#TortieTuesday is the Twitter hashtag for posts about Samantha the Tortie and Serena the Calico cat. This is not Tuesday. Well, it's not really about the three-colored cats either.
Samantha's Partner for Life, and Serena's father, is a big semiferal social tomcat who answers to the name of Burr. Officially he left me when he was four months old, but he visited often after Samantha moved in.
My cheap cell phone takes terrible pictures, but that mug shot was enough to prove the big black-and-white Stumpie cat who came to visit was Burr...up to last winter.
Burr was never, ever cuddly, though he's nonviolent. He tolerates being among social cats for several hours at a time. He does not hold still and let himself be petted, nor did he ever seem to like snuggling up among his siblings and cousins in their den. Once he was big enough to walk out on his own, he did. He's been a real partner in hunting as well as a mate and friend to Samantha, a kind father to Serena, and even willing to share a food treat with poor little Traveller, but basically he seems to be more of a normal cat who likes a lot of personal space.
One day last winter I came home and found the remains of a fast-food meal in the yard. Local restaurant chains send out coupons to get people to buy more. Nobody gets a free meal, but someone who wants a hamburger for himself can use a coupon to get another burger, fries, etc., free of charge. So someone had dumped out a second meal. The cats had left the little box that had held the fries, the little tinfoil packages of ketchup, and some of the paper that had wrapped the burger. I saw a big black and white cat in the hedge. I assumed he was Burr, but didn't get a close look at him.
Over the winter I'd see glimpses of the black and white cat and call, "Burr?" He answered to the name of Burr all right, and Burr seldom had actually come when called...until the day Samantha disappeared.
Samantha had had a disagreement with Serena and had been straying further from home, staying out longer, for some time. Someone might have wanted to adopt her. There was a bear, a big mean-looking one, in the neighborhood. Anyway one night I went out calling Samantha, and she came home and purred and cuddled and acted as if she'd had a nice time wherever she'd been. The next night I went out calling her, and she didn't come home. I've not seen her since.
The black and white cat was in the hedge. "Burr," I said, pleading, "can you bring Samantha home?"
Serena went to him. He did not come to me. However, in the next few days Serena and the kittens, Silver and Swimmer, coaxed him to start coming to me.
He was not Burr. By this time he'd accepted that "Burr" might be his name, too. He answers to it. But he's not our original Burr. He has more black on his face, more white on his back, more of a tail, and he's much older than Burr. Someone just dumped out an old tomcat in another dump-and-run episode.
People. Please. Do not dump out cats or any other animal, whatever you have heard...When I named and dedicated my home as the Cat Sanctuary, it was the Cat Sanctuary, the only one. When I set up a Live Journal account by that name, other places in Virginia were using it, many of them really no better than shelters. By now I'm aware of other private homes having been dedicated as Cat and Dog Sanctuaries. However, they all have one thing in common: Much as the owners of those houses may love all animals, we can't just take every animal everyone from the five-state region wants to get rid of, when they want to get rid of it. We don't rely on cages and may not have one. We don't receive funding to ensure every new animal is fit to be around the ones in residence. If the animals dumped out on us aren't the same kind we've been feeding, we may have nothing they can eat, and if they are the same kind, we may not have enough food to go around for even one evening and morning.
Since the reign of our Founding Queen Cat, Black Magic, the Cat Sanctuary has seen many things.
We've seen whole packs of dogs abandoned on the eve of a record-setting long, hard freeze. I could have told whoever did that that that was especially inhumane. Those little dogs soon found a place to get out of the icy wind, up in the woods. That place is a narrow chimneylike entrance to a limestone cave. It would have been so easy and so inviting for them to get into...and impossible to get back out of, even if the cave hadn't been flooded or been in use by a bear, unless they found another entrance I don't know about. That cave looks as if it would connect to other small caves in these limestone hills, but it doesn't, at least not by a passage big enough for humans to see and use. A bear, cat, or raccoon can scramble in and out. A small dog could not.
There was the fluffy little caged pet--what species? Gerbil, hamster, guineapig, even a small rabbit? I'll never know, because when I found it on the porch the cats hadn't left much of it. It had been fluffy and cuddly and cute, and as far as the cats were concerned, it was a big fat mouse.
There was the little black king snake. Gulegi ate him of course. "I am a snake," he nonverbally said. "I don't sit down and think through these things. I act on reflexes."
There was the world's cutest puppy, for that winter anyway. His little soft paws had never walked on the ground before. If Queen Cat Grayzel hadn't had such a thing about dogs I would have been tempted to try to keep him. I had nowhere to keep him, nothing to feed him. That was the winter we didn't even have a dog pound. I walked nine miles to take that puppy to Tennesssee, where people could at least put him in a shelter, and he cried, and I cried.
