Hallow's Eve

This is Teddy on Halloween. Again, there was a date imprinted on the lower right but I (hopefully) removed it in GIMP.

My summer and the last few months (2008) have been obsessed with Teddy and his momma Quincey, and now, I think, is the time to share their story.

One of our neighbors, "Anne", had recently gotten re-married and she and her new husband decided they weren't having children together since there were already children from previous marriages, so instead they adopted a brother-and-sister pair of kittens from the Humane Society as their "kids" together. Their children named the cats Sam and Quincey.

Not many months later, Anne was unexpectedly pregnant and things weren't going so well for the newly weds; they were separated and working on a divorce. Originally, Sam and Quincey were indoor cats, but now that Anne was pregnant and could no longer deal with cat litter (see toxoplasma) and knew her 10 year old son wouldn't take care of the cats on his own, she put the cats outside, which wouldn't have been a problem except that Quincey wasn't spayed due to financial and time issues.

Anyway, she and Sam started hanging around our house since we had food out for our stray tom, Rumtumtugger. We fed them so they'd leave our shy Rumtum alone while he ate. By June, Quincey was eating almost exclusively at our house and being a general hanger-on (since at least three un-neutered tom cats live near our house: Rumtumtugger, Sam, and the neighborhood cat, Tiger). At this point, Quincey was approximately a year old and still not spayed, so 1 +1 = 2 quite literally, and, of course, with three virile males around she got pregnant.

On June 28, I was outside trimming azalea bushes with a chainsaw when Quincey came over to say "Hey, I've had my kittens; wanna come see?" She'd rub on me and follow me around everywhere; I could see that she'd had the kittens because she was smaller and hadn't cleaned herself up all the way, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out where she'd had them because she acted like she'd forgotten where she put them and was asking me to show her. For a couple hours she hung around the house and I was starting to get concerned for the kittens, so I went outside with her to see if I could find them. When I was near the end of our driveway, I heard a small cry that might have been a kitten's coming from across the street, so that's where Quincey and I went. There was a company trimming trees in the yard of the house diagonal to us and making a lot of noise or I probably would have heard the kitten-cry earlier. I had heard an odd noise previously, but had thought it was just parts of their machinery squealing.

Once Quincey heard the mewling she ran to where she'd left her kittens and I followed her there. She'd given birth in a placed tucked up by the front porch of our across-the-street-neighbor's house. That neighbor, Ms. D, had just recently been moved to a nursing home due to hip injuries, etc, so the house and lot was vacant. There were three kittens curled up in Quincey's little pine straw nest. One kitten was a tortoiseshell, one was a calico, and the other was a black and white tuxedo. Unfortunately, Quincey picked a lousy spot to have her kittens because the sun shone directly on that place in the middle of the afternoon, and I could tell the place was getting over-heated because even Quincey was panting in the sun, plus it was really hot that day. So, I went and got my mom and brother to come out there to help move the kittens into some shade, but Quincey was an anxious mother and wasn't having any of that. She kept moving them back from where we moved them. I told my mom we needed to move them all inside, into some air-conditioning because it was just too hot, but my mom didn't want to mess with them, insisting quite emphatically, "They're not our cats!" So, to help them as much as we could without taking them into our house, we put a carrier out there in the place Quincey had picked so there'd be some shade and we put some straw and leaves in there that smelled like them so she would settle down, which she did. But it was still too hot and when I went out to check on them the tortie-girl was at the back of the carrier, not moving. I took her out and rubbed her a little, hoping that she'd revive a little to nurse, which she did too briefly, but it was already too late; she was cold despite the heat and she died cupped in my hand. I took her in to show my mom, but she did nothing, just more of the same. "It's sad, but, oh well, they're not our cats." She called Quincey's owner, Anne, and told her what was going on, but she wasn't there so Mom left a message for Anne to come pick up her cats. And them we left them alone.

An hour or so later my mom went out to check on Quincey and discovered the incredibly cute calico floundering because of the heat. She was going the same way as her sister. Mom rushed both the kittens inside, locked Quincey outside because she kept trying to move them back to the nest, and Mom and my brother Daniel drove to Bi-lo to pick up some kitten formula to feed the calico because she was dehydrated from being too hot and weak to nurse, but they weren't quick enough and, again, one of Quincey's kittens died in my keeping. They weren't even a day old, barely even half a day. There was barely a day that went by afterwards as we were taking care of Quincey and her remaining kitten that my mom didn't think about the others and how different things would have been if we'd taken responsibility for them like we should have and brought them into our home so they would have survived.

