Serena's three kittens spent two nights wrapped in an old flannel shirt beside my workbench, which is the hot spot for the house because the desktop computer lives there. They didn't seem to know that Serena looked at them a few times but didn't come close to them.
At 4 p.m., after 44 hours, I took the kittens out for a visit.
"My babies!" Serena nonverbally cried, quivering all over with eagerness and wariness. She ran up and sniffed them and me over thoroughly. She licked the male kitten's back end. "Those disgusting scented wet napkins!" She called Silver in for a consultation. "My darling babies! Are you quite well?"
"No, we're starving!" whined the male kitten.
Serena meowed to Silver several times before she sat down and began cleaning and feeding her kittens.
They're too little to have names yet, but the color and texture of the male kitten's coat brought "Suede" to mind. I had also thought of a few "trio" names like Treasure, Trophy, and Tripp, or (if they hadn't got better) Trouble, Trial, and Tragedy.
The two female kittens seem at this point to have very different personalities. The classic calico has black eye patches on a mostly white face, a long thin build, and a lot of energy. She looks like Serena all over again, with slightly different spots. When Serena reclaimed her family, she was the one who turned back to snuggle against me. The pale calico is quiet and lets the other two do things first. The seldom-used saints' names Tryphena and Tryphosa come to mind.
All three definitely do perceive my voice and take turns "speaking" and "listening," though they ignored other sounds and may have been reacting to my voice as vibration in a body they were touching rather than hearing it as a sound.
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