There was the pregnant bull terrier, a big ugly-looking animal that would have scared anyone who hadn't seen her try to run and be too clumsy and crampy to jump across a ditch. People said she and some other big dogs had been dumped out of a truck with Tennessee tags on a busy highway.
One cold day last winter there was a heifer. I would not have made that up. A young female cow is a useful animal. You wouldn't expect one to be dumped out at a Cat Sanctuary, but she was.
One horrible day in midsummer someone abandoned a pet possum. A sick pet possum that snarled and threatened the cats and the resident possums.
Once we even received a half-grown kitten whom my cats adopted--Inky the Manx. Inky bonded with a resident tomcat called Tickle. When she moved out he mourned, and then he started spending his time near her new home, the way Burr had started spending his time near Samantha.
The old tomcat who isn't Burr went through the motions of mating with Serena, Silver, and Swimmer every time they showed any interest, this spring. None of them became pregnant. The old tomcat didn't smell as foul as intact tomcats do, either. He nonverbally told me that he'd been a pet, but he didn't really like or trust humans, especially not to touch or look at his back end.
The real Burr stopped visiting and this other black-and-white cat settled in to stay. "Not on the porch," I said. "You can stay under the porch."
He had probably had a name. I don't know what that name was. I know he's the kind of cat who does not obey orders, exactly, but does know his name. He always answers to "Burr," now. Sometimes he answers by looking at me and nonverbally saying "Leave me alone," and sometimes by snarling like a possum--but he's learned that that's his name.
He does not particularly like me. He now usually lets me rub those hard-to-groom patches of fur around the ears and at the top of his head, but if I touch his back he shudders and walks away.
"You can't have the same name as my Burr," I said. I remembered a movie I watched twenty years ago, called Sommersby, where an escaped prisoner moves into the home and life of another man who looked like him, and people only notice because the prisoner is now trying to behave well and actually behaves better than the man whose identity he's stolen used to do. According to Wikipedia Sommersby was based on something that really happened in France. The Hollywood version moved it to the United States, and people I know hated it, or refused to watch it, because the movie made Richard Gere's character a Northerner who moved into Tennessee right after the Civil War. "You could be Sommersburr," I said to the old tomcat.
"Urggurrgurrr, wow," he said.
He is a talkative cat.
Cats who vocalize a lot tend to be cats who have spent time around humans and really are trying to talk to humans. They don't usually do it very well. Part of the difficulty is that cats and humans actually have normal hearing ranges that overlap only partway, so each species hears only part of what the other says. Cats who do "the silent miaow" are probably meowing on a high pitch. Cats are more likely to hear enough to recognize women's or children's words than men's.
Serena was talkative, as a kitten without siblings; I'd figured out some of the things she said, but not most. Traveller was another talkative kitten without siblings; he'd worked out a completely different "language" from Serena's, so I understood very little of what he seemed to think he was saying. When the two kittens got together, almost overnight they stopped vocalizing and started communicating silently, through body language, as social cats do. Except for the occasional whine when they were sick, as babies, and the occasional yip of protest when they play, Swimmer and Silver are quiet, like the older cats. Sommersburr vocalizes at them; they don't seem to recognize his "words" any more than I do, nor does he use "words" I remember Serena or Traveller using.
I wonder whom Sommersburr grew old with, whether his human is dead or is still missing him in some sort of project or hospital somewhere. It's very obvious that he's accustomed to being around a human he liked better than he does me. He wouldn't have stayed if he'd thought he had a chance of finding his way back to the home he misses. For several weeks he lived in the orchard on what Serena fed him. He was as big as Burr when I saw him first. When the resident cats coaxed him into the yard he was skinny, though still big-boned.
I wonder why anyone would put a cat through what Sommersburr's gone through, this winter, instead of just asking me: "Can the Cat Sanctuary take a geriatric tomcat?" We could, and my cats are fond of him--but how many times these dump-and-runs have turned out badly! How easily the bear could have caught Sommersburr instead of Samantha...
...and how often I've wished it had. If one of the two had to be eaten by a bear, it should definitely not have been Samantha.
I've been feeding him, anyway.
He's too old to prowl or hunt. He spends a lot of time snoozing in the not-a-lawn. I know geriatric cats are hard to place, but it seems to me that Sommersburr might be happier and live longer if he were snoozing on somebody's ottoman. He's not a mean cat, at all. I think he's going through some sort of mourning process, but he's a nice cat who might be willing to bond with a new human, if I knew of someone who was looking for a big, lazy, dozy pillow-substitute.
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