Fake Fred
Let me introduce you to our cats. I would do so with a picture but they won’t sit still long enough for that. All you would see would be several gray and black blurs.
There are six of them. Yes, six.
It all started out when a little cat, a very small gray cat, came to my back door and begged to come in.
It had been in some kind of altercation somewhere that left it with a rather large area without fur about its left eye. That area was raw and it looked painful. It cried pitifully. I was smitten.
But, I had my sweet 18 year old orange tabby, my Kiki, inside and he did not extend his sweetness to other cats. If I brought the little cat in, it would have been a disaster for them both.
I applied Neosporin to the little guys wound, put some Fancy Feast out in a separate cat dish and began my care for the “outside” cat.
It grew cold. I researched and found directions for shelters and built one that snugged under the kitchen window overhang. It came with a protected area for feeding the nameless feline for which I used the masculine pronoun.
In March, our “outside” cat brought four kittens to dinner.
We changed the pronoun. She now had a name too. It was Momcat.
The kittens were cute. Three grey with brindle faces like their Mom and a tiny black cat who trailed behind the rest.
But kittens, as adorable as they are, grow into cats and, given the propensity of cats and other animals, they make more of themselves.
With the help of Forever Friends Animal Rescue and its wonderful founder, Casey Newton, we were able to trap the three gray cats and have them neutered. I had hoped that they were tame enough to be put up for adoption, but too much time had passed and they were officially feral.
Casey brought the two boys and one girl back to our patio. .
The fourth, the runt of the litter, the little black cat with emerald green eyes was just too smart to be trapped.
We will try again, definitely. We gave him a name, Shadow. I am prayerfully using the masculine pronoun.
Momcat moved on.
So, we now had four cats that we were feeding. They seemed to live where we surmised they were born, under the shed.
They moved to the crawl space under the house where there is a heat pipe from the basement to our family room. How they knew to do that is amazing, but again, the calendar moved on and the weather grew cold.
We began the process of building shelters for our little feline friends.
Our letter carrier gave us several large Styrofoam containers which we converted to cat homes according to specific instructions on the internet. We bought a new Coleman cooler and added cat doors and ventilation holes, hoping that all four would move in together.
Kathy K. constructed and gave us a beautiful wooden shelter. We have had limited success with the cats and the shelters. They seem to prefer the crawl space.
Then we noticed a very raggedly skinny and skittish tuxedo cat, hanging around the edge of our property at the same time that we were feeding the four Ferro Ferals.
We named him Fred after Fred Astair who often wore a tuxedo and he joined the breakfast and dinner hours, if only at a distance. We actually put a dish out for him 10 feet or so away from the dishes for the others. Fred was definitely hungry but very untrusting.
One day my husband, who has taken over the feeding of the Ferro Ferals and Fred, asked me if Fred looked different.
“He is letting me pet him,” he noted.
“That’s not Fred, Fred wouldn’t allow you to pet him or eat along with the other cats. This is Fake Fred.”
The name stuck and Fake Fred, a very large and most probably stray cat, whose voracious appetite leads me to believer that he was starving when he found our bed and breakfast and dinner establishment, has joined our feline family.
He is the bully of the bunch, pushing the younger cats away at feeding time. They defer to him, but as they get older, one wonders…
So there you have it, our six cats: Fake Fred and Five Ferro Ferals.
I think we have reached our limit…but then we noticed that a skunk and a possum were hanging around.
No.
