Animal Status Update

Serena is a celebrity cat who's been threatened, attacked, and badly injured. She might prefer to stay down cellar with her grandkitten if I go to visit friends during the February Freeze, but I can't let her do that any more. I've never found out, but I'm guessing she's not in the minority of cats who enjoy travelling and visiting.

And Serena's not complaining about being kept indoors, although she's starting to recover her bounce and sass (while still being sniffly, and threatened). She has, for example, progressed from wanting to maintain contact with me at all times to finding it easier to snooze on the other side of the bench. She'll curl up on my lap to show good will, then stand up with a reproachful look and move to her own side when I change positions. I can gauge her level of boredom by the frequency with which she changes sides or positions while dozing. She is getting bored. She seems to have some idea of what she's up against, which helps. I think she understands why she has to endure more boredom than she's ever tolerated before. Overconfidence and rebellion may come later. For now I'm still, as so many times in the past eight years, awestruck by Serena's practical intelligence. She has a different kind of brain than a human has; she never will really speak, or talk, or write, but she certainly uses what she has.

Drudge is still here, healthy, adorable, adoptable. He drank out of the same water dishes Pastel used before she died, because that's how social cats are; when they have a dish apiece, they'll still take turns sampling whatever is in each dish. If Pastel's trouble had started with panleukopenia, Drudge would have shown some sign of infection by now. There is none. Here he stands to testify that Pastel was deliberately poisoned with something whose effects on cats may destroy immunity to, or may simulate the effects of, panleukopenia. (Not including the watery yellow diarrhea the word "distemper" brings to mind, even if virologists say panleukopenia is the strongest form of the same virus.) 

This does not mean that Drudge may not have been exposed to natural panleukopenia. There's no way to be sure without blood tests. He got the benefit of the full lactation cycles of three immune carriers, since Serena and Silver used lactation for birth control after each lost a litter to "New Roundup" vapor drift last year. In theory that could mean that he has some immunity to the virus, is currently an immune carrier, and might come down with the disease later on--if natural panleukopenia had anything at all to do with this winter's events. 

But I'm still inclined to suspect chemical poisoning that simulated the effects of the deadly virus. Charcoal is wonderful stuff for any undesirable chemicals or bacteria in the digestive tract; I don't see how it could have any effect on virus in the bloodstream. It seems to me that if Serena had been starting to froth at the mouth from the effects of a natural virus, even if charcoal could have done her any more good than it did Pastel, it would have taken more than an hour for any good effects to have shown. I'm still not confident about saying that Serena's been cured of what was probably a small amount of poison. I believe the prayers that have been said on her behalf may have helped, and I've certainly been praying; she is still sniffly, and sleepier than she was before. If she survives she may be an Old Cat, as distinct from the mature but still bouncy cat she was last year.  

Drudge's only flaw that I can see is that he's starting to smell like a tomcat. He likes having his fluffy coat groomed and petted, even being turned upside down and tickled, which few cats will tolerate for anything like as long as Drudge and his brothers do. He's big for his age, and will still grow a little bigger, but I'd be surprised if his healthy weight ever got over fifteen pounds. While his brothers were here, Drudge tagged along, but didn't really participate, when his attention-craving brothers tried to stampede into the house or climb up my coattails to grab food out of my hands. As the only remaining kitten he's lonely, but mellow and polite. His general affect is like, "Will there ever be mild evenings when a human sits on the porch and shares water with us cats and trails switches over the ground for us to chase, ever again?" All kittens have to learn how not to bite or scratch; Drudge learned fast, because he wants to be loved, and would probably be a good first cat for a family with a child. He does seem to have learned, as Diego refused to learn, that scent-marking the porch is not a way to make himself loved. I don't know whether he recognizes individual words; he doesn't answer to his name, whether it's pronounced like The Great Matt's full family name or shortened to "Dru," because he answers to human voices or footsteps. For anyone who doesn't mind a bit of tomcat odor he'd be very easy to love.

And, after the February freeze, will Silver come back here again? I hope she will. If  Trumpkin's humans really want to keep her, I can say that she's worth the cost of a veterinary hospital if she does go down with panleukopenia. She and Serena have been a fantastic team of social cats, all these years. It's rare to find a cat who's as good a Queen as Serena; it's also rare to find a cat who's as good a Loyal Follower as Silver. Despite Serena's "Don't give yourself airs!" act when Silver's come home, full of food treats and full of herself, I really think Serena misses her. So does Drudge. So do I. So, if they're still alive, will the possums Silver made it her job to supervise. And there are other cats, equally pretty if not equally loved, in Kingsport who desperately need the good home Trumpkin's humans clearly have to offer.

Meanwhile, the really stupid animal in this story, the one without the capacity for common decency,  sent his hired man around...not to pretend that he'd not trespassed on a better neighbor's property to poison my cats (and me, and the eighty-year-old gentleman who may have failed to meet an obligation for the first time during that week), but to assert that he was, too, a veteran and he still lives, part of the time, in his original home. The Trotter Lane address is merely the one published in the telephone directory. No doubt this information will be useful to anyone who has found anything at the bottom of the deep freezer, or dead beside the road, or similar, that they think would look good on a pet killer's vanity vehicle. I take his silence on the important question as an admission of guilt.

I don't want Wrymouth Calhoun dead, actually. I want him to suffer. I want him to spend years trying to die, and being prevented from dying and punished for trying, behind bars. And I want him to know before he dies that he'll be commemorated in history by a law that recognizes "pesticide" spraying as poisoning any neighbors, human or otherwise, that are harmed by it, and basically ensures that any lazy landowner who would rather poison road verges than prune shrubbery will be paying two-thirds of everything he has to his complaining neighbors for the rest of his life. 

Some have opined that Wrymouth resents me more than other neighbors because, before I was "the child prodigy," he was sometimes described as "the smart one"...I think adults should try harder to avoid mislabelling children's intelligence, which depends so much on their health and the way adults deal with them. I suspect the old beekeeper who died so mysteriously, who made a career out of having been "retarded" by a childhood injury, may have had a higher IQ than either of us. Still, let Wrymouth Calhoun be remembered as the biggest fool in the history of our town. So much evil he's done just to destroy the peace of a real Christian community, and so much money spent...to gain nothing, to die sick and disowned and disgraced in an institution. Thus be it ever to bullying, cowardly evildoers.

Perhaps, when he's locked up, the rest of us can put the rich uncle's estate behind us, too, and become a real Christian community--an extended family, with generations of friendship among the neighbors who were not physically related to each other--again. Perhaps my Nephews' children can grow up, as I did, in a neighborhood where all children can safely roam over all the land. I hope so.