We moved both Quincey and her sole surviving kitten to our house inside the carrier and set them in the living room by the front door. I stayed with Quincey, petting and calming her whenever she'd get anxious and try to take her baby outside again. Eventually, she forsook the carrier and just stayed in my lap for hours as she nursed and cleaned her kitten and they both slept. My legs fell asleep, but I didn't move; I owed her that much and more for not standing up to my mother and doing what I knew need to be done for her and her kittens.

My mom and my stepdad Doug didn't want to have Quincey stay in the house overnight because we didn't really have a way of containing them and we'd just gotten new furniture that Doug didn't want clawed up or climbed upon, so we moved Quincey and the carrier outside beneath our bay window in the shade, hoping she'd recognize the carrier as her new nest and stay there overnight, but she didn't. She moved her kitten, then came back and acted like she didn't know where he was, just like before so we went out looking for him but never could find him. I suspected he was in the concrete drain pipe under our Ms. D's driveway, but our flashlight beams didn't find him, so we just went back to the house and figured what was done was done. God had given his creatures enough sense to survive on their own til now; surely, He'd bestowed Quincey with some of that knowledge, at least enough to remember where she'd put her own--and only--child. We all seriously wondered if that was true because of the way Quincey was acting, but it turned out she knew exactly where her baby was, she just wanted to see if we did, wanted to show us so we knew, but we were real slow on the uptake.

I found him the next day, when Quincey showed me where he was (basically, I sat by the pipe until I hear mewing and Quincey decided to go in to nurse, so I knew that's where she'd put him). We would have moved the both back inside but she'd place him right in the middle of the pipe which was too long and too small for any of us to reach through. The flashlight's light didn't quite make it to the center, which was why we hadn't seem him in there the night before. Only a small, flexible animal like a cat could have gotten in there, so it really was a very nice place. She kept him for a few days. Then one evening as I was sitting on the steps of the front stoop, she brought him back. I opened the screen door for her and she plopped the little tuxedo inside the carrier and settled in for the night. That became her habit for the next week or so. The kitten stayed in the carrier and she'd come inside to nurse and nap for several hours, then leave for a break, then come back and so forth. After ten pm, we'd close the doors and she'd stay out the rest of the night while the kitten slept and would come back in the morning for food and to take care of her baby.

This continued on for a week or so, during which Daniel and I secretly came up with a name for the kitten. We'd just been calling him "the kitten" previously because our parents were against getting attached to him (because, you know, once you name something it's yours whether you like it or not, apparently). Plus, Mom was still trying to get Anne to take them back, but she and her family were on vacation in Disney for that week and she said she'd get them afterwards (at least, I think that's what week it was; time gets a little bleary after a while). Anyway, Daniel had rented Alvin and the Chipmunks from Family Video and we were watching that and notice the extreme resemblance of our kitten to Theodore the Chipmunk. They were both cute little fat round things with short noses and smushed in faces and small bear-like ears; it was uncanny. So Daniel and I decided the kitten's name would be Theodore, but we'd call him Teddy for short because he also resembled a teddy bear and Theodore is a long name to saddle on such a small kitten. We kept our secret for several weeks til Daniel let it leak to some church friends who then leaked it to the parents who's reaction was somewhere between surprise, consternation, indignation, and amusement. Doug had been referring to him as Milkface or Milkyface (because of the white on his mouth and nose), which indicated a softening of the heart towards "those cats," but "Teddy" seemed to stick very well and it wasn't long before that was simply his name and even Doug and Mom fell into using it without much thought or resistance.

