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By Root 548 0

litters. I was there when they were in heat, and a tom came to call. To the ignorant human eye he was immensely handsome, a most desirable father, a mackerel tabby with a dapper white bib and an ardent, anxious expression in his whiskers. They loathed him, mother and daughter. They exhausted their vocabulary of virginal distaste, these veterans of many litters. He clung to the windowsill, whimpering fondly, and they laid back their ears and hissed. Why? What were they looking for; what was wrong with this big, handsome lover? It’s going much too far to suppose they sensed some genetic flaw in his ancestry. They rejected him; given a choice, female cats do choose.

Even the male can say no.

I thought about mating Morgan. Morgan thought about it too. Carl Van Vechten refers to the female’s “little amorous coos like the tender sighs of the eighteenth-century lover,” but Van Vechten wasn’t thinking Siamese. When a Siamese female is calling for love the world hears, and it isn’t exactly tender, either. Morgan called pleadingly for the first day or so, but then she lost patience completely and snarled with rage. She raced from window to window screaming threats like a fishwife, hoarsely furious with the absent unknown for his absence.

Hoping for kittens at least mostly Siamese, I tried to arrange things with my sister’s blue-eyed Zachary. I put them in the basement together and closed the door. Morgan’s screams made all the plumbing vibrate. Zachary tried to tear down the basement door to escape, and had left great splintery gashes in it by the time I let him out. He was almost two years old, but perhaps he wasn’t ready. Science writer David Zimmerman believes that male cats, even when physically capable, need to mature socially and emotionally before they think about breeding, and Zachary’s traumatic childhood and subsequent position as baby of the family may have retarded him. Or maybe the noise gave him a headache. Or maybe he was just rejecting Morgan. As soon as she calmed down, I had her spayed.

The feline penis has barbs on it, facing backward like the metal teeth guarding the gateways of parking lots, that may or may not influence ovulation. At the climax the female gives a piercing shriek and pulls away and slaps the tom. Some say this is because the barbs are painful, and some that this is just her way of showing pleasure; it isn’t a point very likely to be resolved.

Infertility is not a feline problem: sex leads to kittens. For the good old domestic shorthair, gestation is from sixty-two to sixty-four days, while the Siamese takes longer, sixty-five to sixty-nine days. It’s a good idea to check with a breeder before panicking about the various purebreds; gestation varies. We get a vitamin supplement from the vet, feed generously, and, toward the end, make a suitable kittening bed. She appreciates our thoughtfulness and likes to know the place is ready; some cats have even gone so far as to have their kittens in it. Bottom bureau drawers are often acceptable.

Many cats, even veterans, like encouragement and company in labor, and will follow us around talking about it, or wake us up to tell us. Abyssinians tend to get a bit hysterical, being Abyssinians. Some, even novices, take care of things alone. Blueberry woke me in the morning to show me her first and only litter, all clean and dry, in the box made ready for them. Sidney and his siblings were born on my bed, with me in it. Occasionally a worrying sort of cat will have them in a secret place of her own devising, often wildly unsuitable, like the clothes dryer or the pile of broken plaster behind the furnace or under the porch in bitter weather. When you finally discover them and move them to better quarters, she may keep on trying to hide them. Chippy was like that. Chippy hid kittens in boots and galoshes and under the attic floorboards and in the sleeves of my father’s shirts in the laundry hamper. Her cleverest place was almost their last, far inside a roll of abandoned carpet in the basement, half smothered when we dragged them out. Chippy was striped: is