A bit more than a year ago, Darkly got a puppy. Tragically, it had a congenital disorder and had to be put to sleep after just a few months.
The house felt incredibly empty afterwards, but neither of us thought it would be a good idea to try another puppy. So we went for the easy option: Cats.
I’ve never lived with a cat before. To be honest, I always found them a kind of pointless pet when I saw other people’s: They were rarely home, preferring to be out & about; when they were home, they didn’t really interact much – they were basically either absent or aloof. I didn’t see the point. But Darkly had had several, and since it seemed kinder to have two kittens keeping each other company while we were at work, it seemed to make sense that we’d get one each.
I basically looked at this as paying half the costs for the two kittens, as I had no real interest in owning one. We went to a local rescue center to make our choices.
Darkly, true to her goth nature, found a litter of black cats, and fell in love with one of them, which purred nonstop whilst we were there.
I almost just picked one of the other black litter at random as my choice, but then I came across a cage that wasn’t quite as empty as I’d originally thought: There was a tiny little calico kitten hiding in it.
I went in to say hello, and she was clearly a little unhappy about this, as she glanced wildly around the cage looking for an escape route. She opted to try and climb the highest thing in the cage to try to get away from me, a plan with the slight drawback that as she neared the top, she came nose to nose with my rather amused face as she stood on my shoulder.
She made a strange little noise as this point, not a usual kitten ‘meep’ but more of a squawk – she just opened her mouth wide and forced an ‘ak!’ sound out. This seemed very cute. The staff member who’d been showing us around came over at this point, and said “That’s unusual, she normally just runs away”. Darkly, who knows me fairly well, just said “You want that one, then?”
So we’d both found our kittens, and requested they be put in the same cage until we could collect them, to make sure they wouldn’t fight. The next day we were informed that they weren’t fighting, but were basically just ignoring each other. That was good enough, we figured. We were also told their histories at that point: The black kittens had been brought in by their mother’s owner, who just hadn’t been able to cope with them all. So they’d gone from a house to a rescue center with all their siblings around, no real trauma. My little furball, on the other hand, had been found on the streets, half-dead from hunger, thirst, and parasites. I was warned that she was likely to be very standoffish and antisocial, but since this was what I expect of any cat, I didn’t really have any problems with this.
Since I wasn’t all that excited by the prospect of kittens, I didn’t feel any need to be in on the collection run – Darkly went and got them in the afternoon a few hours before I got back. When I came in, I saw her little black beast prowling around, but not mine. Upon asking, I was told that.. let’s call her “Sooty”.. Sooty had come out of the carry-case, looked around, seen there was food, water, a litter tray, and a huge amount more space than she’d had in the cage, and given a kind of “Yes, this’ll do” look. Since when she’d been investigating the room nonstop.
Mine, on the other hand.. we shall call her “Squeaky”. Squeaky had come out of the case, looked around, panicked, and run into a corner to hide under the low table. Where she’d stayed ever since.
I don’t know cats, but I do know enough psychology to know that dragging her out of her hidey-hole would have been a very bad idea. But she couldn’t stay there forever. So I ducked my head under the table, said “Hello” to her, and then caught hold of Sooty on her way past and sat stroking her. She purrs quite loudly, and after a little while, Squeaky figured that it might be safe for a little kitten to come near one of these big pink blobs after all. She crept out tentatively and I put Sooty down to pick up Squeaky instead. Sooty trotted off cheerfully to investigate another part of the room and Squeaky sat on my lap for a while and got stroked.
This was the basic formula for the next few days: Squeaky would hide until Sooty and I convinced her it was safe, then she’d come out and get fussed over. The house is fairly quiet, what with both of us going out to work all day and not doing anything loud when we’re home. So Squeaky had plenty of quiet time to relax and learn to feel safe in her new home, never got pestered when she was hiding, and always got welcomed when she came out.
Our initial concerns about the two kits getting on together went away very quickly – they both approved of being moved to a big room with sofas and cushions and windows. Squeaky had been all alone in her cage and seemed glad of some company; Sooty had been surrounded constantly by a multitude of brothers and sisters, and seemed glad of the solitude. We came down after their first night here and they were both fast asleep on an armchair, tangled up together and completely dead to the world.
