July 20, 2002

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  When next I  post an installment of my bio, it will begin the series covering the years I rode with Hells Angels.  This blog is about cats.  Yeah, I’m procrastinating a little bit, but it’s more than that. I had an idea I wanted to write down before I lose it. My old memories will keep. Keeping is what they’re good at. I’m having to work to recall them. Some of them I know are state-bound memories, so I have to get back into the state of mind I was in when I recorded them, in order to call them back into the front of my mind. Sometimes that is traumatic. Sometimes it is enjoyable. Sometimes it is simply difficult to accomplish. This week I’m tweaking my brain chemistry shamanically, to add depth and detail to my recall. But that’s another story.

  
  

  This blog starts with the story Pidney was telling me when she came in and jumped up on the bed while Mr. X and I were conferring over the design flaws in his latest surgical instrument.

  
  

  Pidney is a black and white cat, a formally-attired cousin of Bustifer Jones in White Spats. Her name was Penny when Mark left these three cats with us here in his trailer in ’98. I changed it to Pidney to honor her when she gave me the key to diagnosing a kidney stone that was referring pain into my hip and masquerading as arthritis. I washed out the stone, finally, and with higher regard for Miss Pidney, whom I already held in very high regard before that.

  
  

  Pidney is a “dog’s cat”. Leroy is Mark’s dog, a black wolf/alsatian hybrid. When he lived in this trailer with Mark, and for the half year he lived here with us before Mark came back for him, his den was the space under a table in the corner. Pidney would curl up in there with him to sleep. When one of them came in from outdoors, they would greet each other with nuzzling and head-butting. When Leroy left with Mark, Pidney spent a lot of time in the old den. She missed him, and told us so. She is the mouthiest of these three cats, almost as much as the average siamese. When we got Koji, she was the first of the three cats to accept the puppy, and now she and Koji sleep in a pile with me, on my bed.

  
  

  Pidney is the only one of these three cats who will open the door for herself.  It doesn’t latch, but in some seasons it does stick.  Then I know that Pidney wants in when I hear her throwing her little body against the door.  Granny meows for a human to open the door and Muffin scratches.  Pidney pushes it open, comes in and meows for someone to close it.

  
  

  Pidney is the most avid predator of these cats. If I leave an unscreened window open, all three cats come and go that way, but Pidney is the only one who comes in carrying prey. I know the nasal sound of her triumphant muffled full-mouthed cries as she brings it in to release and play with for our entertainment. I also recognize her boasting song when she has succesffully slain and eaten some vole, lemming, or chickadee out there. And I’m quite familiar with the agitated complaints, and the body language that demands comforting strokes, with which she interrupted our conversation today. This means she tackled some parka squirrel or arctic hare and got at least her ego hurt. I see no physical wounds.

  
  

  Grammy Mousebreath, usually just called Granny or Grams but originally named Sassy by Mark, and also known around here as Meatloaf, Boss, or Sassafrass the Dancing Cat, got hurt by something she tried to prey on, or else she tangled successfully with some larger predator. It was the first winter we housesat here, and I was anxious lest one of Mark’s precious cats would expire on my watch, as well as having a lot of affection for the Catriarch myself.

  
  

  Granny is the protofaluter. Mark had her and her four kittens when we met him. The tom cat of Sassy’s first litter, Tux, looked a lot like Pidney does, and appears to have sired a line of formally-dressed offspring in the local feral colony before he disappeared around the same time Mr. Bill across the highway saw a lynx catch a black cat in his front yard. Besides Tux, Pidney, and Muffin, that litter produced the queen Mark named Fancyface. She, Granny and Muffin all have calico patterns, and the pattern on Fancy’s face was… “busy”, I guess, is a good way to describe it: intricate and high-contrast.

  
  

  When we first saw them, Mark said all four females had been in heat and he expected kittens in a couple of months. He really wanted to get rid of one or two of the pregnant females. We told him we’d been seeing some physical defects among the feral cats at our place across the road and would like to take one of them over there to diversify the genepool. He chose Fancyface for that. He said she was the smartest one.

  
  

  She was so smart, she was the first one to find a way to the roof for the other cats to follow. She was the one who climbed the TV antenna and brought it down through the big living room window here. At our house, she made the indoors hers and held her own among the feral cats when she ventured outdoors. When the lights went out at night, she patrolled the house. She would hop up on each bed and stride up the primate under the covers, from leg to chest, touch the end of her nose to the human nose, turn around and go on to the next bed, and when the bed checks were done, she’d usually settle at the foot of my bed, on the corner of the loft over the woodstove, where she kept an eye on the main room of our house, actually a wannigan parked beside our little trailer.

  
  

  Fancy and I bonded during her first traumatic nights in our house. She liked to be underfoot while I cooked. When I would clean the cast iron skillet with a scrape and a rinse, I would pour the soup over her kibble and she started taking up her station between my ankles and crying for “soup” every time I was at the stove. She came to me when her labor started. As I walked through the house, gathering towels for her nest, she followed, whacking at my calves and biting at my ankles as if to hurry me, or punish me for her discomfort. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but she was mad at the world for a while, until her three kittens were born.

