we had set her loose again or not trapped her in the first place, then we would have had another litter of kittens to contend with.
Our daughter-in-law’s sister took the orange kitten as a pet for their little girl. She renamed him ‘Milo’ and he proved as affectionate and friendly as most orange cats.
Aurelia likewise found a home right away.
Then we discovered that almost no one wants black cats. We had put out the word through our vet and with our clients, that we had spayed and neutered kittens on offer. People would call to inquire and hang up when I told them only the black kittens were left.
We had pretty much resigned ourselves from the start that no one would take the feral adults, and we would end up being responsible for them. However, I guess Fate had decided she was finished screwing with us, and sent us a wonderful surprise.
As I always did when searching for homes for cats who showed up at our place, I had sent emails to all of our clients in the hope that one of them, even if not in the market for a cat themselves, might know someone who was. I was up front about the situation with the adults. By this time, they had both calmed down. They were still fearful about being handled, but were very sweet and never offered to scratch or bite us. But they would most likely never be affectionate lap cats.
One of our clients called to say that her father had a proposal for an arrangement to take on the two adults. He lived in the country and had a little structure on his large property, surrounded by trees, where he did woodworking. There was heat and light in the building and he liked to have a cat live there, for company. His last cat had just died at 19.
He would be willing to take on the feral adults, feed them, provide them with warmth and shelter, and let them out in his woods to roam. Would that be acceptable to us?
After we finished our happy dance, we jumped on the offer. A few weeks after Dulcie and Cally went to him, he called to give us an update. They were doing just fine in the woodworking shop. Did we think enough time had passed that he could let them outside with a reasonable expectation that they would come back? We gave him our blessing. He called again a few weeks on to say they were coming back for food and he was shutting them in at night.
Caesar, Nero and Augusta joined our menagerie. Our other cats loved them, especially Domino, who was mostly still feral. She was a mother to the kittens, teaching them how to hunt.
Once we acquired a dog named Caesar, we renamed the cat ‘Tiberius’, since the orange kitten who had originally been called Tiberius was now Milo.
It’s confusing, I know. Just go with it.
All three kittens had lovely personalities, but Nero especially adored everything that lived, feline, canine or human. When Caesar the dog came to live with us, Nero decided this must be another, larger brother. He would run to greet Caesar when we walked back from the kennel with him. Fortunately, although Caesar weighed more than John, he had the same sweet, open personality as Nero.
Nero and Tiberius played with our grandchildren and even tried to make friends with the wild turkeys and deer in our yard.
All those people who called about the kittens and refused when they learned there were only black ones left? They were the losers.