The fact that they were so different personality-wise undoubtedly was a big help: Sooty is a ‘proper’ cat – the whole world belongs to her, everything in it is her servant, and she liked perching on the top of the armchair where she could survey her realm in comfort. Squeaky is not a proper cat. Territorial, dignified, aloof, graceful, stealthy… these are just a few of the words she has absolutely no idea what the meanings of are. It’s become a standing joke that there’s an elephant hiding upstairs that Squeaky hunts, because she thumps around so much sometimes you just can’t believe that a cat could make so much noise.
So Sooty had no worries about territorial disputes as far as Squeaky was concerned – Squeaky just doesn’t have that kind of instinct. She wasn’t so sure about us tho – we seemed friendly enough, and supplied her food and cleaned up after her and all, but she was still a little wary that we were much bigger than her and might be a threat to her if she wasn’t careful.
This lasted until a few weeks after she arrived, when she fell ill – nothing major, just the equivalent of the kind of cold that makes a human spend a day or two in bed. But Sooty was too young to know how to cope with being unwell, and hadn’t quite learned about things like eating to keep her strength up, or drinking to fend off dehydration. So she was very weak and tired, and in that “I don’t feel well, why can’t the world just leave me alone” state you may have experienced yourself when ill.
The illness itself was minor, but Sooty being unaware that she needed to drink was a real concern – she wouldn’t get up on her own, and even carrying her to her water bowl just made her squeak plaintively until we left her alone. We couldn’t make her understand that we were trying to help or that she needed to drink: she thought we were taking advantage of her weakness and were taking over her territory.
Darkly finally resorted to the slightly drastic measure of filling a small syringe with kitten milk and injecting it into Sooty’s mouth. After a few resentful yowls about being poked in the face with a plastic tube, Sooty realised there was tasty fluid coming out and that drinking it made her feel a lot better: She lapped up the milk and after a few more doses was strong enough to drink from a bowl again.
She made a full recovery a day or two later, and all the tension that had been there before the illness was gone – discovering that she didn’t need to defend her home from us because all we did when she was ill was help her get better made her realise that she didn’t have to worry about us being around.
Squeaky, though, continued to have a certain amount of nervousness – she didn’t see the house as her territory like Sooty did. Rather, she was insecure – she had a lingering fear that we might throw her out if she misbehaved, always running and hiding if she had any worry that she’d done something wrong.
There wasn’t much we could do about that except wait for her to realise that we wouldn’t do that.
So, fast-forward a few months, and where are we today?
Well, the kits are no longer restricted to one big room – they have the run of the house and the outside world. Sooty roams the neighbourhood and picks fights with the other cats. Squeaky is quite fond of the garden, but won’t leave it – occasionally she glances over the neighbours’ fences, but never takes more than a few steps into their gardens before running home.
Sooty likes her home and is never gone for more than a few hours, but it’s not big enough for her to live in. Home is Squeaky’s entire world and she has no desire to leave it.
Sooty is fond of her humans and doesn’t mind guests dropping in: She’ll come and say hello, sit in laps, rub against legs, etc. Squeaky doesn’t really approve of any humans other than the two of us, and hides whenever other people come around. She’s completely fine with Darkly. But I’m a little different..
When I take a shower in the mornings, she goes into my room and waits on my bed until I come out and give her a cuddle as I get dressed. When I go to bed at night, she sneaks up and demands cuddles before she gets put to bed downstairs. And if I’m late home, or if I go out without her knowing about it, she cries.
I swear I’m not making this up – it drives Darkly nuts. Squeaky walks around the house looking for me and squeaks nonstop until I come home. And she does this without fail, every single time. I actually have to tell her I’m going out if I don’t want her to drive Darkly crazy.
Darkly used to warn me that I was about to get my hand clawed off for what I was doing when I was playing with Squeaky – I’d pick her up and swing her around the room (to prove that we had enough room to swing a cat), or hold her upside down to rub her tummy, or some such. She’s long since given up on this, and instead just shakes her head in disbelief at what I can get away with with Squeaky.
