A Cat's Tale With Chickens, Possums and Dogs by Priscilla King

 

During the Associated Content years, a popular article was the story of how the cat called Black Magic became the Founding Queen of the Cat Sanctuary. That article has been in a stack of AC articles waiting to be reposted ever since AC went down. Of course it has to be revived as a Petfinder post.

The house where I live was not always a Cat Sanctuary. As old-school Granola Greens, my parents didn't keep cats or dogs. Our pets were chickens.

My web site looked at Prince Charles from Smithtown, New York, back in August; his web address is https://www.petfinder.com/bird/prince-charles-56392993/ny/smithtown/smithtown-animal-shelter-ny53/ . Found as a stray, the poor little fellow was photographed while he was molting, so he doesn't look as handsome as nature intended. Shelter staff assure us that his feathers are growing in nicely. Where's the picture? Anyway, they say that, for people who want a pet rooster, he's a gentle, brave, curious, lovable pet. 

Any rooster who stayed with us until he was old enough to crow was a very lovable pet. 

But these chickens did nothing about the rodent problem, which, in an orchard, is fierce. My parents bought into the popular delusion that mice can be controlled by chemical means--poison bait. This is true for one mouse in each generation. Mouse generations vary depending on species but generally last about as long as it takes for the poisoned mouse that died in the insulation in the house walls to decompose enough that you don't smell it any more. Meanwhile the other rodents know to avoid what the one who died was eating, and they are free to run through the house at night, chomping on whatever else they find. If they don't find any spilled or neglected food, they will happily eat books, clothes, and furniture. The resident snake, Gulegi, has always been very fond of rodents, but in winter he was barely able to make a dent in the population.

So I grew up and left the house that always smelled of dead mice for a few years. Then both parents became ill at the same time, and we wanted my natural sister to be able to go to college though she's not academically gifted, so I came back home for a few years. Dad moved into a retirement project. Mother went back to work as a private nurse, mostly living with a geriatric patient. Sister and I were each other's only chaperones, and although we had high standards about sex and drugs and dated only young men who had the same standards, we did a little bit of adolescent rebellion. A fluffy half-grown kitten strayed up our way. Instead of chasing her away, we fed her. 

That's Leo from Fairfax, a similar looking cat, not quite as fluffy, whose web page is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/leo-57327555/va/fairfax/helping-homeless-felines-va653/ . Our fluffy stray kitten, Black Velvet, was friendly but cool and calm; she waited for human attention. Leo, the shelter staff say, demands attention and will hug your knee until he gets it. Already neutered, he gets along well with other animals as long as he can control some human's attention. 

Velvet had been with us for about a week, being fed and called a pretty kitty by whichever humans were at the house on a given day, when my boyfriend came to Dad's apartment looking for me. "I've got you a present you will love," he said, "even though you've already got one just like it."

"A shirt?" I said. He collected NASCAR souvenir shirts and had given me a few. 

"No, not a shirt, but it's black. Come out and see it."

And there on the seat of his air-conditioned car, cool as a cucumber and purring as if she were in competition with the motor, was Black Magic. I didn't try to pick her up, but held out my hands. She popped into my hands and snuggled on my shoulder. She might have weighed all of three pounds; she was a small kitten, Siamese-American. She must have had a happy kittenhood. She always took it for granted that everyone wanted to be her friend. She and I started to bond on sight.

Bristol from Marietta, Georgia, is described as very different from Magic. For a start he's male. Also, though apparently semi-social, he's not lost his family, but comes with a sister. The shelter staff don't mention his being unusually intelligent and say he's shy at first. They do say he will soon learn to purr and cuddle, as he gets to know people. Bristol's web address is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bristol-57309584/ga/marietta/homeless-pets-foundation-ga140/ .

Magic didn't cuddle up to everyone she ever met, but she always purred. She hardly ever made any other sound, though she had a full Siamese range of sounds she could make when purring seemed inappropriate to her. It was the great loud purr coming out of the tiny kitten that got the two cats their names. Before Dale Earnhardt's cars were a series of "The Intimidator," early models were nicknamed Black Magic and Black Velvet, and we had those souvenir shirts. 

Velvet wasn't social but she accepted Magic's confident friendliness, as everyone of every species seemed to do. 

We soon realized that Magic was not a normal cat at all. She liked riding around with us in cars; she alternated between laps and shoulders, looked out the window, and seemed to enjoy the view. She enjoyed family parties with other animals and children. At parties she circulated, sniffing everyone and allowing everyone to pet her. 

