Tortie Tuesday: Traveller Reaches End of His Road

Once again I, the human writer known as Priscilla King, am writing this Tortie Tuesday post in my own voice rather than those of Samantha the Tortie and Serena the Calico Cat. I know Serena is grieving; I don't feel confident that I know what grief feels like to a social cat.

I know what loneliness is like, for a social kitten, such as Serena was for the first three months of her life. Having no siblings, she got all the nourishment she could take and was big and healthy and full of energy, with instincts telling her to use that energy to practice fighting and hunting...and she had nobody to bounce and pounce with. This brought her very close to her human godmother, me, in ways that weren't the best or the safest for anybody. She'd snuggle against me to take a nap, then wake up and want to practice killing and tearing up my hand.

Serena is bigger now than she was last summer; her attitude's not changed. She's the Queen.

Then, miraculously, someone sent a feral cat with a tame kitten the same age and size as Serena to the Cat Sanctuary. Little black Traveller didn't have siblings to play with either, and had become obsessively cuddly with humans.

Traveller was named for a fictional family, of "outrageous whiteness," who dressed in solid black. Under his solid black fur Traveller's skin showed outrageous whiteness. 

Those kittens looked at each other and instantly wanted to adopt each other as siblings, although their mothers and I made them wait a few days while combing the fleas off Traveller's back end and making sure he didn't have anything contagious. When allowed to make contact, right away they started bouncing and pouncing and racing and chasing. "Where have you been all my life?" they silently said.

As only kittens, both Traveller and Serena had paid a lot of attention to humans and made lots of different noises they used to "talk" to humans. As they bonded as foster siblings, they stopped using most of their "spoken words." I was bemused by the way each kitten continued using one "word" to communicate with me. Traveller's was the annoying whiny "meow" that most cats use to beg for food, or sometimes for attention or other things. Serena's was a noise I hear as "urk, gurk," which she used to solicit tickling and play-fighting. She became much less interested in play-fighting with me once she had Traveller, but play-fighting is still her main way of showing affection (other than actually nursing kittens).

Like some real litter-mates during the first year of their lives, Serena and Traveller were inseparable. What one did, the other did. Even when Serena had kittens of her own...Traveller probably helped Serena set up her neat little nest among layers of fabric drawn out of storage bins, definitely helped her keep it warm for the kittens on cold March nights, and baby-sat the kittens when they crawled out of their nest and started exploring the porch.

It's an old family tradition, ever since Serena's feral ancestors were brought in from a city alley in Tennessee, that mother cats curl up on my lap while nursing their kittens. When Serena did that, Traveller did too. He didn't let the kittens try to nurse on him, but he did snuggle up with them in cold weather.

The feral cat rescuer who sent Trav to us sent a two-week supply of canned cat treats, warning that he wouldn't eat dry kibble. Serena's mother Samantha helped Traveller adapt to eating dry kibble by letting him have a little of her dwindling supply of milk in exchange for a lick at his canned goodies. He ate chicken, turkey, or fish when I cooked those, and rice. He learned to like pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds). He ate his share of the mice, crickets, and other little prey animals that are a cat's natural diet. And he learned to eat kibble and like it--but he did seem to have a weak digestive system. As the price of cat food rises, other Cat Sanctuary residents had accepted cheap store brands of kibble as long as they contained more animal protein than corn bran. Trav ate cheap kibble, but couldn't keep most store brands down.

The Dollar Store's kitten chow, a generic analog to Purina Kitten Chow, was the cheapest food Traveller seemed able to eat. As its price rose above a dollar a pound we tried "Dad's," a small name brand that seems cheap because local. "Dad's" kibble cost, last week, less than half as much as the Dollar Store's generic (I know they changed the name from "Heartland" to something even smarmier, but forget what). Trav didn't gain weight on it but he seemed to keep it down. Huzza.

After they're about six months old male cats are normally bigger than females of the same age and breed, more muscular. Females who give birth before they're a year old normally stop growing while nursing kittens. Serena's growth may have slowed down a little, but she did not stop growing. Right after giving birth she was about the same size as Traveller, bigger than Samantha. By last week she was conspicuously bigger than Traveller, such that a visitor said, "You mean the big one's not the mother of the two little ones?" By last week even Samantha was heavier than Traveller. A year-old tomcat normally weighs ten or twelve pounds. Samantha got up to nine pounds before she started nursing. Traveller was down to seven pounds or less.

But although he was skinny Trav seemed healthy--a week ago. He scarfed up chicken and rice, jumped onto my back or shoulder when I bent over to weed and pick the strawberries, minded the four little kittens. He wasn't much of a hunter, but sometimes he team-hunted with Serena.

