And other animal adventures …
Jezebel the kitten has now achieved a whole three pounds, weight-wise. We have had begun weighing her on the bathroom scale, rather than the kitchen scale which only goes up to two pounds anyway. Of course, to us who see her constantly, she looks about the same as ever: a cute, small, immature feline, tortoise-shell in color and with eyes which still look sort of a muddy grey-shading-to-green. She is comfortable with the dogs, but still a little nervous when encountering the Lesser Weevil at ground level. Three pound kitten, seventy-pound boxer-pit mix – who would win that encounter? Given the size differential, I’d be nervous myself.
Otherwise she is bold to the point of being brash, friendly and affectionate to all humans. The instant she is picked up, she begins to purr like a small electric engine. She spends those evenings when Blondie is watching television, curled up on Blondie’s chest like a little cat-fur collar. We speculate that it is because she likes the sound of a human heart-beat. Perhaps it is as comfortable to other infant mammals as it is to babies, the sound of that heartbeat. She also has an enormously long tail, proportional to the rest of her – and with an endearing kink in the end. Why do certain cats have kinks in their tails – surely it wasn’t caused by an injury? We speculate that there may not have been room in the womb for all of Jezzie’s tail – sheer lack of space forced it into a slight bend.
She has formed, as expected, a comfortable bond with Percy. They were both detected last night, curled up comfortably together on a chair seat, while Percy washed her, with loving and careful attention to her ears. Well, we always have thought of him as our little gay hair-dresser cat. Sammy, the faded flame-point Siamese with the gammy leg has also been detected in a playful mood with her; rather like a crotchety old uncle deigning to pitch baseballs for the edification of the junior set. He does not do it with good grace or for very long, but these actions are promising. The other cats couldn’t care less – all stodgy dignity in the face of kitten impudence.
We did another dog-retrieval this weekend; this one considerably prolonged because of the holiday. The subject in question had a rabies-tag on the collar, but the clinic where it had been issued was closed over the long weekend. Our neighbor Judy captured him; a stray which made himself notable all along the street for his size – which was enormous – and his friendly demeanor – which was unmistakable to all, and the fact that no one recognized him. That’s the thing about neighborhoods; within a certain radius, everyone will recognize a familiar dog, especially a big one which most likely, has to be taken for walks. She couldn’t keep him at her house, her three cats would go absolutely ape-shit at being forced to share quarters with a very large dog. Not that any of ours would have been all that happy, just that they have become inured to it. Blondie thought at first that we could keep him in the back yard; he was a large, leggy dog with ears that stuck out like Yoda’s. He looked like a German shepherd mixed with generous lashings of Doberman and god knows what else. Just what you want to introduce to a houseful of other cats and dogs! We called him ‘Yoda’ or alternately ‘Big Boy’ – neither of us really wanted to prod his nether regions to see if he had been neutered or not, but that was unnecessary, for he turned out to be the original metrosexual dog. Terribly gentlemanly, affectionate, obedient and well-behaved – wussy, even. If he were a human, Madonna would never even consider dating him. As it turned out, he was terribly frightened of thunderstorms. One rolled in, on Saturday afternoon, and he plastered himself against the slider door and trembled so awfully that the whole end of the house shook. We relented and let him, holding our breath. Not to worry – everyone behaved themselves, although Jezzies’ tail swelled up like a bottle-brush and she shot all the way up the curtain in the den doorway to the top and sat there for I don’t know how long. He slept for two nights in the corner of my room, although the Spike was loudly indignant about this. Like a true gentleman, Yoda/Big Boy – whose real name turned out to be ‘Doofus’ restrained himself from slaughtering her. It turned out that he had run away from his home on Friday evening, after being so terrorized by the sound of fireworks that he took out a good chunk of the backyard fence in his haste to depart.
His owner had spent the whole weekend looking for him – but since the place where he lived was a subdivision a good way away up the Nacogdoches Road – without luck. Always nice to return a pet to its rightful person, especially when it’s a dog which has gone a considerable distance from where it was lost. The larger ones do that; the first year that we lived here, we retrieved an elderly golden lab named Tommy who had been missing for two weeks and from five miles away after being panicked by a thunderstorm. But we will have to go around tomorrow and tear down all the posters that we put up, in this neighborhood and the next one over. No way would I ever call the city pound for an animal that I have found, not when I know that they are for the gas within three days of being picked up.