On her first day at my home I whimsically told Magic, "That is a cardinal, the state bird of Virginia. If you're going to live in Virginia now you must always protect cardinals." I'm not sure how many words she understood--though Magic definitely understood words, including words nobody tried to teach her. In any case she did protect our cardinal family. 

She could jump and climb more energetically than your average cat. The attic is ventilated by a little transom window under the porch roof. Magic's trademark move was to leap straight up the door, pushing off as she went up from the door handle and the top of the door frame, and climb into the attic through the transom. Apparently she got along with Gulegi as well as she did with everyone else, and in a few weeks the house stopped smelling of rodents. 

She liked to go for walks with us, too, and use the same vertical jump with a boost from someone's belt to the person's shoulder. I spent much of her first year reminding her, "Be gentle! We're only humans; we have no fur." She was gentle while snuggling but it took her a while to figure out how to sink her claws into a belt or waistband without scratching a friend's waist. But she learned. 

Mother didn't want fur in the house. Magic and Velvet were outdoor cats, even in cold weather. It didn't hurt them since the cellar opens into a shallow cave and maintains earth temperature all year, and the attic got heat from the occupied rooms. The first winter, when her coat didn't look adequate, I used to go outside and let Magic snuggle under my coat until I was shivering. That was how I became her favorite human, though she liked my sister, our boyfriends, and even Mother too. Usually she went to me whenever I was outside; she liked to lurk in the transom and jump down onto my shoulder, but when she was out in the orchard and I called her, she'd sprint a quarter-mile. 

My sister had friends who had what they admitted was a stupid kitten, a whiny little yellow fluffball who liked to sit in an open door. The kitten had been stepped on and had doors closed on her a few times and had not noticeably learned anything from these experiences. The friends dumped this kitten on our doorstep one night, and Magic adopted her. The kitten remained stupid and whiny, addicted to running under people's feet, sitting in doorways, and even running in front of cars to whine for attention, but Magic loved her as if the kitten had been her own daughter. One day after tripping over the kitten I lost patience, shoved her across the porch, and shouted at her. Magic walked over, glared at me, and nipped my thumb in her teeth. That was the only time she ever bit a human, even a vet.

Magic's first kitten was a poor scrawny little thing that never grew any bigger after she was three months old, but she wanted to look like this pampered pair from Louisville when she grew up. If she had ever grown up. She didn't. She was seven or eight months old, and still looked three months old, when she managed to get run over despite all the practice all the neighbors had had at missing her. Clearly Max and Stella, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/max-stella-55842049/ky/louisville/shamrock-pet-foundation-inc-ky105/, will be much more satisfactory pets than Magic's foster kitten was. Even if they like to hide under your bed, pull down the bedding, and shed on your sheet.

Velvet seemed normally intelligent until winter, when she, too, developed a stupid habit. She liked to cuddle up on a car motor. My sister would shoo her out of our little Toyota Corolla and drive off to work, and Velvet would walk down the road and cuddle up on the motor of the neighbors' truck. She didn't live through the winter. 

Magic survived, though, and when she might have been as much as one year old she attracted a mate. She introduced him, and nonverbally told me what fun they'd had. "Take her to the vet before there are kittens all over the place," Mother ordered. So Magic went to the vet. She never seemed to blame me, but after that she became censorious about humans. The boyfriend who'd brought her to me accepted that "She's saying, 'If I can't have sex, why should you?'" By this time my sister had eloped with what her hair-for-brains college classmates considered the prize of their class, so we had no other chaperone and mostly accepted Magic as one. She went along with us on walks, drives, visits, and day trips to any place where cats were allowed. We called her our "kid" and joked about how we'd managed to have a black "daughter." 

It is possible that Magic may still be the only cat who went into the veterinary hospital to be spayed and came home with three kittens. She had mourned for the empty-headed fluffball. She acted for all the world as if she knew the vet hospital was where that kitten had been taken, and hoped to find her foster kitten there. Instead she found three Manx-mix orphans. Being a larger breed, the orphans were already close to Magic's own size. Made no difference to her. They'd lost their mother while they were still young enough to nurse, and Magic was old enough to be a mother cat and nurse kittens whether she could give birth to them or not. I still have, somewhere, a pre-digital photo of skinny little Magic nursing the three big burly kittens.

