Miss Kitty

Who said that feral cats cannot be domesticated? One day in May, l996, a beautiful gray and white Angora cat with a full bushy tail made her appearance on my front lawn. As I approached she would move away, but not before I noticed that she had lost her left eye. She would not come near food until I was out of sight, and I realized her reluctance to come anywhere near me was because she was a feral cat who had never known a home or human touch. I longed for her to trust me enough to pet her and take a brush to her long fur, but that was never to be. She did not leave, and I named her "Miss Kitty" after the lovely lady on the TV show "Gunsmoke".

After a few months my neighbor, Ed Hammond, and I noticed Miss Kitty's bulging belly. She gave birth to four kittens in a secluded corner of Ed's carport. During Miss Kitty's absence one day, I noticed her babies lying on the cold concrete, so I ginerly picked up each one and placed them on a pillow. Big Mistake! Miss Kitty definitely did not appreciate anyone's touching her babies, so she picked up each one in her mouth and carried them across the street to a neighbor's yard. When they were big enough, Miss Kitty marched them back across the street to our yard.

What a joy and pleasure it was to observe the kittens at play - wrestling, pouncing on leaves blowing in the breeze, playfully tormenting crickets and other insects, and falling out of shrubbery after climbing up and not quite knowing how to get down. And what a caring, loving mother Miss Kitty turned out to be. She would not touch the food until after her kittens had finished eating, a practice that continued long after the kittens were grown.

Ed was determined to domesticate these cats. He placed a litter box in his bathroom, brought the kittens inside and closed the doors. Chaos followed. They howled, wanted the freedom of the outdoors, climbed the drapes, the screen doors, meanwhile inflicting scratch upon scratch upon poor Ed as he picked them up and petted them. Eventually a transformation took place, so much so that three of them slept on Ed's bed at night.

One of the cats is a handsome black male with green eyes, a white tuxedo front and four white paws; hence his name "Boots". These kittens were born with feral instincts and it was many months, thanks to Ed, before Boots would come inside, plop himself on the carpet and roll over so that I could rub his white belly, all the while purring loudly in sheer contentment - this after months of hissing at me. Today, twelve years later, Ed and his loving companion "Boots" live in Oklahoma.

Even before the domestication process began, we had all five cats "fixed". It was no easy task to entice them into a cage but finally they could not resist the salmon at the far end of the cage. Getting Miss Kitty to cooperate was another matter; she was too street smart to walk into a cage. It was not until after she mothered two more kittens that we were finally able to trick her. She tried desperately to escape, tearing at the cage and howling in panic all the way as I drove to the clinic.

Each afternoon would find Miss Kitty taking an afternoon nap in my back yard. On one such afternoon she again lay on the grass, except that this time, when I opened the door, she did not lift her head to see who was disturbing her siesta. An awful thought crossed my mind. My heart sank as I realized she had gone to Kitty Heaven.
She had been attacked by dogs during the night because the gas meter man had not locked the gate behind him.

I lined a new box with newspapers, a towel, and laid her rigid body inside. I covered her with another towel, placed the cover on her "kitty casket", and placed it into the gravesite I dug in the back yard. I covered the box with dirt, said a prayer, then planted red and white petunias on her grave. The following day I enclosed the gravesite with a white picket fence.

Miss Kitty, I miss you and I thank you for all the pleasure you and your babies brought to me during your brief life on this earth. May you rest in peace, my beautiful little friend.


Helen