Cat Farming by Klara Holscher
The barn cats live their lives in quiet revolt. Put a stray egg on the barn counter and thirty seconds later Molly, the old black cat, will appear. She leaps up beside the egg and begins batting at it with her paws until it rolls onto the cement floor. She leaps down and laps at the golden yoke, swishing her tail triumphantly.
The yellow tabbies sit in the pasture, peering into frog pools, or they perch next to the bird feeders, taunting the golden finches with their claws. Between hunting sprees they preen over their fluffy coats, small lions living by the law of the jungle. Hunt. Pounce. Eat. Repeat. They lounge on stone walls, basking in the sun, declaring their indifference and superiority. But every cat has its fall.
Lila was one of a long line of black kitties here on the farm, but for a time, she turned blue. No one was there to witness the event, but she emerged from the garage, one day, covered in a glistening sheen. We looked closer. Oil? Why was she covered in oil? Inside the garage we found a vat on the floor left after someone changed the oil in the car. Lila must have made a flying leap from the garage counter and not quite made it to her destination. SPLOOSH! If only we had been there when she landed smack dab in that vat. She was blue for months afterwards. The one benefit? She was the only water-proofed kitty this side of the county.
Then came the kittens. Picking up a stray cat abandoned on an island in the Saco river seemed harmless enough. But Saco, wayward kitty, grew up into Saco, father of many. We already had a couple female cats, and then found another stray cat, wandering the fields near our farm. Pretty soon there were many cat families, and then the kittens began having kittens in a repeating nightmare of feline multiplication. Time does not permit the full list of their descendants. We remember Lefty — named because he only had a left ear after a goat chomped off the other one, and Toughy — the brave kitten with the paralyzed back paws who pulled himself everywhere with supercat strength. These stand out. The rest of the them blur together in a mass of 60+ kittens who arrived over a dismal span of months we look back on as our “Cat Farming Days.” Times got bad enough that we would walk into the dark barn and suddenly hear a “MEOOOW!” as we accidentally lifted a kitten with our foot and sent it flying. This trial by kittens came to an end after many trips to the human society. The loyal ladies at this outpost must have stood on their desks and danced after we made our final trip. Finally, only a few sleek barn cats prowled in the quiet depths of the barn where dozens of kittens once caused havoc.
Ketch, one of these sleek old-timers, stayed on as a champion mouser. He would disappear into the wild for weeks at a time. Aloof and wily, we only saw him when he needed us to do something for him, like remove an ingrown toenail. Then he disappeared again. Once, we saw him slinking back from the fields, carrying a rabbit in his mouth. He picked up a lot of ticks on these hunting trips. One stands out in particular, but we didn’t hear the story until years later, when Caleb sheepishly asked, “Did I ever tell you all about the time when Joel and I lit Ketch on fire?” The boys launched into their story, laughing as the details came back to them.
“Ketch had a tick,” Caleb began.
“We must have been pretty young. We weren’t very good at getting ticks out then. Not like now. ” Joel chimed in. “We were trying to get it out with rubbing alcohol because we had heard that ticks get sort of smothered by it and then they sometimes crawl back out. That was before we knew anything.”
“Yeah, that didn’t work.” Caleb went on, “so we decided to try the old match trick. You know, if you light a match and blow it out, then put the hot matchstick against the tick, it will jump right off the cat. But Joel had this bright idea that if a blown-out matchstick would help, maybe leaving it lit would be even better.”
“We decided this would be worth a try, so Caleb held the lit match to the tick and we waited for a second. Suddenly, WOOOSH! And I was telling Caleb, “Woah, the cat—it’s on fire! Caleb, the cat’s on fire! The cat’s on fire!”
Laughing and crying, Caleb continued the story. “he was on fire alright. The rubbing alcohol—hahah—the rubbing alcohol burst into blue flames and Ketch was caterwauling like you wouldn’t believe. We patted him down as fast as we could and got the flames out. Then Joel peered at the spot the tick used to be. He poked around and then stood up slowly. “Well, I think we got it.”
Ketch continued his hunting trips, but one time he didn’t come back. Maybe he felt safer in the woods. According to our dad’s old proverb, “One boy —one brain, two boys—half a brain, three boys . . .” Ketch didn’t wait to find out what would happen if a third boy showed up.