Nothing special is known about this big burly shelter kitten, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bear-56230284/ia/nevada/story-co-animal-shelter-ia49/, but he's already neutered and said to be a lovable pet. The selection of adoptable cats near Ames, Iowa ("Bear" hails from a town called Nevada, near Ames) is narrow. They show no Manx or Bobtail cats and none who had Magic's Manx foster kittens' distinguishing feature--skin as black as their fur. (Many black cats have beige or white skin, as has Bear.) 

Manx are one of the breeds most likely to revert to their full ancestral size. While our pets usually weigh about ten pounds, and I doubt that Magic ever weighed more than seven, our pets are descendants of wild cats that weigh twenty to thirty pounds when full-grown. Now and then a normal-looking house kitten continues growing to the size that was originally normal for the species, These throwback cats can look quite alarming though, having been brought up as cuddly pets, they usually remain cuddly pets. Two of the kittens Magic nursed were twenty-pound throwbacks.

After being spayed Magic was allowed to recuperate indoors. She did not appreciate having house privileges. Her human godfather brought in special cat toys to occupy her time while I was at work. She took no interest in toys unless a human was playing with them. She understood and apparently obeyed my instructions about which room she was to stay in and which chairs she was allowed to sit on, but one evening when I came in I heard her crying, as Siamese cats do, like a human baby. She stopped when she heard the key in the door. When I came in she was purring as usual. She took time to sniff and snuggle with me even before she went outside, but what she was really crying for, it seemed, was her babies and pets. By this time Magic had made a docile, obedient pet of First Possum, a big ugly animal who looked as if it might want to eat Magic or a kitten, but actually came and went as Magic directed it, tamed by gifts of mouse insides. She didn't touch the possum but clearly spent a minute or two communicating with it in some way. And she wanted to let the kittens nurse. That they were eating dry kibble made no difference to her. She enjoyed being a mother cat.

The vet had prescribed some chemical treatment to get rid of ear mites, which all the cats had. The little bottle had to be stored in the refrigerator. Naturally the cats were about as keen on this treatment as anyone else would be about having cold liquid poured into our ears. The kittens rebelled, growling and hissing. Magic nonverbally offered to help. I was now in a habit of speaking to her as politely as you would speak to any child or foreigner, and letting her show me whether she'd understood what I said or not, so I said, "Magic, would you please let me give you this medicine?" She stood still and turned an ear up, and took her medicine. Then she gave the kittens a meaningful look, and one by one, in turn, they came to me and took their treatments too. 

Two weeks after the stitches came out, Magic was allowed to spend her days outdoors again. She liked that. She seemed to have resolved, during her confinement, that if she could go out again she'd supply me with food. Every day for a week she brought me something she'd caught--never a mouse, rat, or vole, but always a squirrel or rabbit that some humans would have eaten. I thanked her profusely, each time, and told her to share her treat with her kittens. After a week she realized I didn't eat game, but she continued to show me what she'd caught when she wanted to be praised and petted. 

So far as I knew, only one small animal Magic killed ever knew what had hit it. When she walked with humans, it was always a bounce off the trail, a pounce, and up she came with a dead nuisance animal hanging by its neatly snapped neck from her mouth. She dispatched more vermin than she could eat; she was selective about which parts of which catches she would eat, and gave the scraps to her possums. But one frosty night, although she never wanted to stay indoors for long on a cold night, Magic had shown me two dead mice already and I'd turned in for the night. She knocked at the door to show me yet another mouth. I shouted through the door, "Right, Magic, I've seen mice. Let me sleep. I have to work tomorrow." She did but she wasn't pleased. I could tell because, the next evening, she brought in a live mouse, threw it right on my shoe, and glared up at me, twitching her tail, nonverbally saying, "Since you think catching mice is so easy, let's see you do it!" I asked her nicely to catch the mouse, apologized, praised her hunting prowess, and she caught the mouse and put it out for the kittens. She never tried to show me a mouse after I'd gone to bed for the night, again, and I never neglected to make a fuss over her when she showed me something she'd caught, either.

By the end of Magic's second winter, the house was rodent-free. The Manx kittens, who always did things in order so I called them One, Two, and Three, had grown up; somebody wanted the two giants but Three, the completely tailless kitten who never grew much bigger than Magic, stayed. 

