Kurtis Scaletta's Site

Lucy came meowing around last night, and wanted to be let in. Bertie has shown a kind of protective interest in Lucy, and greeted her at the window. We let her in for a couple of hours. Torii hissed a bit, but Bertie looked after her. Gilda barely noticed. When I opened the back door later in the evening, she hurried out past me, probably going back to her young.

When I saw here this morning, she looked at me plaintively. She looked heart-breakingly sad, and I began to wonder if her young were OK and still around. Well, why I’m usually content to speculate, my wife took action. She had been scouting the neighborhood and was certain that our next-door neighbor’s garage was where the kittens were. The 15-year-old who’s learning how to drive had an accident recently — something about going into drive instead of reverse (exactly the kind of boneheaded thing I’d do). The back wall of the garage is bowed a bit and has a hole. My wife thought the cat was getting in and out through the hole. She put her theory to the test by taking this squirrel trap we have. We have had anywhere between 2 and 5 squirrels living in our garage for as long as I can remember, and for a while I was trapping them and releasing them at a park across the river, but my interest in the project ran out before the squirrels did.

My wife put a tuna cracker in it and set it behind the neighbor’s garage. Within 20 minutes, we had ourselves a Pip!

“Well, I’ll go drop him off at the park,” I said. My wife didn’t think it was funny. We brought the kitten inside and mom followed. We now have both tabbies in the cat pen, which we set up in the basement, and are wondering what to do with them. By “wondering what to do,” I mean, of course, that they are probably ours, provided they get along with the other kitties.

We assumed there were more, but when we put the trap back out, we saw our neighbor. We hadn’t had good luck catching the neighbors at home during the work week, but we talked to the guy, Terry, and he told us the kittens had, in fact, been in their garage for weeks. He’d just waited for them to get big enough to take to the Humane Society, and had done so. Obviously he didn’t get all of them, but we expect the rest of the litter is there. They’ll be taken care of and given good homes. Meanwhile, we’re glad Lucy has one little Pip left. Pe is very cute. (Pe is a pronoun appropriate for a Pip, when said pip’s gender is undetermined.)