Now, somewhere between all that, Quincey moved Teddy two more times. Once she hid him behind Ms. D's bushes by her porch (but only for a day), and the second time she hid him in Ms. D's tool shed for approximately a week, maybe a little more. That was an interesting thing to watch. The only entrance to the shed was a small glass-less window about three and a half feet off the ground on the side of the shed and Quincey jumped straight up and hauled both herself and Teddy through the window and hid him at the bottom of the shed in a clear space between some rakes and beneath some stacked boxes and things. I remember this was a few days before Teddy was due to open his eyes. The tool shed was dead-bolted and there was no other entrance other than the window, which, again, only a creature like a cat could get to. Ms. D wasn't there to open the shed since she was in the hospital or nursing home at the time and her brother was staying with her and wasn't due to come back to the house soon, so we couldn't do anything about the cats being in the shed so we let them stay there for a while til we figured Teddy was too big for Quincey to take out of the shed even if she tried (he was almost too big for her to carry over there in the first place; I'd mentioned he was a fat little thing). Eventually, we got permission from Ms. D to cut the dead-bolt and replace it with another one, so that's what we did (it was a nasty, stormy day, I remember) and we moved both Quincey and Teddy back inside. His eyes were just newly opened at his point and he was making attempts at wobble-walking around. He and Quincey were getting to big and mobile for the carrier so we set up a kennel for them. One of our cats who had died the summer before had a kennel that we kept her in at night because she peed on things occasionally (she and our other cat didn't get along and were somewhat territorial) and we had new laminate in the dinning room that warps when it gets wet, so we set up that kennel for Quincey and Teddy. It took a few days for Quincey to get used to it but she did, eventually. The first few night she flipped over her food and litter and meowed half the night. She was still pretty consistent about meowing loudly if we didn't let her out early enough in the morning.

He and Quincey stayed inside the house, living right at the front door for a long time. Originally, Doug didn't allow them on the carpet (our foyer has wood floor) but he relaxed the rule a little because Quincey is an obnoxious rule-breaker and just too curious to stay where she's supposed to. Occasionally, she'd sneak out of the living room and down the hallway into my room and I can't say I didn't encourage that but, well...*shrug* Somehow, kitties always know where my room is; it's always been a favorite spot. The only thing Doug wouldn't tolerate was cats scratching the new furniture or being on it, which I having a feeling Quincey knew perfectly well because she was always trying to jump on the couches. But one day she pushed her luck too far and tried to used one of the couches as a scratching post right in front of Doug and that was the end of it. We either had to figure out another arrangement or the cats had to go outside. It was a mess but we figured something out almost by accident. We decided to set up a cat kennel in the kitchen away from scratch-able furniture and carpet and also where we could close off the living room and hallway doors so Quincey couldn't get into things.

And that's pretty much where they stayed until December 1st when they went to their new home with Ms. Rosemary. We'd had an add in the paper for months and had gotten a few calls, but most of the people were no-shows or only wanted Teddy, but we wanted Teddy and Quincey to go together. We'd gotten permission from Quincey's owner to give her and Teddy away because Anne couldn't take care of them and didn't have any interest in them. We'd also gotten Quincey fixed, and let me tell you, that month she had to stay inside afterwards was very interesting because she's definitely an inside-outside cat. Her and Teddy both love romping around and destroying things. They also love laundry baskets, even empty ones. Every time I'd come home from college with my laundry, the first thing they'd do was jump in the basket. When Teddy started teething, he gnawed through some of my socks and attacked my towels. I learned to put anything delicate at the bottom of the basket because sometimes he liked to burrow through the top layer or so. Teddy also got himself into some pretty interesting predicaments with our next-door neighbors' dog, King. King loves kitties...he loves to bark at them and he loves to eat them (and other small furry animals like opossums [fyi: he's never actually eaten a cat, but I'm pretty sure he would]). Quincey was raised with dogs, so she has no natural fear of them and often tried to show King up by going close to the fence and hissing at him (which never worked), but from that Teddy also developed a lack of respect for large, barking animals. Couple that with his love of climbing trees in other people's yards and you have Disaster-Waiting-to-Happen. But fortunately Teddy has lived to tell the tales of those adventures and maybe some day he'll learn not to pester dogs. Rosemary doesn't have any dogs nearby, so he's good on that account. Silly goober.

I really miss them, but I'm glad Teddy and Quincey are at a good, safe home now, and I'm sure they're having a blast being the lovely obnoxious, crazy kitties that they are; I just hope they're not too much for their new owner! ^___^