One snowy day a fluffy white tomcat came to visit. I didn't want Mother to be able to smell any evidence that my spayed cats were still attracting the inferior and stinky kind of cats. I put on a thick fleece jacket and went out to put a harness on the tomcat. Cats aren't as good at walking on leads as dogs are, nor are their necks as strong, so a collar on a cat is merely a decoration. To lead a cat anywhere you need a harness that puts the weight, when the cat pulls against the lead, around the cat's ribs and waistline. The tomcat didn't mind being harnessed at all, but he didn't want to step out into the fresh snow through which he'd come. He sprang up onto my coat and held on with his claws, telling me how stupid I was. Magic heard him and charged. No stray tom was allowed to talk to her human that way! She pitched into the tomcat, who looked at least twice her size, scolding him in furious Siamese and leaving clumps of white fur on the snow. I think the tomcat was too startled to resist. He settled down and followed me through the snow to a shed where I tied him up and brought him food and water. I knew someone who wanted a tomcat, and in a few hours he had a good home. 

The whiter, fluffier, and bluer-eyed a white cat is, the more likely it is to be deaf and have other genetic problems. Creamy-colored Sweater from Chicago is described at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/sweater-52445988/il/chicago/paws-chicago-il72/ as a nice low-maintenance pet for the right person. She might not play nicely with other animals or children, and might become bored and destructive in the absence of "multiple play sessions" every day. 

Magic showed other unusual abilities. I learned that she was able to work doorknobs if she really wanted to. When she had to be indoors, what kept her in the mud room, waiting to be let out for a bathroom break, was respect. She could have awakened me with a flying leap onto my waist, the way a boardinghouse cat of my student days used to do.

Dock from Lafayette, Louisiana, probably isn't quite as big or as old as that boardinghouse cat but he's described at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/dock-56124515/la/lafayette/wild-cat-foundation-la140/ as big and old. 

Then there was the day one of her foster kittens (Magic always found foster kittens) attracted a barely half grown "boyfriend" kitten. Magic knocked at the door, growling. "What are you growling about?" She pointed to the stray kitten in the yard. "You found another little sister?" She growled more loudly. The kitten was not a sister. Magic's foster father and I, all grown up at thirty, often expressed impatience with the number of teenaged females in our lives, called them all "sisters," found fault with them, wished them well, and felt protective about them. Magic recognized "sisters" as a word for junior cats who were too big and old to be called "babies," but she had figured out on her own that "sisters" did not include males. 

Gato from Denver, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/gato-57324129/co/denver/the-snuggle-is-real-animal-rescue-co552/z, looks as if he's had a softer life than that stray tomkitten had had, but he has the same orange fur, amber eyes, and reportedly the same loud purr. 

Magic also had some sense, though I'm not sure how much sense, of English grammar. Most animals who learn words don't seem to have a sense that words can fit together in different ways to mean different things. What they learn on their own are usually words for food and people's names. What they can be taught are commands. When most animals learn a word like "sit!", they understand it to mean "I'm ordering you to assume the 'sitting' position" and are confused if they ever notice the use of "sit" in a sentence like "They sit together on the bus." Magic did, however, listen to conversations among humans and react to news items. Once someone reminisced in her presence about a long-ago scandal--a butcher shop "used to kill cats and sell them as rabbit meat." Magic was genuinely shocked and scared; she knew that a phrase like "cats kill mice" was good news and "some people kill cats" was, in her view, obviously a warning about a murderer at large. 

She seemed not to accept death uncomprehendingly, as most animals do, but to wonder where departed friends were now and why they couldn't be helped. Pogo, a possum she'd tamed, took to chasing cars and was run over. Magic didn't avoid the part of the road where his remains lay, during the days it took crows, vultures, one other scavengers to clear them away, but she always observed them closely, while walking on the other side of the road, as if cats can think of questions like "Do 'people' look like meat inside, too? Where is Pogo now? Why can't anyone help?" 

She was distressed when Three didn't report for breakfast. She didn't show me the body; vultures did that, later. I don't think she knew exactly where Three had died, but she knew Three had not just run off with a tomcat. She must have seen some part of what happened. Three had strayed down the road, past the home of a relative of mine who had married beneath her, and the unworthy husband had shot her through the body. Three had run about half of the way back toward home, through a woodlot, before she fell. 

The next time I walked down the road toward that neighbor's house, Magic would not stay home, as she usually did; she would not turn back at the property line, as she did when she didn't stay home; she would not even stay home to eat when I set out food. She wanted to stay with me. I stamped and yelled and threw pebbles in her direction to keep her from following me to the paved road. She had learned a healthy fear of moving vehicles, and I thought I'd succeeded in convincing her I was suffering from temporary insanity, as I proceeded to the paved road. Magic had turned back, but when I was about a city block away, she seemed to feel that duty required her to confront her fears. I picked up some things out of a cat on the road. I heard a bang while I was reaching into the car. When I left the car and walked back home, Magic was lying beside the road, shot in the head. 

