Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [91]
As they get older, they’ll eat more and need it less often, like human babies, and eventually we’ll be allowed to sleep all night again.
Happily, almost all cats make legendary good mothers. It’s a rare slow season for news that goes by without the paper printing a picture of a cat who has adopted and nursed a baby squirrel, puppy, rabbit, ferret, monkey, what have you. My grandmother had a cat named Keezo who adopted a small black chick, hatched in error to a Rhode Island Red; the hen disowned it because it was the wrong color, but the cat didn’t mind that it wasn’t even a mammal.
Many are the stories of cats that have sacrificed their lives for their kittens. The theater cat in London, for instance, who had five kittens under the stage, and when the building burned carried four of them, one by one, to safety, and died struggling out with the fifth. (There’s a worm at the heart of this story, as in the story of Ophelia’s drowning reported in such close detail by Queen Gertrude’s henchmen: why are you standing there taking notes, telling us what kinds of flowers she’s holding, counting the desperate trips with kittens; isn’t anyone going to help?)
Méry believes, and it seems reasonable, that the euphoric tenderness of the mother cat depends on her own security. A cat with a solicitous male in attendance, as in jaguar and some lion families, makes a joyful mother with playful young, while the tigress, who hasn’t seen the male since mating, and the feral domestic cat make anxious parents with fearful, precociously aggressive kittens. In human households kind people take the place of fathers, usually, though a resident father can be a careful parent too, and the mother, secure in room and board and safety, purrs so lavishly and takes such blatant pleasure in her young as to put the rest of us to shame. As they get older, she introduces them to the world and, sometimes with help from other cats around, educates them patiently.
With the usual exceptions, of course. There was a cat in my mother’s childhood named Mrs. Johnson. Something was lacking in her chemical makeup, perhaps, since she was well past two before she produced her first litter, giving birth to four fine kittens on a pile of carrot-tops in the pantry. The kittens were particularly attractive, and she was a conscientious mother and housebroke them in a row of flowerpots on the porch. When they were at the peak of their charm, prancing around with their tails stuck up straight, she was seen leading them out of the backyard. They followed her in a neat line, like ducklings. She was heading for a patch of suburban woods between the house and the next street. About an hour later she came back alone. She ate, she washed, she hunkered down with her paws tucked in and closed her eyes, ignoring the family’s shouted questions. Everyone fanned out and searched the neighborhood. They scoured the woods, they knocked on doors, they asked everyone. The kittens were old enough to scamper briskly and to squeal piercingly, but no one ever saw or heard them again, nor did their mother ever ask after them. She lived for many years after that and never had another litter.
Méry tells of a female who, when each successive litter was a week or so old, apparently tired of them and dropped them one by one through a balcony railing to their deaths on the tiles below.
Any instinctive passion as awesomely strong as the cat’s for her kittens may sometimes, from the unwieldiness of its