Traveller is the black blob in the foreground, hoping to be petted. Serena is on the far side of the path, looking hardly bigger than little Black Stache, in the middle. Nobody ever had to coax Trav and Serena to act like a couple of humans minding their children. What one of them did, both of them did.

I found the remains of the rabbit on Friday evening. On Friday morning Traveller started spitting up froth, the way a long-ago cat called Bisquit had done, and then hid himself away and refused to come out, the way Bisquit did. Bisquit hid herself in a pile of rocks beside the road. Trav hid in the crawl space below the newer part of the house, which does not have a proper basement, up inside the floor. Like Bisquit he might have been helped by a home remedy for accidental poisoning, but refused to come out and take it. When I found rabbit fur I remembered that the kittens had seemed a bit off their feed on Friday morning too.

On Saturday morning I thought he might be making a breakthrough; at least he was talking to me again.

"Is that you, Traveller?"

"Meow."

"Well, come out, Traveller! Would you like a treat?"

"Meow."

Uh-oh. Traveller always said "meow," usually several times, in between hearing the word "treat" and gobbling one, but he didn't linger out of arm's length from me after hearing the word "treat."

"Treats, Traveller. I said treats!"

"Meow."

"Are you stuck somewhere? Don't you want treats?" No answer. "Chicken?" No answer.

I started searching, calling. He stopped meowing. As I got closer he growled and hissed, and so did Serena, nonverbally telling me, "Leave him alone!" I realized that the alternative to leaving him alone, since he didn't want to come out, would involve taking out a chunk of floor. I gave him the afternoon to think it over. I even hoped that by suppertime he'd be on the porch where he belonged.

He was not on the porch. He was not meowing back at anybody. Samantha and Serena tried to distract me from calling or searching, both at the same time: Serena by clawing at the wall, Samantha by calling me to pet her while she nursed Serena's theoretically weaned kittens.

On Sunday an odor told me more than I wanted to know. On Monday a different odor added more information I might have preferred not to have. Traveller had died in the crawl space; Butterball Possum had removed his body, and ignored what the kittens had left in the sand pit, which Butterball usually cleans overnight.

Serena didn't show stress while he was ill but has seemed sad since he died. I keep reminding myself that she clearly told me not to try to rescue him. I have no idea whether she knew he was going to die, that he could die, or just that he was sick and grumpy and likely to bite. Yesterday and today Serena's been more likely to bite, or rather nip and nibble, than she's been since she adopted a brother; she's reverted to chewing on my hand and saying "gurk." She's also reverted to slapping at passing ankles, which is of course her way of saying "Tag, you're It." She now weighs eleven pounds plus. I worry about being accused of harboring a dangerous attack animal.

It's hard to say whether Samantha and her grandkittens are spending a lot of time together to comfort each other in their mutual loss, or just making the most of the peak of the lactation cycle Samantha let them induce. That's like asking whether social cats nurse one another's weaned kittens (or whether I encourage them to do so) because cats don't conceive new kittens while nursing existing kittens, or because kittens get some extra nutrition from an additional cat's milk, or just because blended cat families are cute. The answer is probably "all of the above."

Anyway it's been hard to get in and out of the office, this weekend, because the frequency of Samantha's foster-mothering behavior has increased so much. I think she hears/feels my feet approaching the door and takes that as her cue to flop in front of the door and nurse Serena's kittens. All of whom, by the way, eat kibble. Possibly they're telling me that the glyphosate-soaked grain in "Dad's" brand is not nourishing the kittens, even though so far only Swimmer has complained of any difficulty digesting it...what the possum failed to remove from the sand pit did look yellower and more fibrous than cat excrement normally is.

I stepped over the pile of fur around the door and walked out to work this morning. On the way I saw young people mowing and trimming the gratifyingly green, litter-free verges of the highway, a splendid sight.

(Last week a local lurker had seen one of them passing by and muttered something about "the one they got for prostitution." The young people cleaning up the highways, without spraying poison on them, have been "recruited" from local criminal courts after convictions of nonviolent crimes--mostly public drunkenness, underage drinking, or failure to pay child support, but a topic of great interest to some local gossips was the claim that one of the current crew was busted for prostitution. "That wasn't you, was it?" old geezers snark, enforcing peer pressure against walking, picking up litter, recycling, and similar things these geezers feel guilty about lacking the public spirit to do. "You wish! Think I'd tell you if I knew who was doing that?" I snark back.)

Along the railroad some of the "weeds" were already rebounding, while other stretches were brown and dead.

Traveller, the cuddliest feral-born kitten ever to become a real house pet, is already being recycled back into the environment...thirty-six hours, or forty-eight, after eating a double dose of glyphosate-tainted foods.