Guest Cat


The guest cat who
came and stayed.

We have a guest cat. She's been living in the barn, on and off, since the summertime, when the barn became pretty much open to the elements full-time (if you know how to get in -- which a cat is very good at figuring out).

Meet "Guest Cat," otherwise known as Kitty --

I feel rather badly about calling her "Kitty," but until she gains a permanent human-name, we really don't want to call her anything else, as she may have a name we don't know about. Well, she does have a name we don't know about, but as Elliot reminds us, we'll never know her eff-eff-ineffable name. We are but humans.

She's made herself to home in the barn, the office in particular, and has presented us this afternoon with a dead shrew. She was quite polite and only chewed on the tail before leaving the corpse for us.

I guess we've been claimed.

My spouse has taken a printout of the above photo around to the neighbors, all of whom agree they've seen the cat for a while now, and some of them have been feeding her (no wonder she runs off at times when her crunchy bowl is empty in the barn!), but none can say she belongs to anyone in particular. Next steps will be to put her photo up at the downtown store, ask a bit further afield, and then if no one claims her in another week or so, I think we'll have to take her to the vet for her official checkup and shots and see what develops from there.

It may become interesting if she does stay and become non-guest cat -- I don't know if she'll take to being introduced to the other cats, and I certainly don't know if she'll take to becoming an indoor-only cat (which is what she'll have to be in order to integrate with the others). When we join the barn and house (see link to the right: "This Old Barn"), all the cats will have free range of both of the buildings, but they're not allowed outside. We have fox and fisher-cats, both of which think felines are yummy snacks.

In the meantime, the house cats think we are sluts. We smell like Guest Cat when we come in from the barn.

Mere humans, we remind them. We're mere humans.

Posted: Mon - December 8, 2003 at 07:44 PM        

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