Horrified, slow to imagine that any neighbor of mine could have shot at Magic, I picked her up and asked the gloating neighbor, "What happened?" Magic wasn't bleeding. Something must have exploded and stunned her. 

"That black rascal's been climbing up on my car, chasing birds in the tree and making a mess, all week..." the neighbor began. (In fact a black tomcat, much bigger than Magic, had been straying around the neighborhood.) He was holding a gun. 

"My cat? Magic? She's been with me--she was with me in the garden this morning! I tried to make her turn back, but she kept following me out to the road. What happened?" Maybe I thought the neighbor was going to confess that he'd killed my innocent pet by mistake, apologize, and become forgivable. 

But he said, "Oh, I don't know what happened. Been lying there like that all day. I saw A drive out in his usual hurry--maybe he ran over that cat! I saw B walk by. Does he have a gun?" 

B was the neighbor whose education had been retarded by a physical injury in childhood. Officially he was an "ineducable moron." In fact he could have done a good half-dozen jobs better than some people who were employed at them, if he'd been able to learn to talk and read a few years earlier than he was. After Magic, the most innocent, benevolent, well-behaved person in the neighborhood would have been B. B was actually on his way to becoming a preacher, but he never earned enough money from preaching to affect his disability pension. But welfare cheating was his only vice, and in view of the way people had treated him I always felt he had a right to it.

"Tries to blame B of all people!" I raged to the neighbor in between that house and mine. "If there was a stray cat, it had more right to be alive than that scum has." I called lawyers. The law prescribed that someone who killed a neighbor's pet cat could be sentenced to "up to one year" in jail. This was the standard penalty for most misdemeanors in Virginia and the subject of a song about "Eleven Twenty-Nine." I wanted that neighbor to serve more time than that, actually. "Magic never acted like that before. It has to have been because she knew who killed her foster kitten. That little cat was trying to protect me." 

I was assigned a young attorney fresh out of law school. The relative (other relatives insisted that she would have had no choice, that the bad neighbor abused her too) took advantage of connections and retained Terry Kilgore. My court-appointed attorney didn't do his job before the trial and, when we sat down facing the rising star of our town, he basically rolled over and played dead. The words "not proved," which are not an official sentence in Virginia, were in the judge's pronouncement. The jerk's wife and the two neighbors in between us had all seen the neighbor take a gun, or some sort of long object, possibly a Weed-Eater, out into his yard, and they'd all seen me pick up my freshly killed, still warm cat five minutes later, but none of them had actually seen him shoot my cat. Maybe they really were looking another way, maybe they wanted to protect the wife from a beating, who will ever know? 

"You can retry the case as a civil suit," the judge said to me.

"Let's," I said to another lawyer who had worked with my family while Terry Kilgore was in college.

"A better use for the money," he said, "would be to build a monument to put on that cat's grave. They usually go by the verdict from the criminal trial." 

Grateful for this information, I said, "I donated the cat's body to medical science, but that does give me an idea." 

I went home and looked at Magic's last foster kittens, now year-old cats, one spayed and one the mother of five new baby kittens. Then I declared our few acres to be a Cat Sanctuary. The only kind of memorial Magic would have wanted, I said, would be a place where kittens would be appreciated. Not, I said, mindful of Mother's blood pressure, inside the house. They could be barn cats. (I don't think Mother knew that the new baby kittens had been born on her carpet, behind the armchair. By the time she got home they had a box on the porch.) 

And the couple who lived between the bad neighbor and me put up some pieces of chain-link fence and declared their home a Dog Sanctuary.

Sam von Salm, from Los Angeles, https://www.petfinder.com/dog/sam-von-salm-55720867/ca/los-angeles/westside-german-shepherd-rescue-of-la-ca785/ , is almost big enough to lick the face of an adult standing straight, and he's not a year old yet. None of our next-door dogs was quite that big.

A few months later the relative who'd married the scum neighbor sold their house. Scum was, she said, in a nursing home. Had a heart attack, Not expected to live through the summer.

Later I heard that he survived the heart attack and even went back to work somewhere. But I never saw him in my neighborhood again.