Thorn and Rose (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge and New Cat #3)

Squirrels and Oaks go together—and Cats, not so much!

Our new cat Sherbet is fascinated with the life in the heritage oak tree outside the window of her staging room. We have set her up with a "kitty TV," a window opened a tiny crack to allow the full outdoor sensorium to enter, with a wide, cushioned ledge at the level of the sash for her to perch on. She spends hours there, watching the birds and squirrels intently.

Remember, this is the new cat that "needs" to be outdoors—yet she is perfectly content with her window on the world. Two days ago, my spouse was doing some gardening on the hillside below her room. She watched every move. The hard metallic chirps of the California towhees sound just like one of her toys. She watches, alert, as the birds flit from the deck to an over-hanging branch, then she will go and drub the toy, which she can reach.

The first day in her new house, she was terrified of the sound the squirrels made as they jumped from the over-hanging oak limbs to the roof over her head.

It wasn't until she began "following" the distinctive sound of their walk, jumping up to the "TV" window just in time to see them leap across to the tree-trunk, that her tension began to ease. For Sherbet, the squirrels and towhees became part of her new environment, just like my spouse and me, her new toys, and the scents of our other cats.

Charli Mills has been promising (or threatening) a "squirrel prompt" for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge, and this week, she made good:

May 18, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that features a squirrel. It can be about a squirrel, for a squirrel or by a squirrel. Think nutty, naturalistic, dinner or ironic. Go where the prompt leads and don’t forget to twirl with imagination.

Squirrels running across the roof used to wake my late father-in-law, Ben, whose bedroom now serves as our guest room-slash-cat staging room. It was Ben who described the squirrel's walk with a line from an early-1900s child's chant: "The squirrel runs lipperty-lipperty-lip." I borrowed his experience to describe the elderly Rose in my flash fiction, and her similar problem with the squirrels.

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Thorn and Rose

Rose tsked in irritation as the squirrel-tail flirted against her window. 

He skittered along the eave over her window, with the "lipperty-lip" footsteps that identified his kind—vision wasn't sharp anymore, but nothing was wrong with her hearing. Rose tsked again, and that thorn-in-her-side squirrel chittered back. His fluffy tail metronomed as he gathered himself to launch across to the adjacent oak.

Rose spotted the target of his squirrel-talk: a female. Frisking squirrels in spring promised a new generation of Thorns to wake her. 

Sighing, Rose curled her tail over her pink nose, and sank back into her morning catnap.

Noticing Behavior Triggers (New Cat #2)

Cat bites are not really this cute. via Kawaii

Job one for us this week is to start learning the trigger cues for our new cat, Sherbet. 

We were informed when we adopted her that she is a biting cat; she gets over-stimulated and Wham! Here come the teeth. (We saw a little of this behavior with Eva, one of the shelter staff, during our introduction.) The kitty wears an orange collar, which shelter staff use to signal volunteers that a cat bites. We were early adopters of the Kitty Convict initiative. Indoor kitties, our cats all have worn orange collars. So we found it ironic that Sherbet was returned from a previous adoption because she wouldn't stay indoors, yet still wound up in an orange collar anyway!

At our house, we had the back room, a guest room-slash-lumber room, set up for our new kitty. This room has served to stage cat introductions before. Years ago, when we brought home a shelter cat with three legs into an existing two-cat household, Pounce stayed for a week in this back area, gradually getting used to the smells of the other cats.

The door of the room has a good inch of clearance, as well, so cats can play patty-cake on either side of a solid barrier before meeting face-to-face. But that's for the future. Today, the crucial factor is the presence of a futon-bed sofa and two papa-san chairs, a cat tower, floor-to-ceiling windows, and lots of play area and spooky shadows to explore.

We sit on the sofa or one of the chairs, reading (or in the case of my spouse, doing needlepoint), and let her explore around us. The plan is to allow her to do "self-petting" only, stropping under hands or against shins, until she is a bit more comfortable. Even so, she was in the room only 2 hours before I received a bite.

It's obviously a warning nip: it barely breaks the skin. I wasn't petting her, but I was reaching down to pick something up from the floor. 

This morning, playing with Sherbet in the crepuscular light cats prefer for hunts, she eventually tires enough to recline on the sofa next to me, purring steadily as I read my Kindle. Encouraged, I lay my hand, palm down, on the sofa near her head. I get a quick warning lip-nip (no teeth), and she's on the floor, tail twitching.

She pounces on a shoelace cat-toy coiled there, claws at it and chews for a bit, then strolls back to strop against my shin. I get the message.

Sherbet has a thing about hands. In fact, I deduce it is fingers that set her off; a fist next to her face is an invitation to rub her chin and jowls. But uncoil even a pinky from the fist, and her tail begins twitching again.

Next up: A stroll outside? For an outdoor kitty to be safe in our wild-adjacent neighborhood, she needs an escort. And a harness.

How to Derail Your Life (New Cat #1)

Sisu on the stair-rail in 2014

The sadness of losing a cat companion—our Sisu was put to sleep following sudden renal failure on Saturday, May 7th—has only one cure. It's not a replacement cat, either, but an entirely new, different challenge of cat rescue.

We called Sisu our "sofa cushion kitty." Long before he reached cat maturity, he wanted to sleep more than any other cat we've had, preferably somewhere near us. My spouse's lap was his favorite, but absent that preferred site, he would drape himself across the back of the sofa behind me, stretch out a long foreleg, and rest one paw delicately against my neck. His illness came on lightning-fast, and by the time I realized it, he was gone.

Of our trio of aging cats, this left only Pounce, our three-legged, formerly-feral cat. While she mostly ignored "the boys" when they were living, as they vanished she was obviously missing them. When Nimitz died last year, she called through the house for him for several days, and hissed at Sisu whenever he answered. She was looking for Nimitz. This last week, Pounce has been "grieving" in a similar way for Sisu. I know she doesn't quite know what is missing, but she does know something in her world has changed. And cats hate change!

After several days of Pounce's increasing neediness, we began to discuss a new cat. What did we want? We only knew what we did not want: neither a kitten, nor an older cat that would be leaving us too soon.

Sherbet has white mask and legs.

Yesterday, we made the rounds of the cat shelters. At the Sonoma Humane Society, we found a match: "Honey Girl" is a 2-year-old female who had already been returned to the shelter by a previous adopter. 

We knew she would be a challenge, and very different from our sedate cushion-kitty. She "needs" to be outside; our area has predators, including mountain lions, that make it very dangerous for outdoor cats. She needs lots of stimulation and "enhancement." This we can provide with a large house that she will have the run of, with lots of vertical spaces to climb and explore.

And she bites.

Yes, we took on a second kitty with over-stimulation issues. Pounce's feral behaviors have finally (mostly) disappeared, perhaps because we have learned her body language, figured out the clues that over-stimulation is imminent. I hope this new kitty, renamed "Sherbet" (or as my spouse calls her, soar-BEY), becomes more transparent to us over time, as we get to know her, and she settles in with us.

Liner Notes:

Yes, it is not "Sherbert"—that is a misspelling of the word.