  
  

  That first litter of hers was one of very few to have been born indoors during Doug’s lifetime. Most of the kittens he has sold in his career as the Kitten Kid of the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival came from the nests of feral kittens he sought out outdoors and hand tamed. This time both of us enjoyed having kittens in the house, and they were special kittens. They were so special we called them, collectively, the Faluters. With this, her first litter, Fancy proved herself a good mother.

  
  

  Like a wild mother, she preyed for her young. When they were almost ready to leave the nest, she jumped up onto a cutting board where I had left an open can of cat food, grasped it by the edge of the plastic lid, jumped back down and carried it to the nest. In admiration, I took the lid off for her, but I have no doubt that she could have easily destroyed it if I hadn’t. Fancy had one more litter of Faluters before she too disappeared about the same time Tux did, when there were so many lynx sightings in the neighborhood. One member of her first litter became my all-time favorite cat, the feline love of my life.

  
  

  His name was Webley Vickers Mauser. At first, on the occasion of the initial kitten tagging, while they were still moist with amniotic fluid, he was called, Whistle. They were Bell, Whistle, and Faluter. When they dried out and we could determine gender and get to know their personalities, they all got new names. Bell, an orange tom, became Bill. The name Faluter became generic for the whole tribe, and the lone female in that first litter was named Kenna to honor Terence McKenna, my hero.

  
  

  Doug tagged the tom cat of my heart Mauser because of his gunmetal gray fur, which turned out to be all undercoat. As he grew, black guard hairs came in and he was another Bustifer Jones. He was fat, too, during his adolescence. I added the Webley-Vickers reference just for fun, to go with the Mauser.

  
  

  He was a noser, even more that his mother or his Aunt Pidney, or his littermates Bill and Kenna, or any of the second litter of Faluters. He slept at the foot of my bed, too. He and Fancy flanked my feet, peering off the end of the loft in sphinx postures. He was my buddy, and my tyrannical boss. I don’t go out much. The first full day we were apart, a day I spent at the State Fair when he was nearly grown, he must have gotten annoyed with me for leaving him. Upon returning, as I was headed to turn on a light, he jumped up onto a table and went up on his hind legs to take a swipe at my cheek. Then he started the nosing and head-butting and purring. We grokked each other in fullness. I miss him.

  
  

  But now I have Pidney and Granny and Muffin. Granny recovered from her wound, with my help. The first time I doctored her wound, I had to restrain her in a towel, but after that she would come over to me, roll over and raise her chin to expose the wounded throat so I could clean it and apply vitamin E oil. It has long been healed but sometimes she still comes up, puts her head in my lap and rolls over to show me her throat so I can rub it and celebrate our bond.

  
  

  Muffin is “Greyfox’s cat”. Pidney picked me as her human, Granny favors Doug, and the cat that was Mark’s favorite, whom he called Prissy, treats the old fart as furniture. Greyfox named her Muffin because he could not keep Sassy and Prissy straight. He called them Meatloaf and Muffin interchangeably and collectively. By the time he learned to discriminate between them, the blonde had become Muffin and the Catriarch had become Madame Mousebref.

  
  

  When we had a little ceiling fire here from a woodstove gone wild, as soon as we opened the door to let out the smoke, Granny and Pidney were gone. Muffin hid under the bed. She does not go after prey, but she will stalk the wily lunchmeat if there is a sandwich around. She loves to find a glass of milk on an end table. She dips her paw daintily into it and then licks it neatly off. She will walk up and eat from the plate on my lap, but when Pidney brings in some live thing, she doesn’t seem to notice. When Pidney tires of playing with her prey and lets it get away under some furniture, Grammy is the one who tracks it down days later and eats it. Muffin is more prey than predator in her behavior. Long after Grammy has exerted her dominance over Koji and Pidney has befriended him, Muffin hesitates to enter the door if he is near, and she will sometimes run from him, triggering his predatory reflexes. Blonde, I say.

  
  

  Mark had all three of these cats spayed after Granny had her second litter and the two sister kittens had kittens of their own. Pidney gave birth to hers in the same nest with Granny’s and the two of them shared maternal duties. Muffin had hers in a dish cupboard and abandoned them. Hearing the cries, Granny tracked them down and carried them to the communal nest, then, according to Mark, she tracked down Prissy and beat her up.

  
  

  Doug took all three of those litters to the Bluegrass Festival. Only one kitten came back with us. He could have sold D’Artagnan, the Fourth Faluter, several times over, but he decided to keep him. That little tuxedo-clad cat, probably from the cupboard litter of Muffin’s but possibly from Pidney’s litter, is now the last survivor of the original Faluters in the feral colony across the highway. Bill and Kenna and Fancy and Webley and the whole of the second litter have gone up the food chain. The offspring of that line, however, has enriched, beautified, and made the whole colony healthier. Faluters forever!

  • 7:35 pm
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