one up, one down

Al, the idiotic orange cat who is allegedly allergic to his own teeth, had been living in the backyard and refusing to enter the house and interact with us.

Suddenly two days ago he had a change of heart, and as I write this, he's purring on my legs. Last night my sleep was disturbed because I could barely move due to a wealth of cats crowding in on me: Al, Iris's cat known as "Frowstomatic the King of the Universe", and a puffy foster kitten. Al hasn't completely mellowed out; he kept waking me up with his growling at the kitten, but he's following me and the girls around purring and meowing for attention.

When I came downstairs this morning, Al was closely following me, just like the old days when he was a treasured lapcat. "Look, I have a new housecat!" I said. "Well, that's good, because you lost one," said the Sober Husband accusatorily.

And that's the horrible thing which happened: two of our foster kittens went into our tiny, fenced in "yard" (which consists of a deck, a few tiny flower beds, a magnolia tree and a tiny lemon tree, and a small square of cement in lieu of a lawn) yesterday, and only one came back in. It's a complete mystery what happened. I called the head of my rescue program to painfully confess this morning that we've lost one.

For three years, hundreds of kittens have been going into that yard, and we've had no injuries or losses. Now suddenly one went missing. The husband's theory is that the raccoon who comes into our yard ate the kitten, but raccoons do not normally attack anything larger than a mouse. They are famously inept as hunters.

The husband has been cross-examining me as though I were the Jeffrey Dahmer of the kitten world, but honestly I did nothing different than any of the other days in which all kittens were safe. We were home most of the day, leaving just to return another litter of kittens to the shelter to go up for adoption and to take Iris to her swimming lesson (and we got dinner out afterward). I thought the tiny yard was completely safe, and indeed there's no way I can prevent larger kittens from going out there. The children are constantly going in and out (there's a door in the dining room leading onto the deck) on nice days. We're going to make some posters to put around the neighborhood, sigh.

I feel terrible, and it comes right on the heels of one of my biggest triumphs as a kitten fosterer. The litter I turned in for adoption were feral kittens who were rejected by the SPCA as unadoptable due to their lack of tameness. We worked so hard to tame those kittens and succeeded. When I got them, they could not be held, and they constantly hissed and growled. When we returned them, they were perfectly biddable kittens who would be a joy in any household.