Squeaky has huge eyes, giving her a perpetually-startled look, and it’s a standing joke that she doesn’t have a brain: she just has a head full of loose wires that short-circuit so much that her head is full of a sparks. Every now and again, Squeaky just sits and stares wide-eyed at nothing, and this is labelled as her watching the fireworks that she has in place of thoughts. Her behaviour is so atypical of cats, being more like a cross between a kitten and a puppy, that it’s easy to joke about her being completely daft.
But she’s actually very intelligent – she figured out how to open doors months ago, something Sooty still can’t do, and how to get behind the curtains in my room, and various other things. She learns very fast when she wants to.
She’s actually brought home as many mice as Sooty has, despite never leaving our mouse-free garden. And she has an uncanny knack of finding rubber bands, even though Darkly and I are both certain that we’ve never brought any into the house.
I’ve said before that I have a hard time getting angry – I can count of the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been truly angry in my life. I discovered one thing that does the trick tho, courtesy of Squeaky. The other cats in the neighbourhood tend to bully our two, who are still a way from being fully grown. Sooty, I’m under no illusions, thoroughly deserves it – she goes into other cats’ gardens, eats their food, and generally pushes her luck to the breaking point. I don’t blame them for making her have to dash for home when they catch her.
Squeaky, on the other hand, is completely un-aggressive and never leaves our garden. Other cats coming in to our garden in order to chase her into the house are just bullying, pure and simple. So any offenders get a faceful of water and chased out of the garden.
But there was one time when I heard a plaintive little squeak from outside and looked out to see one of the big cats had put itself BETWEEN Squeaky and the house, and was now stalking towards her menacingly as she backed away.
I imagine that this cat still wonders just how everything went so suddenly wrong, because two seconds after the helpless little kitten voiced its distress, there was a human coming up on it from the house behind it and a vengeful black kitten had warped from wherever it had been prowling and was on the fence above the little calico preparing to show this cat the meaning of the phrase “death from above”
The cat managed to exit stage right in an amazing adrenaline-fuelled leap and has left Squeaky very firmly alone ever since. I sat out in the garden for a little while until the kits had both calmed down, then went back in to get a slightly strange look from Darkly: She’d never actually seen me angry before.
Oh well, I suppose we all have our triggers – I can’t say I’m too bothered to learn that one thing that’ll move me to anger is something falling foul of my very wide protective streak.
So as they near leaving their kittenhood, our two small fuzzies have very definitely been shaped by their experiences & owners. Sooty is an independent hunter who enjoys coming back for company and affection from time to time. Squeaky is a gentle­ but incredibly affectionate little creature with no desire to be anywhere but at home with her owner.
When we first got them, I thought that if I were to move out, they’d both stay with Darkly – I wouldn’t really miss having a cat, and Squeaky would be happier staying in the home she grew up in with the companion cat she’d grown up with.
Less than a year later, and I must admit that I’ve changed my mind: If I do move out, Squeaky would have to come with me. I’d miss her if she weren’t there, and she’d be devastated if I stopped coming home.
I’m still not a cat person – I maintain that I can’t understand what most people get out of owning their cats. But Squeaky’s not a typical cat, she’s very much mine, and we’d both be unhappy to be separated.
I took a picture the other day. See what I have to put up with?
Awww….they are such pretty girls. My Colt is a bit like Squeaky…he thunders like a horse, sits for treats, jumps at loud noises, and frequently follows us around like a dog. We have to tell him we’re leaving or he sits in the window and cries at us. He is also at least part Manx (the lack of a tail is a dead giveaway) and has a lot of their characteristics…you might do some googling to see if perhaps Squeaky could be as well. Some Manx or part Manx cats do have tails. And Colt just grunted in his sleep…..
Weird.. I never got any alert about comments being left.. that’s annoying..
Colt does indeed sound a lot like Squeaky. She’s got a very short tail.. I might have to look up Manx..