Hello from Samantha! My human was not well this weekend. She felt feverish enough to try writing a post for me rather than writing a status update for herself.
She sat up with the computer as usual but she refused to come out and play, or pick up and stroke anybody, or bring anybody indoors (although it was damp and chilly on the porch).
She said "I owe people a long political post, five short guest posts, and a first chapter for a novel, the obligations having been incurred in that order, but first I have a fever to starve out."
She made a different sort of noises than usual: a lot of coughs, sneezes, sniffles, and growling at that little object humans talk to about “all the October yard work still to do and this weekend I have this stupid fever.”
The hot-air fan ran a lot. It wasn’t really cold. Other humans weren't cold. Only our human got any benefit from the hot-air fan, much as we cats wanted to use it to dry the damp out of our fur.
On weekends the human usually cooks something with chicken in it. We look forward to weekends all week while we eat our kibble. But this weekend our human did not cook at all.
“Do you want to go to the store?” said the object she holds up beside her head.
“I really ought to cash out that last Paypal payment,” said our human, “but cough! cough! COUGH cough cough...McDonald’s is so chilly and so crowded. I think I ought to starve the streppy-bugs before I go to the cafe on Tuesday.”
I looked. I did not see bugs, or beetles, or even ants in the office room where the human was coughing at the computer.
“Streppy-bugs are invisible,” said the human.
If she wants to play games, I suppose that is her business. Cats usually outgrow making up invisible enemies after we have kittens of our own. I don’t like baby humans so I suppose a little infantile game playing is the price of having a baby-free human.
“No, but they’re real,” said the human. “They are tiny real living creatures that float around on the air, and if you breathe them in, or lick them off your fur, they get down the back of your throat and bite. Mostly they bite babies. By the time they’re half grown most living creatures are immune to streppy-bugs, or streptococcal infections as doctors call them, but they can make adult humans cough if we are run-down, as it might be from seven or eight poisoning episodes in this neighborhood this summer. And once before your time, Samantha, I knew a cat called Iris—in your nicest moods you remind me of her—who had a streptococcal infection all winter long. She never completely recovered. She stopped growing.”
“Traveller and Serena and I all need to finish growing up,” I said. “Rub behind my ears, please.”
That's Serena sitting on top of my Safe Place, which she thinks is her Safe Place too, because she was born there. For a spring kitten, doesn't she look like a grown-up Queen Cat? The human says she's a carrier of a bad gene because she has a sturdy build and her tail is not so long that she has to carry it high or curled up all the time, as I do. Because she's Burr's daughter.
The human also says she got her good sense from Burr's mother Irene. She says Irene never was much of a hunter or outdoorsman, but she had the good sense to stay home, hunt as the team member inside the house, and bring up everyone else's kittens even from outside the family. She says Irene was sometimes too sweet and gentle for her own good, and Serena is sometimes too rough and tough, but both of them were clever enough to understand words, behave well, and almost never annoy her. She says Traveller and I annoy her constantly because we show enthusiasm about food, but she likes us anyway.
“Can’t you smell why I don’t want to pet you?” said the human. “Don’t I smell bad to you?”
She did, but humans always smell foul. Don’t take this personally. Other animals know you can’t help it. Your natural scent is nasty enough but then the things you add to it can be positively sickening. Traces of human scent on our fur interfere with our hunting.
This is why the cats you call feral don’t want to touch humans. It’s not that we’re afraid of you. Burr could slice the skin off a human in strips if he wanted to. It’s that even when we like you enough to put up with your odor, having your odor cling to us keeps us from catching enough prey animals to live on. House mice, like house cats, have made a decision to put up with human odor, but how many of them are there? To catch enough field mice and rabbits to get through the winter, Burr cannot afford to be fouled with human odor, even though he says the human is telling the truth about having stroked his back the morning he was born.
That's Burr, a few weeks after he was born. He's not let his picture be taken since but he still has the same patch of black on his head. He is a big, burly tomcat, maybe ten or twelve pounds, with a stub of a tail.
Well, Traveller and Serena and I have made our choice, and considering that we have to walk around with horrid human odor stuck to our fur, we think we ought at least to get some chicken on a weekend. But our human did smell worse than usual. Maybe she was too ill to go and find chicken. I’ve never seen her bring home a whole chicken, only parts. Old Heather used to reckon the computer has something to do with persuading a better hunter to give our human bits of chicken, but I don’t see how.
So Burr and I went out and found her a nice little fat vole. The kittens wanted to play with it while it was fresh and floppy. I said no. I would have dropped it right on the human’s foot if I could have got into the office room where she was coughing at the computer. Since I couldn’t do that I tucked the vole into her shoe.
I've always heard that humans won’t eat voles, but considering how many other disgusting things they do eat, berries for pity’s sake, zucchini, onions, persimmons, and even oranges, and I’ve seen mine chew on a piece of plastic that smelled like mint!—I thought I’d at least offer her a vole. Somebody has to eat them, and humans certainly aren’t particular about the things they put in their mouths.
“It’s the thought that counts,” she said, throwing it off the porch. “Thank you, Samantha.”
Traveller naturally thinks we ought to lie around her and purr, but maybe the thought does count, because after receiving the vole she began to smell less horrible and run the hot-air fan less, although she was coughing more.
All day, all weekend, we all stayed on the porch and purred at her.
In case more thoughts might do her more good, Burr and I went out hunting again the next night, but we did not find another vole.
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